Richard Brooks of the Times of London writes that Tom Cruise's Valkyrie is being pushed back a year:

The fortunes of Hollywood actor Tom Cruise have suffered a blow with the news that his next big film has been postponed until 2009.

The release of Valkyrie, which tells the story of the 1944 assassination plot against Hitler, was first postponed from this summer to the autumn and is now not expected to appear until next year.

“We were originally expecting the film to be released in June,” said a senior executive at one of Britain’s leading cinema chains.

“I know there have been all sorts of problems with this production and we will not be screening it at all this year.”

The film is not only a blow to Cruise as an actor but in his more recent incarnation as a movie mogul at United Artists (UA), the studio which made the film.

One critic in Hollywood has declared “Valkyrie is dead”, with another arguing that the film’s problems could also wreck the revival of UA.

Not to mention totally bumming out these fellas.

Soon to be ex-GOP Congressional candidate Tony Zirkle from Indiana speaks with neo-Nazis in Chicago:

U.S. Congressional candidate Tony Zirkle is facing criticism from one of his primary opponents, and a host of people on the Internet, for speaking at an event over the weekend that celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

Zirkle confirmed to The News-Dispatch on Monday he spoke Sunday in Chicago at a meeting of the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party, whose symbol is a swastika.

When asked if he was a Nazi or sympathized with Nazis or white supremacists, Zirkle replied he didn’t know enough about the group to either favor it or oppose it. “This is just a great opportunity for me to witness,” he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief.

He also told WIMS radio in Michigan City that he didn’t believe the event he attended included people necessarily of the Nazi mindset, pointing out the name isn’t Nazi, but Nationalist Socialist Workers Party.

As the director of the play within the movie The Producers said after reading its script, "Did you know, I never knew that the Third Reich meant Germany. I mean it's just drenched with historical goodies like that!"

Chaz Pazienza, the former CNN producer whom we briefly mentioned here last week after he was fired from CNN for his blog, has a post today on the HuffPo:

When I asked, just out of curiosity, who came across my blog and/or the columns in the Huffington Post, the woman from HR answered, "We have people within the company whose job is specifically to research this kind of thing in regard to employees."

Jesus, we have a Gestapo?

Since you're still able to type, the answer to that would "No." On the other hand, Chez's former employer has rarely met a government with a similar agency it didn't want to prop up.

(Via Greg Pollowitz.)

Update: Speaking of propping up...

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi writes:

Quietly, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been inspiring Democrats everywhere with their rolling bitchfest, congressional superduo Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have completed one of the most awesome political collapses since Neville Chamberlain. [Nicely done Bush=Hitler Godwin's Law violation--Ed] At long last, the Democratic leaders of Congress have publicly surrendered on the Iraq War, just one year after being swept into power with a firm mandate to end it.

Not surprisingly, given that it's Rolling Stone, that's a fundamental misreading of the results of the November 2006 midterms.

(And apropos of nothing, Douglas Kern used the phrase "Chickendoves" three years ago over at Tech Central Station.)

Is David Duke trolling the Blogosphere these days?

Paging Mr. Godwin:

This is the cover of the new issue of Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine, featuring an article by the far left’s most dishonest blogger, Glenn Greenwald. It’s a monumental convergence of idiocies.

Ahh, another election year, another Buchanan harmonic convergence with the far left. Has the magazine's big Michael Moore cover story and interview happened yet? It's only a matter of time.

As Roger L. Simon writes, "Huckabee is funny...He's come up with the best laughs so far of the campaign... maybe the only laughs:

Some have suggested there is an image of a cross behind Huckabee's shoulder as he talks to the camera in the ad, but Huckabee dismissed that Tuesday.

"That was a book shelf behind me, a book shelf," Huckabee told reporters while campaigning in Houston, Texas.

Huckabee was asked if his language crossed the line between faith and politics: "Absolutely not," he said.

Huckabee went on to joke, to the delight of the reporters in the room, "I will confess this; if you play the spot backwards it says 'Paul is dead, Paul is dead, Paul is dead.'"

Well, brain-dead at least, if you know just a scintilla of the history of the 1920s and '30s.

Someone is taking the title of Jonah Goldberg's upcoming Liberal Fascism just a mite too seriously:

The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler’s time on earth–I’m sure he would have eliminated all bloggers. In Colonial times, bloggers were called “Pamphleteers.” They hung on street corners handing them out to passersby. Now, they hang out on electronic street corners, hoping somebody mouses on to their pretentious sites. Different medium, same MO. Shakespeare accidentally summed up the genre best with these words from a MacBeth soliloquy: “. . .a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. . .”

As Ace writes, "That's a quote from a Philadelphia sportswriter responding to a baseball blogger who, fairly politely and rationally I think, wrote him an email telling him that his pick for MVP was wrong."

Shades of another former sportswriter's reductio ad Hitlerum.

Four years ago, Dennis Miller told The American Enterprise magazine:

The Left is so busy saying John Ashcroft is Hitler, and President Bush is Hitler, and Rudy Giuliani is Hitler that the only guy they wouldn’t call Hitler was the foreign guy with the mustache who was throwing people who disagreed with him into the wood-chipper.

And since in the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes, this week's candidate for the business end of Reductio ad Hitlerum is NBC's Tim Russert, with Rudy Giuliani closing fast for the coveted, if readily available, slur.

Update: "What exactly have they put in the water at The New Republic?"

The New York Post reports:

A swastika was found today spray-painted on the office door of a Jewish professor at Teachers College who studies the Holocaust and vehemently opposed the visit to the Columbia campus by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, cops said.

The reviled image, painted in brown, was discovered at 9:30 a.m. on the office door of Dr. Elizabeth Midlarsky, 66, co-chairwoman of the counseling and clinical psychology department at the college.

As the History News Network wrote last month, Columbia invited Hitler to speak on campus in 1933:

As Prof. Stephen Norwood of the University of Oklahoma has found in his research on the academic community’s response to Hitler in the 1930s, Columbia was not the only prominent U.S. university to behave shamefully with regard to the Nazis. Harvard hosted a visit by Hitler’s foreign press spokesman, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl. American University chancellor Joseph Gray visited and praised Nazi Germany. MIT Dean Harold Lobdell personally tore down posters for a rally against a Nazi warship docked in Boston’s harbor, and MIT participated in a 1937 celebration at the Nazi-controlled University of Goettingen. Yale, Princeton, Bryn Mawr, and others continued student exchanges with Nazi Germany into the late 1930s, and more than twenty U.S. colleges and universities took part in the 1936 Heidelberg event.

But Columbia is unique in one important respect. Its administration alone seems to have learned so little from the mistakes of the 1930s that it is prepared to welcome the leader of yet another antisemitic, terrorist regime.

It shouldn't be an entirely unexpected consequence that a related symbols of hate, then and now, defiles its campus.

In my "Hollywood Nihilism" post from earlier this week, I quoted a story told by writer/director Lionel Chetwynd when he pitched a WWII movie to Hollywood execs:

When Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party — as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.

"So I went in," Chetwynd told me, "and someone there said, 'So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?'

"And I said, 'Well, they weren't bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?' And she said, 'Well, who's the enemy?' I said, 'Hitler. The Nazis.' And she said, 'Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who's the real enemy?'"

Horrified onlookers of the daily television entertrainwreck The View saw that mindset played out this morning by Whoopi Goldberg.

Tim Blair has "Possibly the ultimate leftist slogan of 2007"; no that's not it in Tim's headline above, click on over to see it for yourself printed on--where else?--a t-shirt.

Charlie Rangel would no doubt approve, as would the authors of this book.

A year ago I wrote, "What is it with colleges in the state I grew up in and The Reich Stuff, anyhow?" It looks like the disease is spreading beyond its incubation on the Garden State's campuses out into its signature farmland.

In the Commentary essay (reprinted here) that inspired his new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, James Piereson wrote:

There is much about Oswald and the assassination that can now never be known for certain. Of one thing, however, there can be little doubt: there would never have been any serious talk about a conspiracy if President Kennedy had been shot by a right-wing figure whose guilt was established by the same evidence as condemned Oswald. Such an event would have been readily understood in terms of then prevailing assumptions about the dangers from the Right. Kennedy’s assassin, however, bolted onto the historical stage in violation of a script that many people had assimilated as the truth about America. Instead of adjusting their thinking accordingly, they strove to account for the discordance by taking refuge in conspiracy theories.

As I've written before, this sort of paranoia was associated in the 1950s and early-60s with the fringe elements of the right, before the inability to process Oswald's ideology was one of the first key sign of a far left becoming increasingly batty.

Similarly, the overheated language of the modern left, such as Al Gore’s recent attempt to demonize his critics as “Digital Brownshirts” also begins to grow out of this mid-1960s period. “Just as the Birch Society had accused Eisenhower of being a communist”, Piereson recently told me in an interview, “by the late sixties, the liberals and leftists were accusing everyone else with being Nazis and fascists."

You can see both elements at play here:

The nation’s first Muslim congressman said Tuesday that he erred in comparing the Bush administration’s response to Sept. 11 to an event that led to Adolf Hitler’s consolidation of power in Nazi Germany.

At an appearance before a group of atheists in Minnesota on July 8, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., called Sept. 11 “the juggernaut” that led to war, tolerating torture and increased discrimination against religious minorities.

“It’s almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that,” he said. “After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and it put the leader of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”

Ellison has since issued a sort of non-apology apology for his remarks; the whole thing is very much in line with the "blurt and retreat" strategy that Steven Hayward described recently in regards to an even more prominent member of the left.

Well to be fair, the nation does have quite a bit of prior experience in regards to mixing a "progressive" post-Christian cult-like pagan religion with made-up pseudo-science; best to cut them some slack on this one.

And incidentally, given the inevitable comparisons the film is sure to draw if it is completed, did Peter Mehlman do any work on its screenplay?

Update: Allison Kaplan Sommer links to Defamer:

There are suspicions that the decision was based “on an early treatment developed by Cruise, in which his von Stauffenberg character attempts to slowly kill Hitler by depriving him of the many self-actualizing services offered by Scientology, causing the Fuhrer to die from the despair of knowing he’d never reach his potential as a fully clear leader without the help of daily auditing sessions.”

So it's Downfall meets Battlefield: Earth, I guess. The Color of Reichsmarks.

Or perhaps it's the daily post surveying the crazed fringe. In any case, Robyn Blumner of The Columbus Dispatch is in high dudgeon mode about those mean, mean Men In Black:

Often you can sum up the collective actions of the Supreme Court under a particular chief justice with one word. The Warren Court always will be remembered as liberal, the Burger Court as pragmatic and the Rehnquist Court as conservative. The Roberts Court in its short tenure has already earned the moniker mean.

The addition of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito to the heartless duo of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas has cemented a plurality for cruelty. If there's a choice between casting a lot for the little guy or putting a foot on his throat, it's a safe bet that these four will put on their jackboots.

Funny, I've never confused Clarence Thomas with Roland Freisler myself, but I guess that's just my own naiveté.

Yesterday, I quoted from Victor Davis Hanson, who noted, as had James Piereson, the flip-over of conspiracy theorists from the fluoridated John Birch right of the 1950s to today's left. As the passage I excerpted from VDH concluded:

But over the years, conservatism came to terms with civil rights and anti-Semitism. Free markets, not socialism, enriched America and brought a level of affluence undreamed of it to the poor. (When I was seven, outhouses and unpaved roads were common in West Selma; today in the same neighborhood you see SUVS, new tract houses, and I-pods and blue teeth in the ears of illegal aliens.). And so the Klan, Birchers, and other assorted embarrassments were peeled off.

The left in the 1940s and 1950s had likewise gotten rid of its communist wing, and ostracized its fellow travelers. Henry Wallace was taken off the ticket. Dean Acheson and George Kennan had made liberal anti-communism logical rather than paradoxical.

But now the Left, still going on the fumes of the 1960s, has the greater problem with its extremists. Of course, the “base” can attack Bush on immigration, gay marriage, etc. but not from a position of sheer lunacy. The same is not true of the netroots or the Cindy Sheehan/Michael Moore wing on the Left. They openly praise our enemies, whether in Syria or Iraq (“Minutemen”). They prefer the unfree world of Chavez and Castro to our own. And their language and methodology are as uncouth and repulsive as were the old tactics of the Birch Society.

Proving Hanson's point, here's Peter Mehlman, former Washington Post sportswriter turned writer and producer for Seinfeld, in the Huffington Post today:

You could argue that even the world's worst fascist dictators at least meant well. They honestly thought were doing good things for their countries by suppressing blacks/eliminating Jews/eradicating free enterprise/repressing individual thought/killing off rivals/invading neighbors, etc. Only the Saudi royal family is driven by the same motives as Bush, but they were already entrenched. Bush set a new precedent. He came into office with the attitude of "I'm so tired of the public good. What about my good? What about my rich friends' good?"

How can anyone not see it? It's not that their policies have been misguided or haven't played out right. They. Don't. Even. Mean. Well.

It's been a while since I've referred to Jonah Goldberg's quote on the topic, but it sounds like the perfect rebuttal to Mehlman's conspiratorial ("How can anyone not see it?") rant:

I don't say this because I feel a passionate need to defend George Bush. I would make the exact same points if Al Gore were president. I would make the exact same points if anybody running for the Democratic nomination were president. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has to do with the fact that such comparisons are slanderous to the United States and historical truth and amount to Holocaust denial. When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years. (For example,. during the Contract with America debate, Charles Rangel complained that "Hitler wasn't even talking about doing these things" that were in the Contract with America. In other words, the Contract with America was in some way worse than what Hitler did. At the end of the day, that is Holocaust denial.)

"Darn those Republicans" does not equal "Darn those Nazis." The Patriot Act is not the final solution. The handful of men in Guantanamo may not all be guilty of terrorism, but it's more than reasonable to assume they are. And no matter how you try to contort it, Gitmo is not the same thing as Auschwitz or Dachau. There are no children there. You don't get carted off to Cuba and gassed if you criticize the president or if you are one-quarter Muslim. And, inversely, there was no reasonable justification for throwing the Jews and the Gypsies and all the others into the death camps. The Jews weren't terrorists or members of a terrorist organization. To say that the men in Guantanamo — or any of the Muslims being politely interviewed by appointment — are akin to the Jews of Germany is to trivialize the experiences of the millions who were slaughtered. Even if you think Muslims are being unfairly inconvenienced, when you say they are the Jews of Nazified America you are in essence saying the worst crime of the Holocaust was to unfairly inconvenience the Jews.

Just as newspapers historically have had editors to--hopefully--tamp down on their writers' excesses, so to does Hollywood have story editors, directors, producers and network standards and practices divisions to keep their own writers' extremes in check.

Fortunately, the Huff Post gives them the perfect salon in which to bare all their thoughts.

Dean Barnett writes:

Speaking honestly here, and straight from the heart, I can’t believe the McCain campaign is so blind. Republican voters detest McCain/Kennedy. They hate the way the bill’s proponents have “sold” the bill even more so. The primary selling method, from the White House on down, has been to attack the bill’s critics.

Here’s what the misguided salesmen don’t get, and I’m including the president in this assessment. Only 26% of the public supports the bill. Democrats hate it almost as much as conservatives. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that the bill is wonderful and people just oppose it because they don’t understand its particulars (a tough case to make since the only people who seem to have read the bill are people who don’t like it like me and Hugh), why do the bill’s proponents think it’s a successful tool of persuasion to insult the people with whom they differ?

Fortunately for George Bush, he won’t have to endure the Republican electorate’s wrath over the immigration compromise. But if he did, he would find out that sending out his lackeys to call members of his own party Nazis would not be a winner. (I can’t win. Andrew Sullivan implies I’m a Nazi; the administration implies I’m a Nazi. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t think I’m a Nazi?)

As Beautiful Atrocities wrote a couple of years ago, in the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes.

How much did the critical meltdowns by the usual suspects over 300 fuel its success this past weekend? Probably not a huge amount, but still. As Allahpundit wrote last week in response to Slate's Dana Stevens, "I wasn’t going to go, but now that she’s turned it into a blue state/red state thing, I sort of feel obliged. Good work, Dana".

Stevens' over-the-top criticism (with yet another Godwin's Law violation, which seems inevitable for film critics these days) was astonishingly reminiscent of similar hair-pulling freakouts when The Passion debuted three years ago. Both immediately made their respective movie the film to see, if only to understand what all of the fuss was about.

But compare the leftwing critics' reactions to the American Christian right, who have been assaulted by four decades worth of Hollywood movies challenging their sensibilities.

Eventually, they finally learned their lesson with Hollywood and the media. Here's Michael Medved in 2006 on Brokeback Mountain, in USA Today:

The publicity blitz surrounding Oscar front-runner Brokeback Mountain not only challenged stereotypes about gay relationships, it simultaneously cleared away persistent misunderstandings about the nation's Christian conservatives.

Instead of reacting with outraged calls for censorship or condemnation, the much-reviled minions of the so-called religious right have mostly ignored the movie, allowing it to collect every sort of honor with shockingly scant controversy. While derided by prominent liberals as “the Taliban wing of the Republican Party,” conservative Christian leaders have displayed a new sense of security and confidence, in dramatic contrast to the paranoid Muslim mobs that riot across the globe over a dozen disrespectful Danish cartoons.

This doesn't mean that cultural traditionalists in the USA have abandoned their principles and suddenly embraced the much-discussed “gay cowboy movie”: People who revere biblical strictures against same-sex relationships can scarcely commend a film that provides a lyrical celebration of a homosexual affair that wrecks two marriages.

Nevertheless, the publicists and activists involved in promoting Brokeback Mountain seem almost disappointed that religious conservatives have expressed so little indignation. No major organizations called for a boycott of the film, or threatened its producers, or made any serious attempt to interfere with those who might enjoy this artfully-crafted motion picture (it has become a modest commercial success). In the heartland of Evangelical America, Brokeback has generated more ho-hums than howls of protest (or hosannas).

Or as Mark Steyn wrote in his 2006 National Review cover story on politicized Hollywood's box office woes and Oscar snoozefests:

The more artful leftie websites have taken to complaining that the religious right deliberately killed Brokeback at the box-office by declining to get mad about it.

Will film critics learn a similar lesson about films that challenge their own religious beliefs and understand that collectively blowing a gasket over these movies merely helps to fuel their box office returns?

"Robin Aitken, author of Can We Trust the BBC?, talks about the fact that a depiction of George W Bush as Adold Hitler was posted in the main current affairs office of the BBC and no one objected".

(Neville Chamberlain could not be reached for comment.)

As Roger Ailes said yesterday about the American media, "The greatest danger to journalism is a newsroom or a profession where everyone thinks alike. Because then one wrong turn can cause an entire news division to implode".

Frontline, which bills itself as "India's National Magazine" has a piece that Drudge is currently linking to, titled "Dangerous denial", with the following subtitle:

If all the people of the world had the same living style as the average American, the holocaust would have already visited us.

Of course, when it came to the real Holocaust, the world's most celebrated Indian was the very personification of "Dangerous denial", as Richard Grenier wrote in Commentary in 1983 as a mammoth rebuttal to the even-more-mammoth biopic then making the rounds:

Since the movie's Madeleine Slade specifically invites us to revere the "way out of madness" that Gandhi offered the world at the time of World War II, I am under the embarrassing obligation of recording exactly what courses of action the Great Soul recommended to the various parties involved in that crisis. For Gandhi was never stinting in his advice. Indeed, the less he knew about a subject, the less he stinted.

I am aware that for many not privileged to have visited the former British Raj, the names Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Deccan are simply words. But other names, such as Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, somehow have a harder profile. The term "Jew," also, has a reasonably hard profile, and I feel all Jews sitting emotionally at the movie 'Gandhi' should be apprised of the advice that the Mahatma offered their coreligionists when faced with the Nazi peril: they should commit collective suicide. If only the Jews of Germany had the good sense to offer their throats willingly to the Nazi butchers' knives and throw themselves into the sea from cliffs they would arouse world public opinion, Gandhi was convinced, and their moral triumph would be remembered for "ages to come." If they would only pray for Hitler (as their throats were cut, presumably), they would leave a "rich heritage to mankind." Although Gandhi had known Jews from his earliest days in South Africa--where his three staunchest white supporters were Jews, every one--he disapproved of how rarely they loved their enemies. And he never repented of his recommendation of collective suicide. Even after the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed, Gandhi told Louis Fischer, one of his biographers, that the Jews died anyway, didn't they? They might as well have died significantly.

America's would-be modern day Gandhi has a long record of using ridiculously exaggerated Holocaust metaphors (a trait that has since been acquired by his acolytes) to breathlessly describe his pet cause, as Jonah Goldberg noted last year:

In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” [Gore] wrote that “today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.” He repeatedly refers to the unfolding ecological holocaust” and invokes Martin Niemoller’s famous quote (“When the Nazis came for the Communists, I remained silent; I was not a Communist. ... When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; I was not a Jew. ...”) to label himself and other environmentalists “the new resistance.”

In “An Inconvenient Truth” and in interviews, Gore sticks to his guns. He quotes Churchill’s warning about the gathering storm of fascism and declares: “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequence.”

And yet, as Betsy Newmark wrote when she linked to Jonah's post, "if addressing the crisis of global warming demands the same diligence and dedication that fighting the Nazis demanded, why isn't Gore proposing similar sacrifices today to fight global warming?"

For a start, they should be out there denouncing the movie Cars for glorifying the weapons of mass destruction that cars are in this global crisis. They should be campaigning against NASCAR. But, of course, they won't be doing these things because it would be political suicide. So, now we know where they draw the line. They'll talk a good game, but they won't actually propose anything or say anything that would offend potential voters. As Goldberg writes:

Once you compare a problem to the Holocaust — even remotely — you’ve lost your moral wiggle room. No politician, indeed no responsible person in this country, would endorse a comedic cartoon about genocide, never mind take their children to it. Give PETA credit. While it repugnantly compares the raising of chickens and cattle to Auschwitz, the organization at least has the courage of its convictions, and protests virtually everything that treats animals as anything less than people.

Environmentalists like Gore who invoke the Holocaust are too afraid to follow through. They want all the credit for denouncing what they consider a moral horror, but they’re unwilling to actually face the real consequences of their rhetoric. I don’t believe global warming is akin to the Holocaust. But if I did, I’d like to think I’d have more courage about it than Gore is showing.

Coulter was right about Gore's Edwardian digs:

“I kind of respect him more, it shows he is not stupid enough to believe all this global warming nonsense. He’s trying to get us to believe. Okay, fine, he may be a hypocrite but at least he’s not a moron.”

It's an "Inconvenient Hypocrisy" as Bill Hobbs writes, via Glenn Reynolds.

Update: Perhaps the Goracle isn't Gandhi, but another icon immortalized on the big screen:

It’s great that he’s using solar panels and all that, but notice he’s not disputing how huge his electric bill still is. What the hell is he doing in there? Is he a Terminator from the future and requires constant recharging? (That would explain pretty much everything.)

I blame Cyberdyne Systems.

Richard Miniter asks, "aren’t you tired of the whole 'you’re-a-fascist' line?"

The Fascists and the Nazis are only on the right if you yourself are communist—and therefore, they are barely to the right of you on the political spectrum. To the rest of us, Fascists, Nazis and communists are different sub-species of the same murderous monster, a blood-drenched beast that believes in the power of the state and seeks to dismember or murder every individual and every group in society that refuses to bend to its will.

Those of us who believe in free speech and, its economic equivalent, free trade, limited government, tolerance, the equal freedom of the artist and the entrepreneur, the separation of church and state, and so on, are the enemies of fascists and, their ill-clothed counterparts, communists. Indeed, capitalism is the opposite of fascism, which favors government control of the every economic decision. Calling us (liberals and conservatives) “fascists” simply reveals the Left’s nostaglia for truly evil enemies (like Nazis) and its current reluctance to engage in a battle of ideas.

Spot-on--don't miss the rest.

Tim Blair writes:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad explains things to Time magazine:

TIME: Why do your supporters chant “Death to America”?

Ahmadinejad: When they chanted that slogan, it means they hate aggression ...

And the Time reporter just mindlessly takes it all down, like a stenographer, even down to Ahmadinejad's tacit praise of incarcerated Holocaust denier David Irving.

Paul Hacket violates Godwin's Law: "Video: Hackett calls Dan Senor 'Unterfuhrer'".

As the Beautiful Attrocities blog noted last year, "In the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes".

Including the second year coach of a struggling NFL franchise:

Jets running back Kevan Barlow apologized to 49ers coach Mike Nolan for comparing him to Adolf Hitler in a newspaper interview.

Barlow, who was traded from San Francisco to New York on Sunday for a fourth-round pick, made his inflammatory comments to the Contra Costa Times in Wednesday's editions. Jets coach Eric Mangini said Wednesday he has spoken with Barlow, and the player is sorry for what he said.

"I thought his comments were inappropriate," Mangini said. "After he said it, he wished he could have those words back. But he can't. Kevan has already called coach Nolan to talk to him about that, which I think is important."

Barlow was upset with the trade, mainly because Nolan assured him he wouldn't be dealt. He told the newspaper Nolan was a "first-time head coach with too much power."

"He walks around with a chip on his shoulder, like he's a dictator, like he's Hitler," Barlow told the paper. "People are scared of him. If it ain't Nolan's way, it's the highway."

After making the comments, Barlow called back to say he didn't mean to make the comparison, blaming his outburst on his emotions.

"I was kind of harsh on him, saying he's a dictator. That's bad. Saddam Hussein is a dictator," Barlow said. "I was speaking on emotion."

Gee, you think? Of course, Barlow's far from the only person these days to equate someone whose authority he doesn't respect with the very definition of absolute evil.

Back in March, when Slobodan Milosevic assumed room tempature, Austin Bay described the progression of his ideological beliefs moving "from red to brown" as the Cold War ended:

Milosevic orchestrated the Serb-Croat war and crafted the Serb strategy of “creeping aggression.” He was also the bully behind “ethnic cleansing” in eastern Bosnia. He epitomized the move from “red to brown” in eastern Europe– moving from Communist to ultra-nationalist fascist as the Cold War ended.

Earlier, as World War II transitioned into the Cold War, the career path of Nobel Literature Prize-winning German author Gunter Grass jagged in the opposite direction, as Mona Charen writes:

How disgusting. We now learn that Soviet-appeasing, Western-despising, America-detesting Nobel Literature Prize-winning German author Gunter Grass was a member of the Waffen SS in his youth. Grass earned his lofty reputation by indulging every fashionable far-left cliché of his time. Europe’s elite opinion shapers rewarded this with the Nobel Prize and he received kow tows throughout his long and verbose career.Victor Davis Hanson has the details.

He now reveals that he did not just serve the German Wehrmacht in World War II (obviously millions did so both voluntarily and involuntarily) but in the SS, the unit hand-picked for atrocity work; Holocaust a specialty.

Did he believe that his anti-Americanism somehow expiated the sin of Nazism? That’s certainly the way Europe’s elites would see it. For those not sunk in total moral obtuseness however, Grass career betrays his consistency. He went from being a participant in one tyranny to being an apologist for another – all the while heaping scorn on the humane power that opposed them both.

Austin added this in his post about Milosevic:

The Nazis and Communists both knew they were cut from the same hideous human mold. They both share a disdain for liberalism and a disregard for human life. They are also permanently anti-American. Hitler called the US cowboys– remember that next time you hear the US “cowboy” disparaged. You can see these traits displayed by the Stalinists still among us.

And as I wrote at the time, it's almost like the two ideologies are intertwined...

Update: Tim Blair spots Grass being dubbed "the country’s moral guide for decades" by the press and responds thusly:

Germany’s “moral guide”, was he? Tough gig.

Heh! Indeed. ^TM

What does it take to be considered anti-Semitic, especially by the legacy media?

Mel Gibson rightly earned the world's contempt when he spouted off phrases such as ""F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." during his DUI bust late last month. But if you're Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a bit more work is involved--in fact, a lot more work is involved. You can say things such as this:

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran’s hard-line president called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and said a new wave of Palestinian attacks will destroy the Jewish state, state-run media reported Wednesday.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also denounced attempts to recognize Israel or normalize relations with it.

“There is no doubt that the new wave (of attacks) in Palestine will wipe off this stigma (Israel) from the face of the Islamic world,” Ahmadinejad told students Wednesday during a Tehran conference called “The World without Zionism.”

“Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury, (while) any (Islamic leader) who recognizes the Zionist regime means he is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world,” Ahmadinejad said.

Ahmadinejad also repeated the words of the founder of Iran’s Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who called for the destruction of Israel.

“As the imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map,” said Ahmadinejad, who came to power in August and replaced Mohammad Khatami, a reformist who advocated international dialogue and tried to improve Iran’s relations with the West.

And you can combine such hatred with a megalomania which would make even Mel Gibson or your average Hollywood mogul blush:

Prague, 29 November 2005 (RFE/RL) — According the report by baztab.com, President Ahmadinejad made the comments in a meeting with one of Iran’s leading clerics, Ayatollah Javadi Amoli.

Ahmadinejad said that someone present at the UN told him that a light surrounded him while he was delivering his speech to the General Assembly. The Iranian president added that he also sensed it.

“He said when you began with the words ‘in the name of God,’ I saw that you became surrounded by a light until the end [of the speech],” Ahmadinejad appears to say in the video. “I felt it myself, too. I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there, and for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink.”

Ahmadinejad adds that he is not exaggerating.

“I am not exaggerating when I say they did not blink; it’s not an exaggeration, because I was looking,” he says. “They were astonished as if a hand held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic.”

And you can deny the Holocaust ever happened:

Ahmadinejad last week questioned whether the Nazi destruction of 6 million European Jews during World War II occurred and said Israel should be moved to Europe. He also provoked an international outcry in October when he called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”

But Wednesday was the first time he publicly denied the Holocaust. Touring southeast Iran, Ahmadinejad said that if Europeans insist the Holocaust happened, then they are responsible and should pay the price. ...

Today, they have created a myth in the name of Holocaust and consider it to be above God, religion and the prophets,“ Ahmadinejad told thousands of people in the southeastern city of Zahedan.”

And say this:

BERLIN (Reuters) - Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Germans they should no longer allow themselves to be held prisoner by a sense of guilt over the Holocaust and reiterated doubts that the Holocaust even happened.

In an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine, Ahmadinejad said he doubted Germans were allowed to write “the truth” about the Holocaust and said he was still considering traveling to Germany for the World Cup soccer tournament.

“I believe the German people are prisoners of the Holocaust. More than 60 million were killed in World War Two ... The question is: Why is it that only Jews are at the center of attention?,” he said in the interview published on Sunday.

“How long is this going to go on?” he added. “How long will the German people be held hostage to the Zionists?... Why should you feel obligated to the Zionists? You’ve paid reparations for 60 years and will have to pay for another 100 years.”

Oh, and this, too:

"The Zionists think that they are victims of Hitler, but they act like Hitler and behave worse than Genghis Khan," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday. He was quoted by the Iranian News Agency.

(But how can Ahmadinejad think Israel is acting like Hitler if he doesn't think the Holocaust occurred? Must be all those Israeli road building programs, I guess...)

So after all that, Mike Wallace, fresh off a one-on-one interview with Ahmadinejad, goes on Sean Hannity's radio show, and has this astonishing exchange with the host:

MW: He (Ahmadinejead) is not trying to project an image. Look, it's very difficult. I know...I found it difficult to understand, but the more that I sat there, and the more time that I spent with the man, he is...I'm not suggesting...he despises, if you will...oh, he doesn't despise, but he doesn't like the United States. He doesn't like the United States for the reason that it's supporting the Zionist entity. He doesn't talk about Israel.

SH: So you don't think he's an anti-Semite?

MW: He himself, an anti-Semite, an anti-Jew...anti-Jew?

SH: Yes.

MW: No, I don't.

Golden Yellow Fluffo, indeed. I'd love to know what actually would have qualified for anti-Semitism in Wallace's book--maybe Mel should skip Oprah and sit down with Mike if he wants the media to believe he's cleaned up his act. Or at least get the starring gig on CSI: Tehran.

And Victor Davis Hanson is spot-on: welcome back to the 1930s. Although without Fred Astaire and Duke Ellington to soften the endless appeasement and cynicism by the world's "liberal" elites.

Fox News CEO Roger Ailes claims that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann's wearing a cardboard mask of Bill O'Reilly and gaving a Nazi salute yesterday at a summer meeting of the Television Critics Association is "over the line". It culminates a dark, unending obsession that Olbermann seems to have with his ratings better; Brent Bozell notes that Olbermann named O’Reilly the “Worst Person in the World” 42 times in the last year. That's 40 more times than Saddam Hussein earned Olbermann's signature sobriquet:

Olbermann’s constant, stalker-like obsession with O’Reilly, who normally has about eight times his ratings, lacks all sense of proportion. How do you explain that Olbermann named O’Reilly his “Worst Person in the World” 42 times in the last year? (Saddam drew the brickbat only twice, and Osama bin Laden? Not once.) He named O’Reilly the world’s worst human seven times just in the month of April.

If this obsession is drawing ratings, who then is being attracted to “Countdown”? Olbermann isn’t just cultivating some vague “anti-Fox niche.” Nightly, he bays at the moon in search of the hard-core Left, the devotees of MoveOn and Michael Moore and Daily Kos. In 2004, he was just about the last person inside a TV studio (or outside a mental facility) to claim that John Kerry actually won Ohio, not withstanding that nagging 120,000-vote discrepancy.

But in spite of Olbermann’s best efforts at unveiling the fraud, Bush was still re-elected, so now the MSNBC host is painting him as a dangerous proto-fascist.

Olbermann recently invited on old Watergate figure John Dean to promote his new book, “Conservatives Without Conscience,” which argues that the conservative movement is deeply authoritarian. Since when did John Dean become an authority on the conservative movement?

Jonah Goldberg answers that question:

Here's a short rule of thumb for how to tell who is a "respectable" conservative in the eyes of liberals: any conservative out of power or not seen as supportive of those in power. An even shorter rule of thumb would be: conservatives are respectable if they are useful to liberals. Pat Buchanan became respectable, even adorable, among a loose coalition of liberals leftists, from MSNBC's Chris Matthews to Ralph Nader, when he turned on the GOP establishment. Kevin Phillips, David Gergen and John Dean have been "real" Republicans — though rarely conservatives — for decades because they are willing to confirm the assumptions of liberals. An even more telling example would be the "neocons." Before the Iraq war, neocons were the nice conservatives, the good conservatives, the idealistic conservatives the un-racist conservatives, according to academics, The New York Times and others. This is not to say that they aren't nice, good, idealistic and un-racist. Rather, it's to point up the way in which conservatives become evil as they become influential, relevant, or otherwise inconvenient to liberals. John McCain was touted as a good choice for president by The New Republic and other liberal voices. Today, McCain is increasingly villified by many of these same voices because, it turns out, he's actually a Republican.

Similarly, William F. Buckley is suddenly the voice of humane and decent conservatism, according to liberals. A more humane and decent man, you'll never meet. But it's doubtlessly true that if WFB had the president's ear, the same voices cheering him would once again be calling him a fascist. And, needless to say, if Bush governed on Pat Buchanan's playbook, Chris Matthews would lose his crush on him awfully fast.

Exactly.

Update: More here. And speaking of McCain and other Republicans courted by the media and other Democrats, Debra Saunders writes that it's a one-way street:

I think McCain in the White House could go a long way in healing the country's ugly partisan divide. Then again, I added, Democrats have their own maverick -- Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. Unlike Dems who ran from their support of the Iraq resolution, Lieberman has remained stalwart. He has forged relations with the Bush White House and joined McCain and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in fighting pork-barrel spending.

That's when the table got quiet. It is one thing for Democrats to feel superior to rube Republicans who don't like McCain because he is not sufficiently doctrinaire. When, however, a Democrat gets along with Republicans and espouses moderate positions, well then, he is a turncoat, plain and simple. The episode demonstrated how voters value bipartisanship -- from the other side, only.

Read the rest.

Based on the duds he's been sporting lately, evidently, Prince Harry has read Edward Feser's brilliant 2004 essay, "The Mustache on the Left", and has decided to live out an Internet article as performance art.

Either that, or he's just another morally brain-dead radical chic idiot.

We report--and deride!

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin asks, "What's next--a keffiyeh?" Actually, that would be the sort of fashion territory his father has long since been exploring.

Update: In related topics, Charles Johnson spots "Echoes of Nazism in [Lebanon's] Tyre"; Dean Barnett writes, "Some Americans believe that Israel should not exist. And these are the Americans that [Joe Lieberman's opposition, Ned Lamont] and other Democrats have so eagerly embraced".

Jonah Goldberg and Betsy Newmark have some thoughts on Al Gore's language--both in 1992's Earth In The Balance and this year's An Inconvenient Truth comparing global cooling (sorry, that was the 1970s), global warming, climate change, or whatever the expression du jour is, to the Holocaust. Betsy writes:

But, Goldberg asks, if addressing the crisis of global warming demands the same diligence and dedication that fighting the Nazis demanded, why isn't Gore proposing similar sacrifices today to fight global warming? For a start, they should be out there denouncing the movie Cars for glorifying the weapons of mass destruction that cars are in this global crisis. They should be campaigning against NASCAR. But, of course, they won't be doing these things because it would be political suicide. So, now we know where they draw the line. They'll talk a good game, but they won't actually propose anything or say anything that would offend potential voters.

Oh, I don't know--Arnold Schwarzenegger's been doing a pretty good job of taking his conservative base for granted, with all of his recent talk about global warming.

Update: Jonah debates Mark Schmitt of The Decembrist and the New America Foundation on this topic in a video podcast at Bloggingheads.tv.

Debbie Schlussel notes that while Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni claims that his nation bans "any book that insults any religion", including The Da Vinci Code, there are definitely exceptions that he's willing to make.

Like Mein Kampf. Oh, and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, both burning up Egypt's best seller lists.

But hey, other than those...

Update: Not surprisingly, Iran's doing a fair amount of banning as well: Middle Eastern ban:

It is the second time in two years that Iran has prohibited a publication of international repute for failing to use the term "Persian Gulf" in its maps. In November 2004, it banned the National Geographic atlas when a new edition appeared with the term "Arabian Gulf" in parenthesis beside the more commonly used Persian Gulf.

Tehran believes in aggressively defending the historical term "Persian Gulf" against "Arabian Gulf," which it regards as a name dreamed up by Arab nationalists. While Iran dominates the eastern side of the waterway, the western shores are held by Arab countries.

Meanwhile, Betsy Newmark looks at more homegrown censorship.

Update: Egypt's Big Pharaoh has some thoughts on the banning of Da Vinci:

People downloaded the movie from the internet and passed it from one PC to the other. It was even uploaded to my company's shared network. Banning books and movies will do nothing except raise people's curiosity who end up doing everything to see the controversial material.

As Michael Medved noted last month, American Christians have only recently begun to understand that their getting up in arms about Hollywood's product is expected by Hollywood, and deliberately incorporated into its marketing plans.

James Taranto notes that World Net Daily has removed the offending passage of columnist Vox Day's essay on immigration that we mentioned a couple of days ago. As Taranto notes however, "'Day,' however, stands by his story, which he has posted here".

Big Media, of course, aren't the only ones who make poorly chosen analogies from time to time. See if you can spot the Godwin's Law violation in this essay on immigration:

Not only will [mass deportation] work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society

The author has a bitchin' wicked Flock of Seagulls hairstyle though, and with a name like Vox Day, a nom de pundit that would make Bono and The Edge proud. That's got to count for something, right?

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

(With apologies to Elwood and "Joliet" Jake for paraphrasing one of their riffs.)

What is it with colleges in the state I grew up in and The Reich Stuff, anyhow? Last year, Fairleigh Dickinson had on its staff an admitted Neo-Nazi. Now Mahwah's Ramapo College is running an art exhibition featuring paintings that look like they're straight out of Joseph Goebbels' private collection:

The guest curator is Isolde Brielmaier, a Ugandan art professor from Vassar College who seems to have a particular affection for anti-social “art” including explicit anti-Jewish themes. One work featured in the exhibit, created by artist Deborah Grant (who has no relationship to Ramapo College), depicts a Jewish rabbi dressed in phylacteries with a Star of David on his yarmulke, holding up Torah scrolls with the Nazi swastika instead of text. The inscription below the image reads: “The Old and the New Testament.” The implication could not be clearer: the Jews’ holy text is fascism and they are the new Nazis. [Don't miss the photo that accompanies the article--Ed]

The exhibition is part of African Ancestry Month. What does such an anti-Semitic image have to do with African ancestry? One also wonders what American taxpayers would make of the exhibition which they are funding in part by grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.

For obvious reasons, the college has not been eager to publicize its controversial exhibition. Indeed, I learned of the art only after a Jewish student, upset with the college’s insistence on keeping it in the exhibit during its entire six weeks run, provided a photograph she had secretly taken of it.

That an outsider obtained a copy of the photo did not go down well with the college publicist, Bonnie Franklin, the Vice-President of Communications at Ramapo. Her initial reasons were bureaucratic: the campus gallery discourages photos of exhibits and especially their release to the public. But Franklin was eager to defend the artist’s right of self-expression. Although admitting that she personally found the work “offensive,” she stressed that it “has been extremely stimulating on our campus as an educational instrument.” She further explained that the campus had held several forums to discuss the work. “The piece is subject to interpretation, people have read other things into it. Some have seen it as anti-Christian for example. There have been a number of interpretations.” Finally, she fell back on the default position that the college is a “public institution and such things are protected by the first amendment.”

The simple truth is that Grant’s image equates Jews with Nazis, as curator Isolde Brielmaier admits. Speaking in the post-modernese language of Grant’s work, she says that it “frequently engages in pop culture and politics, issues of race, neo-colonialism, oppression, violence against women, and the history of fascism.” Brielmaier also notes that artist Deborah Grant studied the style of Nazi film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl—a fact that reveals much about her intent in contrasting the Old Testament, the holy book of Jews, Muslims and Christians, with a New Testament of Nazism.

Ramapo president Peter Mercer said that when he first saw Grant’s piece, he contacted the state attorney general to determine whether exhibiting it was illegal. Informed that it was legal, he proceeded to give his go-ahead, after being assured by Isolde Brielmaier that the artist had “no intention to shock anybody.”

Is there any reason to paint something like this...

a Jewish rabbi dressed in phylacteries with a Star of David on his yarmulke, holding up Torah scrolls with the Nazi swastika instead of text. The inscription below the image reads: “The Old and the New Testament.”

...without the intention of epatering the bourgeois?

(Via Atlas Shrugs. For more examples from the Reactionary Art World, click here and here.)

Update: Compare and contrast Ramapo College's art exhibition with NYU's panel discussion on those cartoons. Notice what's curiously missing from the latter: the actual artwork!