Must Love Dogs

So this week Arizona representative Brenda Barton noted in a facebook post that:

“Someone is paying the National Park Service thugs overtime for their efforts to carry out the order of De Fuhrer… where are our Constitutional Sheriffs who can revoke the Park Service Rangers authority to arrest??? Do we have any Sheriffs with a pair?” 

When asked later to explain her comments she stated:

“It’s not just the death camps. [Hitler] started in the communities, with national health care and gun control,” Barton continued. “You better read your history. Germany started with national health care and gun control before any of that other stuff happened. And Hitler was elected by a majority of people.”

Okay, Ms. Barton.  Three things of note.

First of all, how many times do I have to tell you its "Der Fuhrer", not "De Fuhrer" by which I think you actually meant "Die Fuhrer"?  "Fuhrer" is masculine and requires a masculine article, not a feminine one.  F over!  Try again.

Secondly, a quick spin around the interwebs at various sources show that your history is debatable at best.  It looks as though strict gun laws were put in place in Germany as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, well before Hitler came to power in 1933.  Hitler's gun laws of 1938 actually seem to have increased access to guns for most Germans, Jews excluded.  National medicine was also already under way in Germany before Hitler came to power.  And even if Hitler was a stern advocate of these two policies, it was hardly the lynchpin of his rise to power or the rise of the Nazi state.  There were many other key factors and I don't think it particularly matters what Hitler's health and gun policies were.

So my third thing, Ms. Barton, is a question.

Do you love dogs?

I'm going to bet the answer is yes, because even if you don't there are thousands of registered voters in your state congressional district who most certainly do, and you don't want to alienate them in any way.  So you love dogs.

Well guess who else loved dogs?  This guy:

Hitler loved dogs.  You probably do too, Ms. Barton.  That doesn't mean you want to invade Canada to make more living space for our retirees to hang out in during the summer, and it doesn't mean you want to throw all the red heads in a concentration camp in the name of American Purity.  No.  It just means that you happen to have something in common with a horrible, horrible person.

Matters of policy may be more important than dogs, but even so if Hitler and Obama had similar gun policies it would mean only that they have one thing in common and little, if anything, else.  To suggest otherwise is as insane as suggesting that you are a Nazi because you love dogs.

I do tire of this whole comparing politicians to Hitler.  Rather than remember him as a representative for how low the human race can descend, Hitler has been made into something of a boogieman lurking in the closets of our nation, representing its most irrational fears.  We really should cut it out.  But sensible government is in short supply these days, so I see no end in sight.

Though perhaps there is one politician we can compare to Hitler....

Happy Happy Happy All the Way to the Bank

Usually on Wednesday's around 10 you'll find me sitting in front of the television with a grin on my face, watching the Robertson clan do anything but sell duck calls.

I started watching the show during the fall of 2012, in the midst of the second season (though I wonder if we need a new word for television season.  Calling it a run or a set might be better, but la da di da dee) a wee bit before it became a thing.  I admit the first time I saw it I didn't like it, but a few weeks later I gave it another chance and I watched Si Robertson go to the eye doctor.  

I was hooked.

It was only this past summer, walking around the Virginia Beach Aquarium in the midst of a family vacation, that I noticed people walking around with Duck Dynasty t-shirts.  In short order I learned that you could get Duck Dynasty garden gnomes, and towels, and calenders, and greeting cards, and Duck Dynasty sleep pants, bed sheets, socks, hats, boots, contact lens cases, chia pets, sleeping bags, christmas lights, cookbooks, coffee mugs, and so on and so on forever and ever, Amen.  

The merchandise didn't bother me too much, though I wasn't about to buy any.  It made me a little sad because it left me with a feeling that the show would collapse under its own weight, that the banal and casual brilliance of seasons 1-4 is simply impossible to sustain.  Maybe the Robertson family understands this, and that's why they are grabbing the lime-light while they well and truly can. 

But then there is the planned Duck Dynasty Christmas Album, due in stores on October 29th.  I think that's the last straw for me, a commercialized reach for a bridge too far, and my interest in the show is diminishing.
  

I'm not even sure why it matters to me.  I mean, it's not like I went to see Starry Night at MOMA Queens and there was Van Gogh himself trying to sell me a Paul Gauguin bobble head doll.  This is a show about some rich rednecks who rather enjoy hunting ducks and blowing stuff up, so who cares if it gets mired in commercialism just like everything else in this country does?

I would argue that in a world where most "end of men" sitcoms and movies suggest that the lest vestiges of manhood are merely a crass, unwavering interest in large breasts, it was nice to actually see something relatively wholesome that is nonetheless funny, featuring characters who meet a changing world by sticking to values of faith, family, and ducks.  It will be interesting to see how fame fits into that list.  For me, once you make a commemoration of a phenomenon by putting an old man's face on a t-shirt (as well posters, wall paper, key chains, cumberbunds, physics textbooks, regulation NFL footballs, and Roman Abromavich's bemused soccer watching smile) it loses some of what made it special in the first place.

Yeah, they exist.

Shutdown!

I can only watch about 30 seconds of CNN right now.  This is stupid.  Our great country, our wonderful country, is led by stupid people.  

My daughter tells me I shouldn't use the word "stupid".  But she is asleep now, and I don't care.  

 

Who do I blame for all this?  Naturally I blame the House Republicans and their insistence that Obamacare be repealed.  I've admitted previously to not be a huge fan of Obama, but this time I'll close ranks and simply agree with the sentiment that in the past -- what, three years? -- every effort to defeat Obamacare by repeal, or litigation, or a change of government has failed.  

There are times when great leaders fight to the last tooth and nail -- or at least promise to.  Senator Ted Cruz invoked Churchill when he said that he would fight with every breath in his body to defeat the law, going so far as to say "As Churchill said, we will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the streets".  

I would argue that Churchill is probably the greatest war time leader of any nation.  He gave the actual "fight on the beaches" speech as Britain awaited invasion by a German military machine that had just broken the will of France -- an easy thing, you may say, but if you've never actually read about the Fall of France I would encourage you to do so.  It is an epic tragedy and war had never been envisioned on such a scale before that time.  

It was a bleak moment, but Churchill was basically asserting that he would fight to the last breath in his body. If Britain was taken he would even continue the war from the far flung reaches of the British Empire, and his wartime strategy shows his desire to anything, ANYTHING, to prick and scratch at the Germans, even if it be only with a pin.  

I think it is clear that imminent invasion is rather different than the passage of a bill you don't particularly like. But I suppose there are those that feel that Obamacare does threaten the Liberty we enjoy and therefore threaten the very core of our national values and identity, and therefore must be fought to the last.  

Still, I have to believe that sometimes great leaders have to recognize when they are defeated, when they have reached their limits, when they have exhausted all their viable options.  The Republicans are there.  If they were to accept the fact that our Democratic institutions did -- albeit narrowly -- spring forth Obamacare and they therefore must live with it, maybe work to make it better, then I would give them immense credit.  It takes a great deal of character to accept defeat, sometimes perhaps more than it does to fight on to the last.

Getting back to Mr. Churchill, I wonder what he would have thought about all this?  I'm no expert on Churchill, but if his first volume on the history of the second world war is any indication he was a man who had an English Public School morality, a sense of fairness and right and wrong bred on the rugby fields and polo grounds of his youth.  He believed in the rule of law and international institutions.  Indeed, when Hitler overstepped his bounds in the mid thirties by re-arming and later reoccupying the Rhineland, Churchill felt that a vigorous international response sanctioned by the League of Nations was called for. 

Based on that admittedly slim argument, here is a man for whom the law was paramount -- provided the Germans weren't bombing the shit out of his country, in which case perhaps it wasn't.  Still, if Churchill had been handed a political defeat such as the Republicans received with regards to Obamacare, I think he would respect the institutions of the law, accept his defeat with magnanimity, and seek to move on in the business of governing the nation as best he could.

Or maybe he wouldn't.  The Winston Churchill I have my in head though, he certainly would have, even if he never really existed.

I wish our Congress would do the same.

Though I must say, it would be interesting to see Senator Ted Cruz and his band or renown fight Obamacare on the beaches.  I imagine it might look something like this: