From outside the Brookings Institution, 1775 Mass. Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C.
One thing is certain in Washington–free speech is often on display, even if only for a few minutes before one of the dozens of police forces operating within the District of Columbia shoos the First Amendment types back to from whence they came…or into a paddy wagon, depending on the mood. As a D.C. native, I’ve seen plenty of protests, marches, placard displays, sit-ins, hangings-in-effigy, speechifying, and mass arrests.
I’d have to rank the one I saw today as fairly high on the fantabulous scale.
Obama as Hitler?
Der Fuhrer?/Photo by A. Ault
That photo stopped me short on my way into a conference on comparative effectiveness that featured Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag.
This message was brought to us by Lyndon LaRouche, right wing crank and conspiracy theorist.
LaRouche is so controversial that even his Wikipedia page has been protected from editing because there had been some apparently “non-neutral” tampering.
Apparently, he’s now interested in stopping what he calls “Obama’s Nazi Health Plan.” The leaflets being handed out by the LaRouchians included a screed that likened Obama’s health proposals to genocide and fashioned Peter Orszag, Larry Summers, and Rahm and Ezekiel Emanuel as Obama’s Himmler, Rommel, Goebbels, and Mengele.
I guess with the health reform debate moving forward, no one, not even a perennial outsider like LaRouche, wants to be left out.
He just can’t afford pinstriped K Street denizens to make his “case.” And that’s probably a good thing.
– Alicia Ault (on Twitter @aliciaault)
3 Comments
June 10, 2009 at 8:15 am
If you are going to use foreign words then the spelling should be correct (this also affects the pronunciation): Der Führer
If required, XML and sgml codes are available for these and other ’special characters’ so why not use them? ['Obama’s speech' above is an interesting example (which unfortunately went wrong)]….
June 11, 2009 at 4:57 am
There certainly isn’t anything preventing Obama, given his incredibly high public support, from becoming the next Hitler or Lincoln.
June 19, 2009 at 8:09 pm
[...] taken off, and he moves on the Obama Fly-Swatting story. The LYMers, on the other hand, are taking the joke on the road, and standing on street-corners for hours on end (as oppsoed to a few seconds) [...]