Sadly, the ranks of reasonable people apparently don't include many of the leading lights of the Republican Party and its amen corner in the conservative movement. Over just the past several days, former Arkansas governor and 2016 GOP White House hopeful Mike Huckabee accused President Obama of preparing to "march Israelis to the door of the oven" with the Iran nuclear deal. Conveniently forgetting 50 years of history during which the GOP welcomed Southern conservatives, the Klan, and the Confederate flag with open arms, the Oklahoma Federation of Republican Women displayed an image declaring Democrats had traded the lynching ropes for welfare programs. And just hours before Confederate flags were found outside Martin Luther King Jr.'s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the GOP's 2008 vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, took to Facebook to ask between the Confederacy and Planned Parenthood, which "killed 90,000 black babies last year?"
And that was just the past week.
As it turns out, these grotesque misappropriations of the Holocaust and slavery aren't the exception to the GOP rule—they are the rule. As a review of recent right-wing rhetoric shows, for today's Republicans, Obamacare, the national debt, tax hikes on the rich, abortion, federal regulation of for-profit colleges, gun control, social safety net programs, marriage equality, torture detainee rights, and just about everything else conservatives hate are little different than Hitler's slaughter of 6 million Jews or America's original sin. The only question for GOP sound-bite manufacturers now isn't whether to use such abominable analogies, but which one.
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