Democratic Buffoon: Republicans Engaged in "Stalinesque" Purge

That's Chris Matthews' latest description of the Tea Party-flavored GOP kicking Charlie Crist and Arlen Specter to the curb. Also McCain, but that seems more like wishful thinking...

CHRIS MATTHEWS TEASER AT TOP OF SHOW: Also Republican purge. Arlen Specter is out. John McCain, Charlie Crist and Robert Bennett are all being threatened on the right. Is this anyway to run a party or run it into the ground?

...

MATTHEWS: Coming up what happens to Republicans who don't march to the right wing tune? Well they're getting purged. This is Stalinesque, this stuff.

Of course, "sophisticated" people aren't going to have anything to do with that:

MATTHEWS: Well I think watching this -- like all of us I study this thing – it seems like one of the reasons that the Democrats got 90 percent of the Jewish vote, for example, last time around for Barack Obama is not so much love of him or knowledge of him. It was fear of this theocratic, gun-toting party that begins to look more and more right wing, more and more Sarah Palin than it did two years ago. If this party, the Republicans, keep going over to Palin-ism and gun-toters and 2nd Amendment types, I think a lot of people in the suburbs, sophisticated people of all backgrounds, are gonna say, "That's not my party."

Wrong on both facts and analogy. First, the Tea Partiers are, according to polls slightly more educated that the average American and slightly wealthier too. Plenty "sophisticated."

As for the "gun-toters" comment, gun control has been in retreat in this country since the primaries in 2000, when voters on both the Left and the Right made clear that candidates coming out against the Second Amendment aren't going anywhere.

The analogy is also inapt unless Rubio is planning to put a bullet in the back of Crist's head. And the heads of Crist's followers. And pretty much anyone who disagrees with that too.

Matthews' Stalin call-out is why Godwin's Law was coined. Matthews is working the reductio ad Hitlerum with Stalin substituted for Hitler. Either way, same outcome: "You're like a murderous cretin who's so far on the other side of the moral event horizon he's irretrievably and indisputably bad. So shut up."

posted by Gabriel Malor at 09:27 AM

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