Be Careful When referring to someone as Hitler

When you watch FOX News you can't help but notice over the years how all these right-wingers (chicken-hawks many of them) like O'Reilly and Hannity and Gibson and those Neocons who host the morning show love to refer to every dictator who doesn't like us as "the Hitler of our time."

I remember a couple weeks before the disaster in Iraq began, Bill O'Reilly debated a guest who was anti-war and referred to Saddam Hussein as "The Hitler of our time." Michael Savage on AM Radio refers to Ahmedinejad as "The Hitler of our time." Sean Hannity on Hannity and Colmes, in concert with whomever is the rightwing guest on that "Fair and Balanced network" always talk about how we need to stop Iran the way we should have stopped Hitler in 1937 instead of 1945.

Well, let's establish a few facts here, which Mr. Hannity, Mr. O'Reilly, and Mr. Savage, and everyone else in the right-wing media (by right wing media I am referring to Talk radio, Weekly Standard, and Fox News) need to be reminded of:

-- Hitler was actually powerful. That's #1. I cannot stress that enough. Hitler had the most advanced sophisticated (and largest, or second largest after the Soviet Union's conscripting of young men) in the world. The kind of jets and tanks and missiles they had were second to none.
And Hitler presided over a prosperous Germany. Can anyone really make the case that Saddam Hussein had formidable weaponry?? Our weaponry was far superior in the first Gulf War, and that was when he still had some of the later Soviet and Czechoslovakian weaponry. Does anyone really think Iran has a formidable military?? They have a large Army, but that's about it. They make their own crappy tanks, but that's about it. Their army is pathetic.

-- Nazi Germany (and get this neo-cons, cuz this might surprise you) had actually invaded other countries. Not one country. SEVERAL countries. Name one country Saddam Hussein Al-Tikriti (I'm one of the few people in the media other than Thomas Friedman who knows that's Saddam's real last name) invaded AFTER 1991. You can't. Cuz he didn't invade any countries after 1991. Why?? He couldn't. And the two countries that he ever did invade were not without reason. Iran had stepped into his territory. And Jimmy Carter told Saddam it was okay to go to war with Iran. And that's not me saying Jimmy Carter did that. That's Christopher Hitchens words. And as for Kuwait, Saddam Hussein asked the state department if they'd oppose him invading Kuwait. April Glasbie in the state department said, "We have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like yours with Kuwait." And he didn't invade Kuwait for the fun of it. He did it because he owed them money from the Iran-Iraq war and the Kuwaitis started drilling into his oil fields to extract repayment.
NOW: Name a country IRAN has invaded. You can't. Not 1 country has Iran invaded since the border skirmishes in the 1970s with Iraq. And Iran is not any kind of economic power in the world. If they didn't have oil they'd have nothing. The country is loaded with the 4th largest oil reserve in the world, and they don't have one, not one refinery in the whole country. They have all their oil refined in Bahrain and the UAE.

-- I have been to Munich. I have been to Dachau concentration camp. I have seen the camps and taken the tour and learned what went on there. Ahmedinejad, Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and Bashar Assad are dictators, no question, but they don't have extermination camps in their country for the purposes of wiping out significant groups in the population. In those countries, you just keep a picture of the president in your home, don't talk politics, and you'll be ok. Show me millions of people, or even hundreds of thousands being imprisoned in extermination or concentration camps, and I might lend you some credence on your Hitler argument.

If Iran was so powerful they would have already landed their troops, jets, and tanks into Israel to "wipe them off the map." But they haven't because they CAN'T. They're weak. They don't spend 1% of what we spend on our military. The fact is that the United States military spends more on our "defense" budget than the next 20 countries. And that far exceeds what the "Axis of Evil" countries spend.

Yesterday I listened to the Laura Ingraham show on my way to work and I heard some caller talk about how he thought the war in Iraq was a blunder, and then she asked him, "Would you rather have Saddam Hussein back?" My answer is Yes. Absolutely. 110%. Why?? Because he was secular. Women walked the streets without veils. Women were an educated class in the country. People could walk the streets without fear of a car bomb or an RPG going off. And people say that he was an evil dictator who killed a lot of people. Yes. You're right. But as bad as he was, if you just kept a picture of the man in your house at all times, and went to his birthday celebrations, and refrained from talking about politics, you'd be ok.

Saddam Hussein hated Al-Qaeda just as much as we did. He was threatened by them like we are. Al-Qaeda doesn't like secular dictators. But you wouldn't know that. You wouldn't know that cuz to you, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden are just two Arab Muslim bad guys. And so two Arab Muslim bad guys of course have to be friends, right?