As far as Germany, it is important to realize that people in general are more educated today, and the press was significantly less free.

I think Mitt will be fine. He ran a lot of negative adds in the primaries. The race is tied. The president is making mistakes due to over confidence. Plus, I think he is making the mistake believing Americans are dumber than they are. The negative adds do work, but the debates will be when the truly undecided will make their decision. The adds now are to set the tone so one can believe the lies.

[Hitler’s] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Crap, Neo, that’s been The Left’s entire modus operandi for the last 15-20 years or so.

It started around the time of the faux “supermarket scanner” meme w/ Bush I

Since the primaries, this is the second time people have worried Romney is losing the campaign battle. He’s not.

First, there was Romney and Solyendra. Then a seeming lull which prompted near panic. Then there’s been “you didn’t build that” with the overwhelming big lie response and again, near panic.

Plus, eveyday we have dishonest and misleading polls, not only because it is too soon for polls to be of value but because they are designed to not test the waters but trouble the waters. Current polls are pseude evidence for the big lies.

Further, the idea that McCain lost because he didn’t fight dirty enough doesn’t speak to the facts of the race. It wasn’t until the fiscal crisis presented that the tide turned against him.

I find myself suprised to not enthusiastically joining in a call for a close in no quarters fight. But I think I know Romney’s strategy because he appears to be sticking by it:

Focus on the failed policies of the man, not the man. Keep away from social/cultural issues. Raise lots of money. Don’t make any big mistakes. Let the economy and fear of same be your biggest supporter. This isn’t a blitzkrieg but more of a seige type of strategy, one that tests the will of the opponent and leads to infighting. We have already seen how that occurred once over Bain. Wait until real panic sets in and the rats begin to look for their own survival.

Obama learned and taught and used these amoral/immoral principles, designed to agitate groups of people–to quote Alinsky by “rubbing raw the wounds of discontent”–and aimed at getting them to hand their power over to an “organizer” who made promises that he would ameliorate their situation (but who was actually seeking power to further his Marxist agenda), and “community organizer” Obama and his odious crew are using them right now.

Reportedly–for obvious reasons the MSM doesn’t want to dwell on or to explore this, or any other part for that matter, of Obama’s life–Obama’s big community organizing project was to get the poor black residents of Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens housing project asbestos removal and other necessary repairs, and from the little reporting that was done by bloggers, nothing was ever done.

Hillary Clinton wrote her undergraduate thesis at Wellesley on Alinsky and his methods, met with and interviewed Alinsky, and so impressed him that he offered her a job working for him, presumably as another Marxist propagandist and agitator.

My problem with using the term “Nazi” is that, in modern political discourse, it is a word bereft of meaning. People of every political persuasion throw it around to describe any politician they don’t like from town councilmen to president.
In any case, you can find many perfectly good examples of nasty political rhetoric from our nation’s own history.
On your second post about the daisy ad, the difference between then and now may simply be the amount of exposure the ad got. The daisy ad ran on a major network during prime time, back when that meant something. Everyone saw it. This latest ad was only supposed to run on cable in a few swing states (I believe they started talking about it on blogs and in cable news before it even aired, and I don’t know if/where they actually did run the ad). So this is something that a lot fewer people have seen and the discussion about it is mostly among the political junkies rather than the general public.
In my opinion, the biggest take away from the Romney-killed-my-wife controversy is that is shows how incompetent (or desperate) the folks running this PAC are.

1. The emergence of the Big Lie is partly a function of media technology. The Big Lie won’t readily spread by rumor, because telephone-game style revision will tend to dilute the message. In particular, note the appearance of the Big Lie about 20 years after the advent of motion pictures and 10 years after radio, when the Big Lie could reach the less literate segments of the population.

This leads me to wonder: How does the emergence of the internet and social media affect the Big Lie? This takes us back to the days of rumor mongering, only the rumors go around the world instead of across the back fence. Do modern media counter the Big Lie, or do they fissure society into opposing camps that accept and reject the Lie?

2. Theologically, the Big Lie is not a new idea. The conception of Lucifer, the light bringer, includes the idea that nothing Lucifer says may be trusted, and even the true statements lead in false directions. Thus, good people should shun Lucifer and all his works and ways.

The Big Lie in its modern form comes into existence after popular piety had receded somewhat. But everybody who ever watched television (late night infomercials, anyone?) or used e-mail (My father was the finance minister of Nigeria…) has seen plenty of Middle-Sized Lies. Is is possible that Lucifer will make a come-back, and the public at large will start to shun and reject individuals or groups who the public believes are fundamentally untrustworthy?

“This week you’ve learned i kill women with cancer and funded my financial success with monies from El Salvador hit squads. I just wish my opponents had been half this creative at putting Americans back to work in these last 4 years.”

Those are, it seems to me, Romney’s only two choices, there is no real middle course that will result in Romney winning the election.

What Wolla said! They’re playing “rope a dope” with us. Keeping control of what subjects get talked about. “When did you stop beating your wife?”

SRSLY, the Republican strategists must know this. Why don’t they start telling some REAL inconvenient truths?