Believing the Insane

In some of the earliest responses that I saw to the shooting of Rep. Giffords was a piece on a right wing website claiming that the shooter was a liberal because he referenced Hitler and Mein Kampf on some website.

The discussion about incendiary rhetoric aside, anyone who can look at the historical record and try to link Nazism and liberals is either insane or deliberately delusional. I tried to have a discussion with someone who was saying this and this argument was based on the presence of Socialist in the Nazi party name. They ignore the entire history of the Nazi party under Adolph Hitler and decide that Hitler was a liberal. After all, didn't you know that Hitler co-opted several German unions (before he destroyed the unions and put their leaders in the concentration camps). So if the party has Socialist in their name and co-opted some German unions, of course Hitler was a Liberal.

These are the same people who insist that the Southern Democrats who opposed (violently in many cases) had to be liberals because they were Democrats.

Its fascinating for me to have these discussions. I know that many on the right are not all that interested in facts, but this attempt to redefine Nazism as some sort of Liberalism and to pretend that the Southern Democrats doing everything in their power to enforce and protect segregation were Liberals is simply insane.

I have not figured out how they can make such ludicrous claims with a straight face, but they do.