Senator Robert (“some of my best friends are negroes” ) Byrd peeked out from underneath his hood yesterday on the Senate floor and, with the courtly manners worthy of the old fashioned Southern gentleman that he is, proceeded to compare the Republican party with the Nazi’s:

Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.

But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that “Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact.” And he succeeded.

Hitler’s originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.

And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.

Senator Kleagle is recognized as something of an historian when it comes to the arcane details of the Senate. In fact, he conducts a monthly seminar on the history of that august body. Funny…he never gets around to lecturing on his own excerable role in filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1965 or his opposition to the nomination of the first African-American Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. But then, the doddering old fool can barely stay awake long enough to listen to the Senate’s opening prayer and drink his metamucil much less hold forth on his own colorful career as an apologist for the Klan and civil rights obstructionist.

The Capn’ does a better job giving the old coot a history lesson on Nazi Germany than I could:

By the time the Enabling Law came up for a vote, the SA (Brownshirts) had effectively terrorized the Reichstag into giving Hitler everything he wanted. Hitler did not come to power through purely democratic means, nor did he care all that much about the sheen of legality. His SA by that time numbered into the millions, and they had already blazed a trail of violent chaos, attacking all of their political opponents, assassinating a number of them; that’s how the Nazis came to power. So when Byrd speaks about how the Nazis used legal means to secure their dictatorship, rest assured that the Senator takes that completely out of the context in which it occurred.

I might add that, in order to assure passage of this “Enabling Law” which suspended the Weimer Constitution and gave Hitler broad, dictatorial powers, Der Fuehrer simply arrested a number of socialist and communist deputies and kept them away from the Reichstag when the vote came up. In addition, Hitler’s leader in the Reichstag, Hermann Goerring, placed dozens of SA Brownshirts throughout the floor initimidating the rest of the deputies into voting for the Act.

Perhaps Senator Cross Burner should get his head out of his wrinkled, sagging posterior long enough to read something besides garbage like this:

It is time to acknowledge our democratic system of government has been replaced by fascism.

Strong? You bet. But true, saith I. Laurence W. Britt, in an article entitled “Fascism Anyone?” published in the Spring 2003 issue of Free Inquiry magazine, identifies what he says are 14 “basic characteristics” of fascism. Britt writes that he “consider[ed] the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia,” and says further, “To be sure, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history. But they all followed the fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power.”

The only problem with this “analysis” as well as Senator Sheets rant is that they never bother to define what fascism is! So hysterical are they in their opposition to the President and the Republican party, they believe that simply by saying “Nazi” long enough and loud enough, it will come true and people will believe them. They haven’t the foggiest notion of what fascism is except that it’s “bad.” And that’s hardly enough to justify tarring your political opponents with such an incendiary label.

Thankfully, the American people just seem to shake their heads in wonder at this exercise in overheated rhetoric. I would also guess that 62 million people don’t like being compared to Hitler on a daily basis.

I wonder if that’s going to come back and haunt the Democrats when election time rolls around?