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He Contains Multitudes

Is Barack Obama a new Adolph Hitler or a new Neville Chamberlain? The Washington Times says... both!

A Saturday op-ed by GMU professor Walter Williams argues

The path we're embarked upon, in the name of good, is a familiar one. The unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the '30s and '40s with the men usually associated with those names. Those horrors were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the name of "social justice." In Germany, it led to the Enabling Act of 1933: Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation. After all, who could be against a remedy to relieve distress? Decent but misguided Germans, who would have cringed at the thought of what Nazi Germany would become, succumbed to Hitler's charisma.

Meanwhile, on the same page on the same day, Jeffrey Kuhner, president of the Edmund Burke Institute, claims

[Obama's Cairo speech] will be remembered as the pivotal moment in history when the United States ceased to be a superpower. Sapped of its self-confidence and sense of grandiose destiny, America chose the policy of appeasement over confrontation, lies over truth, illusion over reality.... During the 1930s, appeasement was based upon the notion that a majority of Germans were decent people who simply wanted peace and national self-determination. Thus, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made the fateful decision to give away the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia's ethnic German region, to Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime.... Mr. Obama is repeating Chamberlain's tragic mistake - except this time, the Israelis are to play the role of the Czechs, the sacrificial lamb at the altar of appeasement.

At this rate, we'll all soon be nostalgic for the days when the Times published Frank Gaffney's thoughtful, measured articles about Obama's secret Muslimhood.

(h/t Steve Benen)

--Christopher Orr