Comments Elsewhere

This is retarded.

Those who contemptuously pride themselves on a superior grasp of history ought not to pass along, without any comment or cavil, comments like this:

“Israeli intelligence has long believed that after the U.S. delayed invasion plans to allow U.N. weapons inspectors time to search for Iraq’s WMDs, Saddam moved the banned weapons to Syria, the only other country where the Ba’ath Party ruled.”

… which of course neglects the obvious conflict of interest involved when Israeli intelligence is dishing alleged dirt to the United States on two of its three biggest military rivals; and mindlessly points out that Assad’s Syria and Hussein’s Iraq were both ruled by “the Ba’ath Party,” neglecting that the Ba’ath Parties in the two countries were not in direct contact with each other and were, in fact, ideologically opposed to one another–over roughly the same issues (Ba’athism in one country vs. Ba’athism in the whole Arab world) that divided Stalin and Trotsky (who were both particularly bloody-minded sorts of Bolshevik thugs–but who it would be foolish to place together as allies).

Not to mention this:

“Patrick, ‘most people’ voted for Hitler in ’32 — so I really don’t give a shit for the Ambiguous-Collective Mob.”

This is categorically false. Hitler lost the 1932 Presidential election to the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg, by a margin of 30% to just under 50% in the four-candidate first round, and then again by a margin of 37% to 53% in the three-candidate runoff. The Nazi Party received 37% of the vote in the special Reichstag elections in May 1932, and then dropped to 33% in the November 1932 elections. (In fact the NDASP never achieved majority support in any national election ever held in the Weimar Republic. In March 1933, Hitler used the Reichstag fire to imprison or shoot most of his political opponents, to eliminate most of his (democratically elected) political opponents from voting in the Reichstag, and then to ram the Enabling Act through this rump Parliament. The rest, as they say, is history. Unfortunately.