Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right…

This post could be subtitled: Why I find American politics tedious.

I steer clear of online political forums, read very few blatantly partisan blogs (though the few that do rest in my rss reader are excellent) and typically flip past cable news programs of a political bent. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate domestic politics or find political discussion boring in and of itself. It’s the noise.

The keening, shrill, oft juvenile shrieking that pours forth from the lunatic fringe of both political proclivities, left and right. This fringe may well entail a minority in the American body politic but what they lack in numbers they make up for in pure, shouting volume. Common sense, critical debate and any semblance of reality are drowned out in a crescendo of hysterical and vapid nonsense that starts with [choose your partisan radio/television savant] and is passed along to a herd of willing recipients who re-manufacture the whole mess on a smaller scale (the political forums I mentioned, public speaking events, protests, etc.)

One of the more insidious aspects of this irritating and loud minority is the ease in which they draw hackneyed comparisons between their enemy du jour and history’s darkest ideologies, institutions and tyrants. The more proliferate example of this idiocy these days can be found regarding both the previous and current administrations and the evocation of history’s most tragically successful sociopath, Adolf Hitler. During the Bush administration it was all the rage among left wing anti-warriors with a whole lot of energy and very little sense.

Most recently the ignorant comparison has been attributed to right wing simpletons who’ve taken the leftward swing of American domestic policy under President Barack Obama and followed their left wing cousins of yore:

The logic used to support this position is childlike in it’s simplicity. Hitler’s Nazi party was officially called the National Socialist German Workers Party. You see, it’s got “socialist” in it and so if Obama’s left wing policies are tantamount to a national shift toward socialism (which they are cuz Sean Hannity sez so) and the Nazis described their party as socialist, well say no more.

The conclusion is easy.  Forget all that historical context of the rise and fall of fascism; hyper-nationalism, anti-semitism, anti-communism, expansionism, etc.  If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it must be a Nazi.

I understand that mud slinging and politics go hand in hand but, really, it’s gotten to the point of absurdity.