This business about Hitler!

Yesterday was, without a doubt, one of the most shameful days to even occur in the history of the United States Senate! Yesterday, the Republican senate minority gathered together to vote down the United Nations Treaty for the Disabled, a piece of legislation that was modeled in the United Nations after the American Disabilities Act (ADA) that was enacted into law many years ago during the Administration of George H.W. Bush. The U.N. Treaty on disabilities has been signed by around 155 nations and approved by over 125 parliamentary bodies across the world. A very frail and just out of the hospital former senate leader and Republican presidential candidate in 1996--Bob Dole--sat with another supporter, Senator John McCain, as they watched the senate vote down this treaty as it fell short of the sixty six votes needed by five votes.

What the Republicans said in this vote is, in effect, that they do not support the rights of disabled people across this nation and across this world and that they would have voted against the Americans For Disabilities Act if it had come before them when it was first enacted so many years ago.

This vote also says so much more about the Republicans of 2012!

This is a Republican party that opposes almost everything that is good and progressive in this world! They opposed the climate change treaty that so many have signed onto around the world! And, they have some sort of a perverted idea about national sovereignty that is very disturbing to behold. Senator Jim Inhofe, of Oklahoma, stated in his opposition to the disabilities treaty: "I do not support the cumbersome regulations and potentially overzealous international organizations with anti-American biases that infringe upon American society," In an even greater perversion, the right had convinced home schooling parents that this treaty would, in some odd way, affect their ability to practice their already very isolationistic home schooling practices.

In point of fact, since this treaty was modeled after an already long existing American law--the ADA--it would not affect anything that has not been long affected in this nation already. What the right in the senate sent was a further message to the world that this nation is on a potentially very strange and disturbing track that can lead to no where good! However, these ideas have been sent out before and the rest of the world seems to be getting the message.

There is a cancer alive and well in the American body politic!

The most internationalistic nation on this planet has a significant element contained inside it that is bent on creating a nation state that might be more inclined to try to dominate this earth than to do anything for those who are less fortunate who just happen to live on it! It is these same people who will vote for an even increasing defense budget that already exceeds the next ten nations after it in rank combined! Their greatest concern is not whether taxes are raised on the very rich as much as it is whether the sequestration coming with the fiscal cliff might cut sixty billion dollars out of that defense budget!

We have been watching with some interest as some conservative and liberal commentators have been downplaying the analogy of Adolf Hitler in relationship to the new right. They seem to feel that it is “over the top� to compare Hitler and his Nazi party to what is going on in America today. We would remind them that those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat its mistakes.

It is not over the top to compare a political party that may be closer to a Hitler like cult than anything else to what is going on with the Republicans today! After all, we will, in the approaching year of 2013, celebrate the tenth anniversary of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. And we best remember that we came close, in 2012, to placing the same people back in power with Mitt Romney who were the architects of that invasion. These were the people who stated when Bush took office that “America is an empire now.� This writer looks back and remembers the helpless feeling that so many had with the approach of that 2003 invasion around March nineteenth of that year and our feelings that nothing good would ever come out of it. It was probably eerily similar to the feeling that so many had in between the wars Germany as they saw Adolf Hitler and his Nazi’s make their climb to power in a nation that had been racked by the humiliation of what had been done to them at the close of the first world war. If the rest of the world went into a depression in 1929, Germany had been there for a while before that time.

There were severe economic problems involved then just as there are severe economic problems involved now!

The just finished election did one thing and proved one fact: The Republican neoconservative New Robber Baron led faction is not going to go away in this nation. If they did anything, they consolidated their power in the areas of this nation where they are strong. And they just demonstrated their continued ability to affect national and international policy with this vote on the U.N. Disabilities act treaty. The specter of aging Bob Dole probably not all that far removed from death sitting once again on the senate floor watching what happened with his Republican colleagues, many who had served with him, only mirrors the direction that this nation could be moving toward. Dole represents those who fought the great war and led this nation and this world through the great international progress that was made during the last half of the twentieth century. People like Jim Inhofe represent the factions who, particularly with their opposition to climate change legislation, may represent its dismal future. It is interesting to note that Senator Mike Lee, of Utah, a tea party leader, also opposed and led the fight against this treaty. We do not feel that it is too over the top to wonder if the tea party might be the Nazi party of the future! They are very white and very much follow a zealot’s path!

People like Adolf Hitler had no use for those less fortunate in this world as they tried to build a strong and powerful Arian race of blond haired, blue eyed German supermen. There was a piece recently on CNN about the way that the United States military is using its over bloated budget to experiment with an apparently genetically engineered race of super soldiers. And, in a recent piece on gun control, one commentator stated that how would a nation use its citizens guns to oppose a government that has the capabilities of things like unmanned drones and the other super weapons that have been developed over the last decade or so.

If we think that we passed a milestone with the 2012 elections where these neoconservative “black helicopter� believing fanatics have lost their sway, we have not! As long as they are around in the numbers that they exist in, this nation is going to be in a state of perpetual peril where any change to the negative in economic conditions could bring them roaring back to power. They are about all gone in Germany who remember the twenties and the early thirties when Adolf Hitler made his move to power. And, Bob Dole and the generation who opposed and destroyed them are also about gone. It is a new age now and the forces who have always been around are still around today. So, please forgive us if we talk about Adolf Hitler because we are a historian by training and we see so many similarities between now and then. And, if the new right doesn’t want to be compared to Hitler, they need to stop acting like him! When a major party candidate for president speaks of “the forty seven percent� more than once in a presidential campaign, we see the divisions being promoted that remind us of some very disturbing ground. Adolf Hitler’s “final solution� is still far less than a century away! And, when United States senators get phone calls from constituents in large numbers who home school asking them to vote against a disabilities treaty such as what happened yesterday, we would simply ask just what are they teaching a future generation of citizens in those so very lonely and isolated homes.

Hitler would be proud!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe