I just hope I haven't done too good a job of familiarizing the public with this stuff -- I'd hate to think I was normalizing it sufficiently that the citizens might no longer gave these guys the Springtime for Hitler look. You know, "seen too oft, familiar with her face" etc. Wouldn't that be a dramatic irony!
UPDATE. In comments, D. Johnson takes a trip down memory lane:
I remember the furor over Bush's executive orders. After reading dozens of blog posts on the topic, I became convinced that it was even worse than I thought. It was the start of a dictatorship, I reckoned; the administration would either declare martial law and suspend elections, or simply refuse to step down after the elections took place...
I was fifteen years old at the time. What's their excuse?Yeah, I only called Bush a fascist to be funny, but I was an old man even then. Christopher Hazell skunks the picnic by bringing up the droning: "Obama really gets a bum rap. I mean, you use your illegally massive secret surveillance network to track down and kill your own citizens without trial, and all of the sudden people start calling you a 'tyrant'!" Fair enough, I'm against that too, and will endorse actions against it even by transparently duplicitous conservatives. But I notice we hear fewer accusations of Obamatyranny over that these days than we do over fiddles with Obamacare and such like. Why do you suppose that is? Maybe it's close enough to 2016 that they're imagining their own asses in the CiC's seat.
UPDATE 2. Also in comments, Aimai, regarding Clinton: "Clinton the drug runner? The clinton hit list? Hillary accused of murdering her lover vince foster to cover up the fact she was a lesbian?" Ahhh yess, early innings in the right's attempt to capture the "have you ever really looked at a dollar bill, man?" market. There's a whole generation of wingnuts who think they learned "skepticism" from the Mena airport.
UPDATE 3. As usual, apposite posts turn up after my column is published. Today's Deroy Murdock propaganda job-o-work contains several ObamaHitlerisms such as "Obama now rules by decree," as well as a very Breitbartian complaint against Obama's executive orders: "Obama’s predecessors have signed executive orders and, more or less, left it at that. But Obama pounds his chest as he does so." If only Murdock had footage of this!
My favorite part, though, has nothing to do with ObamaHitler:
Also, Earth’s sole superpower is sagging where it should be No. 1. America has slouched to No. 12 on the 2014 Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom.That's like saying America has regrettably fallen on the NAMBLA index of Places with Cute, Friendly, Unattended Kids.
