Hitler, Trump, and Other Unrelated Things
Today, during the latest episode of The Impeachables, a Stanford University professor of some sort — honestly don’t know and honestly don’t care — replied to a straight line from one of the Democratic “questioners,” who pretended to ask (for what possible purpose? — I don’t know and I don’t care) how a U.S. president is different from a king, with this zinger:
I’ll just give you one example that shows the difference between him and a king. Which is, the Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility. So while the President can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron.
“So while the President can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron.” Ba-dump-tssshhh!
Right. Likewise, a Stanford professor can employ the rhetorical form of a witticism, but she can’t display any wit.
When will today’s professoriate learn that they are getting paid to churn out hackneyed career-climbing inanities that no one will ever read, not to speak?
Trump has called Canada’s Justin the Wonder-Cupcake “two-faced,” after Trudeau was caught, along with other world leaders, mocking Trump in his absence at the NATO summit. For those game-players who take the pragmatic attitude that one ought to “praise Trump when he does good,” I’ll throw out this cookie: It’s hard to deny that Pretty Boy Blackface really is duplicitous and a hypocrite, is it not?
So two points for Trump — which gets his score up to his IQ level. (And I can say that because, unlike Canada’s Pasty-Faced Obama, I don’t suck up to Trump when that’s convenient for me, and then turn around and mock him behind his back.)
Patterico posted a series of tweets today, which he has re-posted at his blog, jokingly comparing Trump’s followers to Hitler’s, by replicating their standard arguments in defense of Trump as hypothetical defenses of Hitler.
Some of the jokes are funny, and the comparison works well enough, though it seems a bit too easy. For example:
A: He’s not perfect but you gotta admit this guy hates the Commies.
B: But Kristallnacht!
A: There you go again. “Little Mustache Man Bad!”— Patterico (@Patterico) December 4, 2019
Many of his readers, naturally, are criticizing him on the grounds that “Trump is not Hitler,” which is true but beside the point. Others are trying to pin him on the logical weakness of using an analogy to prove anything about Trump — which is a non sequitur, since it is obvious that Patterico is not trying to prove anything about Trump, but merely to show how easy it is to use such defenses to justify anything.
In short, Patterico is not making an argument in these tweets, but just having fun at the expense, not of Trump, but of his typical followers. And why shouldn’t he have that fun, since those cultists, including his former editors at RedState, have never shown anything but irrational hatred and scorn for him? And they spit at him for no reason but that he continues to disapprove of all the things about Trump that those same people used to claim to disapprove of, before they, unlike Patterico, sacrificed their independent minds and alleged principles to the social comforts of belonging to the tribe, no matter what self-contradictions they would have to embrace to fit in?
