The 27%

I was watching the History Channel the other night and learned that the Nazis only won 37% of the vote in the 1932 election. From that beachhead in the electorate, they used violence, suppression, and mass media to completely co-opt and dominate what had previously been a civilized nation.

American has its 27-percenters. My point is not that they're Nazis - they aren't - but that leverage on power, even in a democracy, frequently does not require a majority. Look at the Teapublican willingness to drive Congressional agendas, without regard for compromise, by abusing the filibuster. It was intended as a rare power; the GOP uses is now as a minimum required supermajority.

On this day 67 years ago, Adolf Hitler killed himself rather than face an accounting at Nuremberg for his brutal crimes against humanity. Coward.

But Hitler's death is still cause for celebration, even if I wish an American dogface had double-tapped him.

Against forgetting

The day that Russia's President, Dmitri Medvedev, cautions against amnesia of Joseph Stalin's huge crimes is a day I can agree with him.

My own caution would go further. It was the economic failures of capitalism in the first 30 years of the 20th century that gave rise to Hitler and Stalin, helped on by the social and political failures of royalism. Those failures put us in America, along with our friends in Europe and around the world, in the terrible position of having to choose to ally ourselves with Stalin.

That's why the stakes have been so high in prevention of another depression. That's why the costs in debt were bearable.

We have spent the past 30 years tearing down the bulwarks we had built to keep capitalism's dynamic energy safe. Now is time to build those guide-rails back again.

Religious extremism - IOKIYAR

McCain is still trying to have it both ways on his religious extremists. Sure, he has finally cut them loose, but what Obama may or may not have listened to is worse, worse, worse. And you'll notice the media is going along just fine with this. It took a blogger to raise a stink.

Hagee's whining, too. His views have been distorted, poor baby, totally unlike Jeremiah Wright's views. Now don't you want a little separation of church and state?

The truth about Hagee's sort of primitive theology is that he may claim that he believes in free will, but he really believes that everything happens because Gawd wills it. So Hitler has to be part of the good news.

The really really really outlandish belief that Hagee holds hasn't really been examined: He thinks it's a good thing to end the diaspora so that the End Times can come and most of us can die. Because Gawd wills it.

Public domain image of the "Whore of Babylon" from Wikimedia Commons. Click image for details.