Vacation time! While Orac off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 22, 2005 and is the third ever Hitler Zombie post. Although the Undead Führer himself has not yet made an appearance, the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster evolved into. Enjoy! (Note: I did not check all of the links; if some of them are now dead, I'm sorry.)
I've been wanting to write about Senator Dick Durbin's ill-considered use of argumentum ad Nazium last week in the light of my previous posts (here and here) on the the use of questionable Nazi analogies for political purposes. However, mercury/vaccine blogging took over and got in the way. It's time for a vaccine blogging break, at least as far as longer posts go (barring new developments, of course). I'm a bit burned out on it.
In any case, there's not much for me to add about the Durbin quote at this late date, given that fellow RINO John Cole at Balloon Juice handled the issue quite pretty well. Yes, Senator Durbin's remarks were over the top, although he did try to make a valid point on how the interrogation tactics at Gitmo resemble those of repressive regimes more than I'd like to admit; it's just that he botched his point. He also seemed unable make a coherent case afterward when the right wing pundits started attacking him as having called our soldiers Nazis. Even so, Durbin certainly made a more valid point than, say Rick Santorum or Charlie Rangel did when they dropped the H-bomb). However, the reaction of the right to Durbin's turn at exhuming Hitler's corpse (not to mention Stalin's and Pol Pot's corpses) in the service of his political agenda is way out of proportion to the actual offense. They're really out for blood this time.
Of note, Orcinus has a stronger condemnation of the right on the whole affair. Unfortunately, he lets Durbin off the hook way too easily. Durbin may have had a point worth making, but he overplayed his hand and deserves a decent fraction of the criticism he's getting.
Yes, it would appear that the Hitler zombie has claimed at least part of another victim's brain, which is probably not surprising. Given the paucity of nourishment devouring the brains of Charlie Rangel provided in the recent past, the Hitler zombie was almost certainly still famished. We can only hope that Dick Durbin's brain provided a more substantive snack for the undead Führer, at the very least so that the Hitler zombie won't be looking to feed again soon. We could all use a break from the hyperbole and ill-considered Hitler/Nazi analogies used for political purposes.
Make no mistake, though. It will be back. The Hitler zombie always comes back. Which makes me wonder: Whose brain will it eat next? Howard Dean's? Bill Frist's?
ADDENDUM: It looks like Durbin apologized.
Durbin's response should have been to make his point more forcefully. He should have said something along the lines of "Perhaps when Sen. Santorum reads about people in American custody chained naked to concrete floors having defecated on themselves, perhaps that makes Sen Santorum want to stand and salute the flag. But it makes me sick. That's not my America." The other stuff was a distraction, and the right (with the complicity of the media) successfully side-stepped the very important point that Sen. Durbin made by focusing on the distraction and ignoring the point. Durbin did neither himself nor America any favors by apologizing. The point that the way those prisoners were treated is beneath the United States and diminished immensely any moral authority we had in the world needed to be made.