That's the problem, Techie, you're on the outside of Liberal thinking and the wall is opaque to you. What you think you see are merely the distorted reflections on that surface of yourself. You're projecting again, SDAI-Tech1, nothing more.

To undo the process by which you normalized what I said into something that fit into your world view, first, I said "references to Nazis", I didn't say anything about calling people "Nazis". The direct application of the epithet is sometimes used by inarticulate dolts whom nobody takes seriously, but nobody with any sense uses it even as an analogy because it's so easily misunderstood and boomeranged.

I was careful to say "by borrowing their tactics" to make the point that this has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with politics and power and the tools of the trade. The story of the Nazis is one case study in the textbook of power, and that's a book that every politician studies. When I praise Karl Rove as a modern-day Goebbels, I'm crediting him with studying the master's work and making his own contributions to advance the art of propaganda. There's a great deal of truthiness in the little known factoid that Rove was honored by the International Academy of Propagandists for his work expanding the boundaries of Goebbel's classic Big Lie Technique.

There are parallels between the technique used to take over the Reichstag from within to today's "plantation" system in the Congress. They're parallels rather than direct lessons because a parliament is suborned differently than a bicameral legislature, but the basic principles of a small faction gaining disproportionate power through manipulating the system are the same. The commonality of technique arises not because the NeoRepublicans are Nazis by another name, but because representative democracy provides a lever to do it: You can corrupt a small number of representatives far easier than you can corrupt the entire population. The same advantage of efficiency--just under a million-to-one, in fact--in decision-making also makes for efficient corruption. It's an Achilles Heel.

That's why we have to look at historical examples of similar incidents and use them as warnings. You can't learn from history if you try to sweep it under the rug because a name's offensive. One might legitimately wonder, in fact, if you aren't using the name to deflect attention from what I'm really trying to say. You wouldn't do that, would you, Techie?