Nazi comparisons and party conventions: The dumbest political quotes of the week
Each week, the Daily Caller picks the dumbest political statements and ranks them (just for Yahoo! readers) on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being the worst). Who do you think said the dumbest thing? Vote in our poll below!
Why are some politicians still comparing their rivals to Nazis or their policies to the Holocaust? This is never a good idea. Ever. It backfires every single time.
Maybe it was the party conventions that got everyone riled up, or perhaps it was the end of summer blues. Whatever it was, for some reason politicians just couldn’t stop bringing up one of the worst periods in human history.
This week, The Daily Caller brings you the Dumbest Political Quotes of the Week: Comparing People to Nazis Edition.
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During a California delegation breakfast Monday at the Democratic National Convention, the state’s party chair John Burton compared Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s “lies” to those told by Hitler’s best pal Joseph Goebbels.
“They lie and they don’t care if people think they lie…Joseph Goebbels – it’s the big lie, you keep repeating it,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported Burton as saying. “[Ryan told] a bold-faced lie and he doesn’t care that it was a lie. That was Goebbels, the big lie.”
Of course, Burton apologized for his remarks later in the day because someone reminded him that Nazi comparisons never go over well.
Cringe Factor: 4/5
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Later in the week, Republicans had their own public relations issue when Maryland Rep. Roscoe Bartlett brought up the Holocaust during a nonsensical discussion of federal student loans.
Bartlett said that federal loans were unconstitutional, and that ignoring the Constitution could lead to a Holocaust-type situation right here in America.
“[I]f you can ignore the Constitution to do something good today, tomorrow you will be ignoring the Constitution to do something bad,” the Washington Post reported Bartlett as saying. “There are more people in our, in America today of German ancestry than any other... the Holocaust that occurred in Germany — how in the heck could that happen? And when you start down the wrong road, it can be a very slippery slope.”
Come on now. Shouldn’t Bartlett have learned from Burton’s mistake earlier in the week?
Cringe Factor: 4/5
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This Nazi comparison really takes the cake.
Dick Harpootlian, South Carolina’s Democratic Party chairman, compared his state’s Republican governor to Adolf Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun.
Gov. Nikki Haley gave a press conference early Wednesday from the basement of a building in Charlotte, N.C. Harpootilian took that opportunity to say that Haley “was down in the bunker a la Eva Braun.”
Naturally, Republicans and even fellow Democrats asked Harpootilian to apologize for his ill-advised metaphor.
So far, Harpootilian says he has no plans to say sorry.
“Hell no. What am I apologizing for?” Harpootilian told CNN. “This is fake. Nikki Haley is feigning [outrage]. There is not a sincere bone in her body.”
