Recent Comments

1. about 15 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   Edgeways,

   If the focus of the humor were Hitler that would be one thing. Examples of Hitler humor are the film “The Producers”, the TV series “Hogan’s Heroes”, etc.

   But that’s not what the strip is doing. It is raising the argument that Obama is like Hitler.

   Some have pointed out that the cartoonist was simply making fun of people who are calling Obama Hitler. If that’s so, then the humor needs to be a shade less subtle than it is.

   The way that this came to my attention was that an Obama hating skag sent this cartoon to my wife.

   -Wexler

2. about 15 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   Is this supposed to be funny?

   Hitler’s genocidal extermination of Jews, “gypsies”, homosexuals, and anyone else deemed to be inferior or undesirable was one of the most tragic and painful atrocities in the world’s history of inhumanity we have visited upon ourselves. An estimated 6 million people were rounded up, imprisoned, starved, gassed, and incinerated in crematoriums across Germany and other infamous locations. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chełmno, Drancy, Janowska, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Struthof, Alderney, Ohrdruf, Sajmiste, Sobibór, Treblinka, Warsaw; these are names of some of the 15,000 extermination and concentration camps that the Nazis created to make the Aryan race pure.

   During WWII, an estimated 68 to 72 million people lost their lives in the effort to end Hitler’s plan to purify the white race and establish a 1000 year fascist regime. American military deaths were a tiny fraction of the total, less than 1%, yet still represented half a million people, meaning that virtually every person in this country lost an immediate family member, a relative, friend, or acquaintance.

   The specter of Nazism and government death panels has resurfaced in the national debate over health insurance reform. How ironic. The US is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not have national health care in some form. Our medical outcomes reflect this failure. We spend more than twice as much per capita on medical care than the next nearest big spender, yet we rate 37th in the world for overall health. Many of our medical statistics put us below Third World countries. Our economic system and the network of faceless, nameless insurance company deniers in cubicles all over the nation function as de facto death panels.

   The US has been working on a national health care plan since it was first proposed by Teddy Roosevelt. A new study just released shows that more people die from lack of health insurance than from car accidents and murder. Having an estimated 40 million with no insurance coverage and millions more with poor insurance plans that exclude critical care or have very low annual caps is a national embarrassment.

   Of the many stupid excuses to not fix this problem, any comparison to Hitler and the Nazis extermination of 6 million Jews is the most ignorant, disingenuous, inaccurate, and just plain deceitful of them all. Anyone who actually believes this argument is a fool. Anyone who promulgates it is either attempting to derail the debate with fear or is branding themselves as ignorant and anti-American. It is anti-American to spread known lies during a policy debate, and it is certainly discernible from information that is publicly available that none of the plans being discussed have anything to do with extermination. Instead, they are attempting to solve a crisis situation which is threatening to destroy America’s ability to compete while insurance companies and their fat cats deny care to paying policyholders and take our money to their bank.

   The health insurance system takes billions of dollars that could be used to treat sick people out of the system as profit. Profit never treated a sick child, never gave an elderly person another day in a nursing home, never did anything except turn the filthy rich into the obscenely rich. Now whether or not you believe that this is a moral outrage is moot as you are entitled to your own opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts, and there are no Nazis to be found in this discussion. If you are seeing Nazis in these plans, then you ought to be seeking the advice of a reputable psychiatrist or perhaps your minister, priest, or rabbi. The problem is inside your head, not in the bills before Congress.

   -Wexler