Thursday, August 06, 2009

Rush Limbaugh and Godwin’s Law

Speaking of gas bags, now we have that radio entertainer – I could hardly call him a commentator – Rush Limbaugh, comparing the Democratic Party to Hitler’s Nazi Party.

Now anyone who has been on the internets for any period of time knows what happens next.

Rush Limbaugh automatically loses the argument.

This is a result of Godwin’s Law. Proposed by Mike Godwin in 1990, it was initially a discussion on threaded conversations on a Usenet, that as the length of the thread gets longer, the probability of someone being compared to Hitler approaches 1.

Corollaries have been offered, and the law itself has evolved to its present incarnation:

The first person who brings up Hitler or the Nazi Party in a debate automatically loses the argument.

Now Limbaugh might argue that Nancy Pelosi actually used the N-word first, and in that he would be completely wrong – as usual. Pelosi was making the observation that a few of the teabaggers who were invading recent town halls conducted by congressmen were carrying signs bearing swastikas. She wasn’t calling them Nazis, she was indicating that these people are from the radical fringe.

Here’s the discussion of Limbaush’s Nazi-Calling on today’s Hardball on MSNBC.

I like Shrum’s comment about being back on oxycodone and hydrocodone.

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