If you’d forgotten – or never learned about – how the Clintons think and operate, the last couple of days were a quick Cliff Notes refresher. First up, Hillary was at a fundraiser, and talked about Ukraine. Perhaps trying to impress her audience or perhaps displaying her inner neocon, Clinton morphed – as she did in 2003 – into John McCain:
Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30s. All the Germans that were … the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.
This is about as inflammatory a statement as you can imagine – and one the president has wisely eschewed. But I guess if it’s an indicator of how she thinks about the issue, it’s fair enough. Her instinct is to equate the 2o1os with the 1930s – which is one more indication of how she truly is a classic boomer politician. But, of course, after a flurry of press interest, Clinton then backtracked. Observe the form here – because there is a real possibility we could face years of this:
[Putin’s action] is reminiscent of claims that were made back in the 1930s, when Germany under the Nazis, kept talking about how they had to protect German minorities in Poland and Czechoslovakia and elsewhere throughout Europe. So I just want everybody to have a little historic perspective. I am not making a comparison, but I am recommending that we can perhaps learn from this tactic that has been used before.
To recap: “if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did” is “not making a comparison.” I guess it all depends on what the meaning of the word “comparison” is. Get out your thesauruses – the Clintons are coming back! Carpenter, meanwhile, proffers a much more apposite analogy in history a century ago in America:
President Polk justified his Mexican land grab, in part, as a solemn U.S. responsibility to protect Americans on both disputed and incontestable Mexican soil. Unlike Hitler’s limitless and intercontinental aggression, though, all Polk wanted, post-Texas annexation, was California, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada, and chunks of Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma. Polk’s aggression infuriated Congressman Lincoln and led U.S. Grant to later observe that Polk’s war was “one of the most unjust ever waged on a weaker country by a stronger.”
Even this analogy is a stretch, but it’s shorter than Hitlerism.
The Dish 