Sunday, January 23, 2011

Is Hate Speech Really a Right Wing Exclusive?

In Washington on Wednesday, on the floor of the House of Representatives, the ugly rhetoric of politics returned in full force. Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN) invoked the Holocaust when speaking of the Republican stance on health care and compared their statements concerning the controversial law to the work of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

“They say it's a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels," Cohen said. "You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it. Like blood libel. That's the same kind of thing.”

It didn’t stop there.

“The Germans said enough about the Jews and people believed it - believed it and you have the Holocaust. We heard on this floor, government takeover of health care. Politifact said the biggest lie of 2010 was a government takeover of health care because there is no government takeover," Cohen said.

Cohen didn’t tell anyone to go get a gun and shoot anyone but then, neither did anyone else. What he did though was compare Republican opposition to a law that was forced down the throats of the American people to the propaganda constructed by the Nazis that eventually caused the deaths of millions of Jews during World War II.

Maybe Cohen agrees with Alan Grayson, the shamed, former Florida Representative who claimed, during the health care debates, that Republicans want people to “die early”. (Grayson lost his bid for re-election in November last year. Go figure.) What’s interesting is there was virtually nothing about Cohen’s statements from any of the mainstream media outlets. If a Republican politician (or pundit) had made a statement comparing Democrats to Nazis (which I believe actually did happen during the debate) it would have been front page, headline news on all channels. Yes, I said all channels, including FOX.

The liberal bias in the main stream media is getting to the point where nothing they report can be taken as fact anymore. I remember when news reporting was mostly unbiased, honest investigation of stories and when reporting on Washington was about keeping politicians that way. Today it seems most main stream media outlets simply look the other way when there’s bad or controversial news from the left.

Steve Cohen should be ashamed of himself for his comparison. Political rhetoric has been the focal point of the news since the Tucson incident and even the President has called for people to scale back the rhetoric on both sides. Obviously some people on the left don’t worry about what the President says or what he wants. Mr. Cohen made that very clear.

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