This Isn’t Going to Help

Congressman Broun of Georgia is warning of an Obama dictatorship:

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

Obama needs to invoke Godwin here and declare victory.  I’m not exactly in favor of Obama’s plan for national indentured servitude of young people, but can we dispense with the fear mongering and start worrying about why large numbers of Republican voters stayed home this election?   Can we start worrying about why young people are increasingly lost to Republican candidates?   Obama won.  Get over it.  He’s not going to be the moderate centrist people are hoping for, but he’s also not going to be Hitler or Joe Stalin either.  I can promise you I won’t like what’s coming, but right now we have to worry about being strong opposition, not floating paranoid theories about brownshirts.  I expect to find that kind of crap coming from obscure web sites and blogs (you know, like this one), not from the mouth of a United States Congressman.

26 thoughts on “This Isn’t Going to Help”

  1. I hadn’t actually seen that video untill after the election had concluded. My first reaction was a gigantic ‘WTF’. I don’t see anything happy coming from that statement. A national police force? Sure it has hints of the SS, but what does that make the FBI? Knee-jerk reaction is going to cause an uproar untill he plainly states the who/how/why of that plan.

  2. It’s really not fair to compare Obama’s statements to Hitler or 1930’s Germany. This country is in nowhere near the turmoil of post-Weimar Germany, not to mention the struggles of Germany after WWI.

    There were a host of circumstances that helped lead to Hitlers rise to power, none of which exist in this country currently.

    Sure, I see hints of things in Obama that remind me of Hitler and really bother me, but nothing says to me that we’re “headed down that road.” We elected a naive Marxist. Does that suck? Yes, but he’s not Hitler and this isn’t Germany.

  3. Godwin’s Law should be repealed. Time to be a student of history. We don’t need the exact conditions of hyper-inflation and unemployment to raise up our own dictator. That’s naïveté at its worst. All we need is a charismatic leader with the will, a propaganda machine, and 51% if the vote.

  4. Obama’s comments about wanting a new and as of yet non-existent body of deputized civilians for domestic protection, to be larger than the military, has nothing to do with forced labor from school kids. The knee that’s jerking is perhaps your own.

  5. I have to disagree with you on this one, Sebastian. ‘The people’ don’t have to make Obama a dictator. He can do it all on his own with the support he now has in government. I see dark storm clouds in the horizon. My impression of those who claim this is not all that bad is that they are ‘whistling in the dark.’

  6. Is an Obama dictatorship possible? of course. He has done some very authoritarian & marxist things that quite frankly scare the shit out of me. That does not however mean that an Obama dictatorship is near.

    I see some rampant disregard for the BOR from Obama, I see authoritarian tendencies and marxist rhetoric that bother me, but I’m not about to run around screaming that the sky is falling. If I do that I’m no better than the nutjob “Bush = Dictator” folks on the left.

    Oh, and remember, if he were to try to seize power there are still millions of well-armed Americans.

    For now I expect the worst from Obama but will reserve final judgment until I see what he attempts to do as President. Right now I see a man with some dictatorial tendencies and attitudes, but I also see a man who has literally accomplished NOTHING in his political career besides getting elected.

  7. Understand what I mean about a dictatorship:

    • Obama acts outside any reasonable boundaries of the constitution. And by that I mean beyond the standard accepted progressive crap about the commerce clause. Where the constitution is clear, even most progressives favor following it. Basically I mean Obama declares law well outside his authority as President.
    • Obama refuses to stand for reelection.
    • He squashes opponents political speech and ability to organize against him, and by this I mean going well beyond the fairness doctrine, which only applies to publicly owned airwaves, but can be challenged in the courts.
    • Obama refuses to obey or endorse the edicts of The Court.

    Pretty much all of those things have to happen before he’s a dictator. I think you’ll see Obama brushing a bit at some of these areas, but so far, he appears to be setting up a solidly progressive-left presidency, within the bounds of our system. I don’t like it, because I hate progressivism, but so far it’s not well outside the bounds of what we’ve seen in this country to date.

  8. I just hope we don’t have to see and confront all that first-hand (or during a second administration) before we recognize (and are crushed under the boot-heel of) Obama’s dictatorial ambitions…

  9. The progressive agenda has always included weakening limits on government, which is why we must oppose them. But that’s a far cry from just declaring no such limits exist and ruling as dictators. I think we’re going to see a lot of the former from Obama, but not the latter. He will work within the system to weaken the system, which is why we will work within the system to oppose him.

  10. Sebastian said:
    “I am a student of history, and Mike W. is correct. The American people are not about to make Obama a dictator.”

    I am a student of history as well, and I think Broun is right. In fact he soft-pedalled by stopping at “… showing me signs of being Marxist”.

    If more people aren’t willing to see proposals like that for what they are, and vigorously oppose them before they become faits accompli, we will cease to exist as a reasonably free society.

    Your propensity to trash people for being more pessimistic than you is not very appealing.

  11. There’s a difference between being pessimistic, and believing that Obama is going to be Hitler or Joe Stalin, and we’re living in 1930’s Germany. There was speculation that FDR was a closet Marxist too, and maybe he was. I’m not suggesting that we don’t have a lot to worry about, but let’s keep our focus in the areas where we’re going to realistically need to provide opposition. I think the country will survive Barack Obama.

  12. I believe we will survive him too, but at what cost? More concessions to socialists in the name of ‘compromise’? Or putting it all on the line to oppose these insane initiates of the present ‘rulers’?

    Ever since politicians discovered they could buy votes by giving citizens more from the public treasury, we have gradually paid the price by the loss of freedoms.

    Can you imagine, for example, Teddy Roosevelt in the early 1900s conceiving of a time when a President-elect once actually stated he supported a ban on all handguns in America?

    Can you imagine William McKinley in 1896 conceiving of a day in American when one Presidential candidate proposed giving those who fail to make their mortgate payments a bailout, while the other Presidential candidate promised to give a tax rebate check to 40 million citizens who do not pay taxes at all?

    The compromises we have made with the enemies of liberty have gotten us nowhere. In fact, it has been to our detriment if you look at the broad picture. Little by little, year by year, we give away our liberties.

    And this is why I will NEVER comromise with socialists such as Barack Obama and his zombie-like worshippers.

  13. Martyn,

    I don’t disagree with your sentiment in the least. But what are we to do? We have just been handed a stinging electoral defeat. People voted for Obama for a lot of different reasons, but they were not voting away the country. We can use overreaches and missteps to our advantage, but we have to be prepared to capitalize on that.

    Saying you’ll never compromise with socialists is well and good, but what use is it? They don’t have to compromise with us. They are in the majority right now. The electorate put them there. What’s more important is what we do, and whining that we’re heading toward Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia is not going to help put a quick and sure halt to what the progressives are planning to do. The way to accomplish that is to regroup, re-message, and over the next two years convince the same electorate that put the Democrats in power that they’ve made a horrible mistake.

    We are in for a dark period, much like the Clinton years. But we survived that. We’ll survive Obama too.

  14. The thing is, we aren’t just supposed to “think” the country will survive. The Constitution is supposed to guarantee it. The only true threat to this country, then, is a leader that refuses to be bound by the Constitution.

    I read Obama’s platform and I don’t see any evidence that he considers the Constitutional limits on Presidential or Congressional authority to be binding. Déjà vu all over again except this one thinks he has a mandate to change the country as he sees best.

  15. Sebastian, I do agree with you to the extent that I’d like to hear Obama explain what he meant by the statement. I blogged this back in July, and questioned whether he was referring actually to some type of new civilian apparatus, or whether he was referring to the existing civilian national security force (i.e. civilians in the DoD, like NSA, for example). We’ve yet to hear anyone in the media question what he meant.

    However, if he clarifies it and means a group of, let’s call them “community security organizers,” I’m very uncomfortable with that.

    I believe history repeats itself, but we’re not in 1930’s Germany conditions. However, I don’t think that Hitler began with his followers in a seemingly religious fervor and an adoring media that willfully glosses over his fallibility.

  16. hypnagogue:

    It’s supposed to be a guarantee, but it’s only as good as the population willing to, over the long term, vote to preserve that guarantee. I think the population, for the most part, didn’t vote to trash the constitution, even if that might be the result. We have to convince them they made a mistake, and reverse it as quickly as we can.

    BadIdeaGuy:

    History never perfectly repeats itself, but it does provide variations on the same things. I think what we’re seeing here is history repeating itself, but that history is of the early 1990s, rather than the 1930s.

  17. The biggest trigger for me would be if Obama attempts to circumvent term limits. To my mind, that would set all kinds of alarm bells ringing.

    Of course, the smart way to get it done would be to push for naturalized citizens to run for office, then tack another way and try to get statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, followed by some sort of amnesty for illegal aliens. Finally, have someone in the Senate introduce a bill to remove presidential term limits, as, after all, we’ve come so far and The American People should have the right to choose whomever they want.

  18. Honestly, it is because Repubs suck. The suck not because they are conservative. They suck not because they have ridiculous ideas about governments need for involvement in bedroom matters.
    Repubs suck because they are sell outs who put forth leaders who don’t even come close to backing the values of the base. Why the heck would idealistic young people vote for RINO’s? If they wanted someone like McCain they would be Dem’s.
    Repubs suck so bad that I, the eternal, “A vote in protest is not a vote wasted.”, voted McCain because I knew you idiots had screwed the pooch so bad that you needed all the help you could get to pull your ass out of the fire. To bad it wasn’t enough.
    You lost because you effin deserved to loose. The strategy that, ‘the other guy is so bad you HAVE to vote our side’, works about as well as my pool strategy of having so many balls on the table that my opponent can’t get a shot in.
    Until the Retarded party gets back to it’s values it deserves to lose.

  19. Godwin’s Law , insomuch as it is used to invalidate a discussion, can only be used when the parallel being drawn to the Nazis/Hitler is incorrect. The parallel in this case, while perhaps farfetched by a long shot, is perfectly valid. As such, Godwin cannot be called.

  20. “The parallel in this case, while perhaps farfetched by a long shot, is perfectly valid.”

    Well no, it is not. Did you fail civics in school? Do you know nothing about how the government is set up? Obama cannot do anything he wants. He can, as one commenter put it, “refuse to be bound by the Constitution,” which is about as effective as saying you refuse to fall to the ground if you jump out the window.

  21. Maybe the idea is a little more mainstream than even you would like to believe.

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