by Jonah Goldberg
Apparently there's a self-proclaimed militia leader named Mike
Vanderboegh who runs an obscure, low-traffic blog out of Pinson, Ala.
(population 5,007). Mr. Vanderboegh recently called on his fellow "sons
of liberty" to break the windows of Democrats to protest health-care
reform.
Let's start with the obvious: Vanderboegh is an idiot, and
anyone who followed his advice is an idiot, too. These people are
buffoons, not just because such tactics help Democrats but because such
behavior is simply wrong, reprehensible and clownish.
Equally wrong, reprehensible and clownish: the reaction to Vanderboegh and his alleged ilk.
The Daily Beast's John Avlon insists that Vanderboegh's rallying
cry, combined with some threats and broken windows, make "the
parallels, intentional or not, to the Nazis' heinous 1938 Kristallnacht
... hard to ignore."
Actually, it's really, really easy to ignore the parallels. During
Kristallnacht, Nazi goons destroyed not just 7,000 store windows but
hundreds of synagogues and thousands of homes. Tens of thousands of
Jews were hauled off to concentration camps by the Nazis, who had been
in total power for half a decade.
http://townhall.com/columnists/JonahGoldberg/2010/03/31/the_hostility_follies