According to Crain’s Chicago Business, on Tuesday night former President Obama compared the era of President Trump to Adolf Hitler’s.
Greg Hinz, writing for Crain’s, said Obama spoke in a Q&A session before the Economic Club of Chicago, back in his home town. Hinz wrote that Obama resorted to the usual leftist rhetoric, intoning that the United States has survived tough times before, referencing Joseph McCarthy and former President Richard Nixon. Then he segued to the need for a free press in order to ensure the country’s survival, saying that he had difficulties with the press, as has Trump, but what he himself understood was “the principle that the free press was vital.”
Hinz wrote that Obama continued that the danger is “grow(ing) complacent. We have to tend to this garden of democracy or else things could fall apart quickly.”
Hinz then reached the crux of the matter:
“That’s what happened in Germany in the 1930s, which, despite the democracy of the Weimar Republic and centuries of high-level cultural and scientific achievements, Adolph Hitler rose to dominate,” Obama noted. “Sixty million people died. . . .So, you’ve got to pay attention. And vote.”
The bald comparison of Trump to Hitler is not surprising coming from the avatar of the Left; the Left has been promulgating the lie that Hitler was to the political Right and not the Left for at least 70 years.
But what is truly ironic is that Obama’s tenure had more than a few similarities to the early phases of Hitler’s Germany. Guess which figure championed universal health care, increased taxes on the rich so social welfare programs could stay afloat, and more government oversight of corporations? Which figure’s party wanted to make college more affordable, saying in the party platform that “the state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious [person] to obtain higher education.”
If you said both, move to the head of the class.
No one would accuse Obama of being Hitler, although the beginning of their tenures had some similarities. But for Obama to use the tired cliché that a right-wing leader resembles Hitler, whose own party referred to itself as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, is nothing short of patently outrageous, false, and un-American.