THE PATTERN BECOMES CLEAR!

From the cacophony of their commentary, conservatives seem of late to be experiencing all the Kübler-Ross stages of grief simultaneously.  Jonah Goldberg, sent out to enforce wingnut orthodoxy in the face of the Trump-Palin challenge, is basically just going homina homina homina like Ralph Kramden caught in a harebrained scheme ("The problem is this implicit notion that if you are an 'establishment candidate' you aren’t a 'real' conservative. It may be true that if you are an establishment candidate you aren’t a populist" farrrt). The others have been telling each other Trump is Obama's fault so much that they seem at this point to bore one another.

So credit for initiative to Mario Loyola at National Review, who digs into history to get to the heart of the matter: It's not Obama who's to blame, it's that bastard FDR and his political equivalent in Europe, the Third Reich.

The Nazis succeeded in selling themselves as the solution to the workers’ plight. Of course, they were nothing of the sort. Hitler promptly led German workers from a bad situation into an infinitely worse one, a world war that ended in the destruction of whole cities, the deaths of 3.4 million German soldiers, and a record of crimes against humanity that will forever shame that people more than any other had organized Western civilization. 

What bears remembering here are the worries that led Friedrich Hayek to write his classic treatise, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek started his most famous work in Britain, and worked hard to finish it after the Anschluss joined his native Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938. He wrote it in English, for English-speaking audiences, to warn them that the road to the serfdom of totalitarian rule starts with the embrace of socialist policies. Hayek argued that replacing market competition and stable rules with heavy-handed regulations and arbitrary control of social outcomes leads inexorably toward tyranny. 

He saw the great English-speaking peoples committing the same mistake the Germans had made in embracing the socialist policies of administrative government 30 years earlier. He saw them sleepwalking down the same road to serfdom, and he wanted to warn them of the consequences. Though one book could hardly make a difference, his timing was impeccable. In the United States, the Supreme Court had just caved in to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which had dismantled just enough of the U.S. Constitution to make way for socialist policies and the capture of government by special interests.

Makes you wonder why Roosevelt sent us to war against Hitler, when to hear Loyola tell it they were basically after the same thing.  Bonus points for this:

My purpose here is not to compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, which would be preposterous and stupid...

Wait for it...

...but rather to show how dangerous it can be for working-class folks to lose trust in the leaders of mainstream democratic parties. The Nazi Party styled itself a workers’ party. Its opposition message was essentially the same as that of Michael Moore in movies such as Fahrenheit 9/11...

Maybe we should have a Godwin Challenge to check the speed with which columnists transition from citation of Godwin's Law to breaking it.