Stages four and five have not arrived, yet. They are the takeover of the military and law enforcement by the goon squads and then the inevitable self destruction of the country that results from fascism.
Blatant, unashamed hypocrisy is used effectively by the Republicans. Senator Chuck Grassley said that a government plan would "decide when to pull the plug on Grandma." When he was quoted on that, he said that idea is a "distortion from the far left." First you lie about a provision in the health care plan, and when you're caught doing it, you lie again and blame it on the far left. Then you lie, again, about the false "death panels" that he himself brought up, and then you lie, again, and blame the left for bringing it up and causing the fear that is killing health care reform.
The danger to the United States, and the rest of the world, of the Republican theories of economic policy are staring us right in the face. The Great Depression of the 1930s and the current economic recession are just two examples of the failure of Republican economics. The Republican no regulation, free market is supposed to create a perfect economy where everyone benefits from the theory of the "Invisible Hand" that will set everything right. It hasn't occurred to them that the invisible hand is invisible because it doesn't exist.
The Republicans have been pushing this ideology for 233 years and all it has produced is the Great Depression and the current economic recession with over half a million people losing their jobs every month. How many more hundreds of years are we to wait for free market ideology to kick in?
From Robert Creamer on the Huffington Post: "The Bush tax cuts didn't just produce fewer jobs than advertised. They didn't produce any private sector jobs at all. The whole experiment in handing over money to the wealthiest people in America so they could use it to benefit the rest of us was a colossal - empirically verifiable - failure."
Rightwing, Republican ideologue Senator Jim DeMint vows to make health care Obama's "Waterloo," and urges conservative activists to help "break him." And he says that, "We're about where Germany was before World War ll where they became a social democracy."
DeMint is obviously not a student of history. The result of Waterloo was a decisive victory for the Duke of Wellington, which we can suppose he is wishing for Obama in his Waterloo reference, and Germany was not a social democracy during World War ll, it was a fascist dictatorship.
"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."
George Bush, the Republican who set the pattern during the last eight years for Republicans to follow, used all of the above techniques to further his goals. The lies about WMD, the lies about Saddam involved with al Queda and 9/11, and the fact that he said he couldn't think of a single mistake he had ever made.
The above is the psychological profile of Adolph Hitler, one of the great barbarians of history, prepared by the United States Office of Strategic Services during World War ll. It fits precisely the techniques currently being used by the Republicans. So, who are the Nazis? If the shoe fits...
From an article in the Christian Science Monitor: "But Holder should recall the testimony of William Keitel, the ranking officer of the German Army: "I took the stand that a soldier has a right to have confidence in his state leadership, and accordingly he is obliged to do his duty and to obey.' The Nuremberg tribunal sentenced Keitel to death by hanging. Article 8 of the London Charter that established the Nuremberg court made clear that obedience to an order from a superior to commit a crime is not a defense."
From an article in the New York Times by Michael Hayden, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, defending his and his agency's role in the illegal surveillance of US citizens during the Bush regime: "That is, the agency work force heeded, to the very best of its ability, the direction I gave them when the program was begun: do what the president has authorized us to do and not one photon or one electron more."
William Keitel was hung for following Hitler's illegal orders. Michael Hayden is walking around and writing articles in the NY Times bragging about following Bush's illegal orders.
Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany was the most barbaric in modern history. It resulted in the deaths of at least 46 million innocent people with the deaths of six million innocent Jews, simply because they were Jews. That's barbarism.
Barbarism: An act, trait or custom characterized by ignorance or crudity.
To believe the lies of the Becks and Limbaugh about the death panels and all their other lies about proposed health care reform shows astonishing ignorance. To act on those lies by disrupting and shutting down the democratic process of discussing the health care program shows astonishing crudity. Therefore barbarism.
