The Northern Valley Beacon orders a little cheese with its whine

This blog has recently drawn attention to a few phrases posted at our sister institution, the Northern Valley Beacon.  The key phrases were these:

The Republicans need a fuehrer to lead their party. They like to be led into wars of atrocity based upon false pretenses. They like to be given easy-to-remember cant to dully repeat in the face of facts.

I posted a series of questions to the NVB, of which two were the subjects of a recent reply.  The material in italics are comments by the NVB.

• "Is it malicious to object to being called a Nazi for voting differently from the" anonymous contributors to the Northern Valley Beacon? (Just where did this happen, oh sensitive soul?)
• "Do you really believe that we are Nazis" for voting Republican "or is it rather that everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi?" (Huh?)

The NVB accuses me of a Orwellesque distortion of language for assuming that "the Republicans need a fuhrer" means "the Republicans are, in effect, Nazis."  Now, I concede that the word fuehrer does not in every case apply specifically to Hitler, just as the word red does not always mean communist.  But if I were to say that the folk at the NVB are "reds in their hearts," they would quite reasonably assume that I was calling them communists.  Not believing the latter, I would not say the former.  When George Bush called Michael Dukakis "a card carrying member of the ACLU," liberals all over the country cried murder. For it was assumed, due to the historical connotations of "card carrying"  that Bush was in effect calling Dukakis a communist. 

But consider, in addition to the infamous fuehrer quote, what is included in the recent reply. 

The campaign tactics [of Republicans] do, indeed, resonate of Germany of the 1930s. Liberals are vilified as the source of all the evils and ills that were charged to the Jews and other non-Aryans during the formation of the Third Reich.

Have liberals really been accused of wanting to interbreed with conservatives?  Never mind.  Then there's this:

If people emulate the tactics of regimes that presided over the degenerate episodes in human history, they are likely to be identified with such regimes.

Now I'm confused.  Is the NVB identifying the Republicans with the Nazi, Stalinist, and Maoist regimes, or not?  We need a fuehrer, if not a Fuehrer; our tactics "resonate" with those of the Nazis; we are warned we will be identified with the Nazis.  If the NVB doesn't think they are in effect calling us Nazis, they don't know what they themselves are saying or thinking.

If a Republican called the current Democratic party (in South Dakota or out of it) communists, the Republican would be nuts.  I have plenty of gripes with the way Democrats run their campaigns, and they have reasonable gripes with my party on the same score.  But they aren't traitors or commies, nor, for the most part, are they extremists. 

When the NVB likens the current situation in America to that in Weimar Germany, or late Czarist Russia, its contributors are manifestly off their rockers.  Real totalitarians do not attack their opponents with negative campaign adds.  They attack them with bayonets, starvation, and gas chambers.  Have any members of the South Dakota Democratic party been arrested?  Tortured?  If not, its obviously adolescent to talk of dictators and totalitarians.

The NVB is in fact a long whine.  Mommy!  They ran an "unscrupulous, malevolent, and depraved" campaign against us!  "The corporate dictatorships are exporting our manufacturing and creative jobs and are establishing a serfdom in America."  Mommy! Mommy!

The whine is a bit past its prime.  But the cheese makes up for it.