This week, the latest source of would-be outrage/czar sniping from the right is Anita Dunn, White House communications director who recently called Mao Tse-Tung (along with Mother Teresa) one of her “favorite political philosophers” despite him engineering the deaths of untold numbers of people during China’s shift to a communist state.
Okay, fair enough. People can be up in arms about this – particularly mopes like Karl Rove and other Fox contributors who apparently long for the Cold War.
But here’s an example why the Helen Lovejoy-like reaction by the right to Dunn’s comment is pretty stupid:
Adolf Hitler was a genocidal maniac responsible for the suffering and death of millions of people, and the destruction of much of Europe. Yet he is also credited with saying “The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it” regarding how to engineer state rhetoric, an idea with which I could not agree more (and people like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh have built very lucrative careers upon).
This said, does my agreement with Hitler above serve as a validation of his actions as head of the Third Reich?
No. The man was a demented butcher.
Yet this is precisely the wild leap which critics of Anita Dunn are taking in her mention of Mao, and it’s utterly brainless – as is the notion that her appreciation for some of Mao’s ideas means that Dunn must be a closet commie embedded in an administration of like-minded people.
But what else can we expect from the media’s right-wing these days? Christ knows they’re long since out of good ideas on how to guide the country.
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