Trumpler. If the jackboot fits...

Donalf Trumpler

A couple of weeks ago, Bill Maher (an avocational clown) had dinner with Donald Trump (an avocational dictator) at Martes-A-Lago-Garten. He was attempting, I guess, to humanize Trump. “He has a sense of humor.” Yeah, if that’s what you call it. I’ve been following Trump closely for over ten years and I’ve never heard him crack a joke. To be honest, that’s only a few jokes fewer than Maher has cracked over the same period of time. But this dinner had a purpose: Sort of like Max Bialystock explained to Franz Liebkind:

“That's exactly why we want to do this play. To show the world the true Hitler, the Hitler you knew, the Hitler you loved, the Hitler with a song in his heart.”

Such crap like Maher’s can’t go unanswered and so Larry David (good guy) wrote a parody for the New York Times entitled “My Dinner with Adolf.” Funny. And effective. So effective that Bill Maher birthed a cow over it, saying David’s satire was “kind of insulting to 6 million Jews.” Now there is some real hyperbole…because not one of the six million even read it.

This farce continued during the weekend when Michael Smerconish ran one of his polls, which asked whether Hitler comparisons to modern politicians are ever appropriate? Damn right they are. And the split was nearly 70-30 agreeing with me.

Now Michael Smerconish is a lot like Joseph Heller’s Clevinger in Catch-22:

“In short, Clevinger was a dope, who didn’t know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his communist enemies, but both groups never defended him to anyone because he was a dope.”

Smerconish’s reasoning is based on the old argument that Hitler’s evil is in a league all to itself and therefore shouldn’t be compared. But people have incredibly short attention spans. So short in fact, that a ton of these morons think the holocaust never even happened. Or as Woody Allen tried to explain them, “I thought Hitler worked for the phone company.”

People, especially Americans, need to be reminded of Hitler every day, or they’ll just forget. And as to the comparisons? Yes. Let’s certainly compare Hitler with any politician that is dumb enough to reflect his arguments, his activities, or his machinations, otherwise we increase the chances that today’s dime-store Hitlers will become tomorrow’s Hitlers in power.

So it doesn’t matter whether someone brings to mind fascism or nazism or Mussolini or Hitler. If the analogy is apt, use it for chrissake. If the jackboot fits, make ‘em wear it.