Monday January 05, 2004

OL' BLOOD 'N' GUTS' FINAL SOLUTION. I am a dedicated follower of General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters (last sighting here), and look forward to each new column as eagerly as if it were a new Lockhorns installment.

His most recent column, though, has me worried. Not that it is stylistically off the mark -- it is in some ways the apotheosis of his style. But I fear he may have shot his wad.

The column opens with a graf of breathtaking logical inversion:

It's fashionable in left-wing circles to describe anyone who admires America as a fascist. But the real totalitarian threats of our time come from the left. And no public figure embodies the left's contempt for basic freedoms more perfectly than Howard Dean.

First a grotesque mischaracterization of a mischaracterization (us dirty hippies call tough-talking law-and-order types fascists, General -- people who "admire America" we call saps!), then a sweeping and undemonstrable historical generalization, closing with an outrageous slur against Dean and all Democrats that actually mirrors the liberal name-calling Peter first complained about! It's so wrong it's beautiful, like Beavis & Butthead with battle decorations.

Peters claims that Dean supporters are against free speech because they "try to intimidate other presidential aspirants by surrounding the cars delivering them to their rallies and chanting to drown out their speech... These are the techniques employed by Hitler's Brownshirts." I'm not sure what real-world events, if any, he's referring to -- the
Washington Post did report that Dean supporters chanted outside a Gephardt speech; Gephardt's people were obliged to close the windows, and his spokesperson called the act "a little bit disrespectful," which hardly summons up visions of Kristallnacht. (I can't find any reference in actual news to the car thing, which may exist only in one of Peters' brain-bubbles.)

Then Peters compares Howard Dean to Hitler, Goebbels, Big Brother, Lenin, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev.

All good fun, but you see the problem, don't you? The election is ten months away, and Peters has already gone to the money shot. After you've repeatedly compared a candidate and his followers to Nazis, what else is left? Maybe you could compare them to evil space aliens who are a hundred times worse than Hitler -- or Saddam Hussein. But nothing else quite has that Hitler zing.

Now Peters is stuck with the Hitler parallel. He may try to find another metaphor -- comparing Dean to a dung-beetle, say, or an artichoke, or a stagecoach -- but Peters' gift is not so much for creative writing as for monomania, and he will revert. And after a few months of screaming Hitler at the Democrats, Peters will sound like your typical Free Republic poster talking about Lincoln.

The General has given good froth for a few seasons, but it may be that -- like that other great General, Coriolanus -- he has o'erreached.

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