Milbank: Over the top on the ever-reaching fringe mindset

By Dana Milbank

The peaceful town of Mason City, Iowa, hasn't been in the headlines much since it served as the model for River City in Meredith Willson's “The Music Man.” But recently, Mason City raised a real fuhrer.

The geniuses of the North Iowa Tea Party put up a billboard in town showing the photos of three leaders: Adolf Hitler (with swastika), Vladimir Lenin (with hammer and sickle) and Barack Obama (with 2008 campaign logo). Over Hitler were the words “National Socialism,” over Lenin was “Marxist socialism” and over Obama was “Democrat socialism.”

“Radical leaders prey on the fearful & naive,” the billboard informed passing motorists.

Folks, we've got trouble in River City.

The Tea Partiers took the billboard down - to hush the national uproar, not because they thought they had done something wrong. “There's going to be a lot of billboards just like this across the United States,” a co-founder of the group told The Des Moines Register.

He's probably right about this. The vile sign in Mason City was not a one-off by a fringe group. It was a logical expression of a message supported by conservative thought leaders and propagated by high-level Republican politicians.

Late last month, Thomas Sowell of the conservative Hoover Institution penned an irresponsible column likening Obama's presidency (particularly his pushing BP to set aside funds for oil-spill victims) to the rise of Hitler in Germany and Lenin in the Soviet Union.

Sarah Palin then tweeted her followers with instruction to “Read Thomas Sowell's article” about the Obama-Hitler nexus. Sowell's theme - that Obama, like Hitler and Lenin, exploits “useful idiots” who don't know much about politics - was strikingly similar to what wound up on the Mason City billboard.

And let's not deny an assist to Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, who went to the House floor to read aloud the Obama-Nazi comparison by the “brilliant” Sowell.

Twenty years ago, the dawn of the Internet Age gave us Godwin's Law: If an online argument goes on long enough, somebody will eventually invoke Hitler. When this happens, it's the end of the conversation, because all rational discussion ceases when one side calls the other Nazis.

These sentiments have long existed on the fringe and always will. The problem is that conservative leaders and Republican politicians have, in their blind rage against Obama, invited the epithets of the fringe into the mainstream.

Consider these tallies from Glenn Beck's show on Fox News over the last 18 months: 202 mentions of Nazis or Nazism (according to transcripts), 147 mentions of Hitler, 193 mentions of fascism or fascist, and another 24 bonus mentions of Joseph Goebbels. Most of these were directed in some form at Obama.

It's not strictly a product of the right. California's Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown likened his opponent's tactics to those of the Nazis, while Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., talks blithely of a health care “holocaust” and an aide to Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., dubs the opposition “Brownshirts.”

But at the moment, the anger pendulum has swung far to the right. Isn't there a grown-up to rein in these backbenchers when they go over the top?

Dana Milbank is a Washington Post political columnist. Comments: danamilbank@washpost.com