Godwin’s Law has the health care debate in a hammerlock.

Back in 1990, when the Internet primarily meant user conversations — sometimes helpful, other times extremely vitriolic — on discussion boards known as Usenet, Mike Godwin composed the law that now bears his name: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

In this brief interview, an older protester outside the Raleigh, N.C., office of Rep. Brad Miller, a Democrat, delivers the basic Obama-as-Hitler charge: “Hitler got rid of his undesirable citizens through ovens. Obama wants to get rid of people like me through hospice. . . . If [people] are a certain age, grim reapers calling themselves as counselors will go and tell them to take a pill and just die.”



Just who introduced Hitler in to the town halls has been the subject of not inconsiderable debate itself: “Nancy Pelosi started it,” says Powerline. Another theory has is that folks carrying the Obama/Hitler signs are Democratic plants. Pamela Geller wrote yesterday at Atlas Shrugs, there is a “ fifth column manufacturing smears and lies.” Others on the right have tried to use confirmed reports that Lyndon LaRouche supporters are sporting Obama/Hitler posters at protests to distance themselves from the Obama-is-a-Nazi charge.

The LaRouchies notwithstanding, the distancing effort seems like an uphill challenge as long as folks like Rush Limbaugh are also talking the talk. “In recent weeks,” wrote Michael Berenbaum in the Huffington Post, “Rush Limbaugh and others repeatedly compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler and his health care policies to Nazi tactics.”

“They were for abortion and euthanasia of the undesirables,” Limbaugh said of the Nazis on his radio program. “As we all know, and they were for cradle-to-grave nationalized healthcare.”

It’s also a challenge when when leading conservatives are calling on their own side to cut it out.

“The reckless right courts violence,” David Frum wrote today, invoking the protesters who have up armed at town halls. “We have to tone down the militant and accusatory rhetoric.”

The Nazi comparisons from Rush Limbaugh; broadcaster Mark Levin asserting that President Obama is “literally at war with the American people”; former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin claiming that the president was planning “death panels” to extirpate the aged and disabled; the charges that the president is a fascist, a socialist, a Marxist, an illegitimate Kenyan fraud, that he “harbors a deep resentment of America,” that he feels a “deep-seated hatred of white people,” that his government is preparing concentration camps, that it is operating snitch lines, that it is planning to wipe away American liberties”: All this hysterical and provocative talk invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence.

Writing at Aliciblog, Roy Ederoso says that Obama-is-Hitler is one of [the right’s] steady tropes,” and links to a roundup he compiled back in April. “Nowadays,” he wrote then, “you can’t click through a dozen rightblogger sites without reading that President Obama is a fascist.”

“The billions of dollars spent bailing out the auto industry and AIG,” said Montana Conservative, “was a smokescreen that allowed Obama the puppet and his radical handlers to begin pushing the government into a fascist state.” “It is possible as of this writing,” said The Promise of Reality, “that Barack Obama will become the first true fascist leader in America.” “Fascism Officially Arrives in America… Freedom is now dead in America,” said Free Oklahoma. . . .

“‘Fascist'” is a good, strong scare-word,” wrote Ederoso. “It has the advantage of novelty. And it’s not as if it has to mean anything.” Then he added, somewhat prophetically:

When that flames out, they can take “Nazi” out of the test lab and start using it as an alternate. That would be something of a nuclear option, but it only has to last them until the next election.

How to explain the furiousness now on display? Blogger Watertiger at Firedoglake says its about racism, pointing to a comment Politico reported from a protester outside a Maryland town hall meeting:

“Obama energized the youth just like Hitler did,” said Barbara Kelly, a substance abuse counselor from Hagerstown. “He’s given the country away to the elitist Obama supporters. They don’t have to answer to anyone!”

“For the uninitiated,” wrote Watertiger, “this is wingnut code.”

What our substance abuse counselor (egads!) really means is, “No uppity, Harvard-educated Negro or any other black person is going to tell me what to do, even if it winds up improving my life quality of life.” Sadly, this is the crux of the matter. All this town hall hullabaloo isn’t about government intervention, or socialism, or “death panels,” or pushing your grandmother and her moth-eaten cardigan into a mass grave filled with geriatrics. Obama’s skin color is what is generating all the hysteria and vitriol behind the teabaggers, the birthers and the anti-immigration crazies. The health care reform debate is nothing more than today’s white sheet and hood writ large.

Other observers want to refine the broad brush of racism to a finer point. “The aggressive, furious attempts to even shut down the possibility of a political discussion is reminiscent of the anti-desegregation movement,” wrote the blogger Hunter at Daily Kos yesterday.

[It’s a] point that becomes noteworthy when you aggregate the motives of the “birthers”, who loudly deny Obama’s citizenship, the “teabaggers”, who loudly declare that the same taxes they paid under Bush are tyrannical under Obama, the “deathers”, who loudly assert that healthcare reform is secret plot to euthanize seniors and others that the government deems unproductive.

Athenea says Hunter get’s it right: “The irrationality and rage and the arguments that don’t reflect anything to do with the situation remind me EXACTLY of the way people talk about busing and school boundaries and the old neighborhood.”

In old movies you’ll see the signs: “We Love Our Children! We Hate Busing!” Which love of your children has about as much to do with the question of segregation as Hitler has to do with health care; it’s all about resistance to the idea that things are going to change.

No matter the motivation, Nate Silver says there’s a certain political effectiveness to these demonstrations: “The real upside to the protests is that they perpetuate misinformation about the Democrats’ bills.” And, Silver says, the Democrats need modulate their message in rebuttal:

Ultimately, the message that Democrats need to be getting across is not that the protesters are protesting in the wrong way or for the wrong reasons, but that they’re protesting, in some substantial measure, about the wrong things: that what they seem to think is contained in the health care package doesn’t necessarily match the reality.

But it’s hard to message precisely or effectively when you’re stuck in “nonsense feedback loop,” according to Jonathan Cohn (borrowing a phrase from Josh Marshall).

[It’s] a conversation in which Zeke Emanuel wants to kill grandma, health care reform is bad for the people who can’t get health care, and Stephen Hawking has been snuffed out by the British National Health System. Instead of arguments that are unrelated to reality, we’re getting arguments that are the very opposite of reality.

Stepping back a bit from the fray, Ezra Klein says “What’s happening at those town halls, and what has been happening in American politics for at least two decades, is structural, not situational.” Which means it’s not about health care or even the president per se, and it’s not going away any time soon.