How could I have been fooled?
I’ve kept the flag of Israel on my newspaper’s Facebook page since Oct. 7; I still get chills thinking about the photos my father-in-law shot when he was an Army private in 1945 at the Buchenwald concentration camp; I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., years ago and can still smell the melancholy finality of the “shoe room.” Heck, I even listen to Ben Shapiro almost every day.
Yet last week, as soon as the advance voting polls were open in my county and I’d finished pulling the wings off my allotment of flies for the day, I voted for Hitler.
Go figure. As it turns out according to the frenzied ravings of America’s Left, all the presidential ballots of my Old Testament-loving voting life have been cast for Hitler. I know, right. I’m a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma – like one of those Chocolate Lovers Twinkies.
Vigilant Democrats have illuminated for me that voting for Hitler has been a habit of mine every presidential election since 1984, in fact. In those short election year interims that I’ve been able to relax the death grip I keep on my gun and my Bible long enough, I’ve picked up a pen and blackened the oval for whatever version of the immolator of Europe and the murderer of 20 million human lives the Republicans were offering me that go-round.
And these have been no Mel Brooks versions of Der Fuhrer, mind you; not the singing, dancing, spiffy-costumed, hit-Harvey-Korman-in-the-face-with-a-pie versions of the head cheese of The Reich you remember from “The Producers” or “To Be Or Not To Be.”
No, these were Hitlers with blood dripping from their fangs, who went by names like Ronald Reagan, G.H. and G.W. Bush, Bob Dole, Mitt Romney and now Donald Trump. To hell with supply side economics, pro-business policy, smaller government, tax cuts and jelly beans – these guys all wanted Poland.
And this was just the top of the ticket. It turns out there’ve been truckloads of Hitlers running for office on Republican ballots of states far and wide for decades – congressmen, senators, Rotary Club presidents – at least according to the historically competent, moral and compassionate Democrats who have once again dictated the qualifications to head up the New Third Reich.
After all, who better to know a Hitler when they seen one than the folks who celebrate the killing of 600,000 innocent babies every year as “reproductive rights?”
Indeed, we Republicans seeking outright malevolence like border security, economic progress, American excellence and an unstoppable military have sought a long line of Hitlers to lead us. Some of you more seasoned than I will recall Senator Barry Goldwater having dared to visit a military installation in Germany and give an interview to conservative German magazine Der Spiegel in which he declared his position on Vietnam was to allow the generals to win the war. For such inside-the-beltway heresy, California Governor Pat Brown pronounced “The stench of fascism is in the air” when Goldwater was nominated by the Republicans to run for president in 1964.
Of course the Hitler I remember best was my first, and liberals hated him almost as much as they hate Donald Trump. I remember specifically those Iranian thugs releasing the U.S. embassy hostages after 444 days in captivity literally within hours of Reagan’s inauguration. The message didn’t sink in on St. Louis congressman Bill Clay from St. Louis, who later alleged the president who brought down the Berlin Wall and rebuilt America economically, militarily and spiritually after the disastrous Carter years was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.”
And remember when Republicans gained control of Congress in the 1990s for the first time since Moses, and Democrat congressman John Dingell from Michigan compared the new U.S. House to “the Duma and the Reichstag;” – the legislature in Czarist Russia and the German parliament that brought Hitler to power? Yeah. Not much actual oppression in those years as I recall; just Monica Lewinsky and a certain blue dress and ‘it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is…’
There was Democrat Daddy Warbucks George Soros calling out George W. Bush as a Nazi for the audacity of killing Islamic terrorists after 9/11. There was “tally me banana” performer Harry Belefonte pronouncing Bush a racist for the crime of being white and president. When some tallyman tallied me number of blacks in the Bush Administration and the upper level management positions they held, Belefonte had a comeback: “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich.’’ Well, that settled that. Dayayo!
In a 2012 article in the Abilene Reporter-News, writer Larry Elder recounts NAACP Chairman Julian Bond playing the Nazi card on numerous occasions during the Bush years. Speaking at historically black Fayetteville State University in North Carolina in 2006, Bond told an audience “the Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side.’’
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker tried to trim excessive public employee packages in the state and was dubbed by leftist bloggers a fascist, “perhaps not in the classical sense since he doesn’t operate in the streets, but a fascist nonetheless…” South Carolina Democrat Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian in 2012 referred to a Republican press conference with Governor Nikki Haley as Haley being “down in the bunker, a la Eva Braun.” Kansas’ own Democrat National Convention Delegate Pat Lehman invoked Hitler in calling Mitt Romney a liar: “It’s like Hitler said: If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big lie, and if you tell it often enough and say it in a loud enough voice, some people are going to believe you,” Lehman told the Wichita Eagle in 2012.
Mitt Romney channeling Hitler? Wink Martindale’s stunt double? Seriously?
The irony of course is that if this election’s Hitler becomes president, Democrat voters themselves are going to fare better than with their own alternative. Deep down they know that, because they remember the previous Donald Trump presidency and because even they recognize an empty bucket when they look at Kamala Harris.
But that’ll never satisfy the elite Democrat king makers who culled the duly elected if enfeebled Joe Biden from the ticket, implanted Kamala the Klown, and are now terrified that the scheme doesn’t seem to be working – even among the intersectional coalitions of gays, minorities, queers, abortionists, race hustlers and criminals they’ve spent every election since 2008 trying to convince of their imaginary victimhood. Even the “diverse” America, it seems, has begun to outgrow them.
Since they lack a plan Americans want to buy in to, they’ve fallen back to ruining this Hitler financially; they’ve tried manufacturing legal actions against him; they’ve tried maligning him; they’ve even tried killing him.
But Hitler’s still on his feet with a plan to Make American Great Again and millions of us minions ready to work to make it a reality. With no ideas and out of options, all his name-calling opponents have left is their visceral, irrational hatred. Very shortly, we’ll find out if that’s enough.
Dane Hicks is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, VA. He is the author of novels "The Skinning Tree" and "A Whisper For Help." As publisher of the Anderson County Review in Garnett, KS., he is a recipient of the Kansas Press Association's Boyd Community Service Award as well as more than 60 awards for excellence in news, editorial and photography.
Thank you for this article, Dane. I visited Buchenwald in the 90s, but the smell of pure evil was still there. I think the comparison between abortion and the death camps is fair. Those who participated in the murder and abuse thought that what they were doing was okay and maybe even good or necessary at the time.