By Richard Hébert

THE right-wingnuts must be truly desperate.  If Thomas Sowell is any indication, they’re hauling out their attack of last resort against Barack Obama:  paint him with their Adolf Hitler brush.

It would be merely sad if it wasn’t so disgustingly appalling.  How dare he?  Talk about gutter politics.  Such rubbish belongs in the trash bins of the Internet, not in community newspapers.  Sowell resorts to fear-mongering fabrications. 

His argument is simple:  Obama’s oratory excites crowds.  Hitler’s oratory excited crowds.  Therefore Obama must be another Hitler.   Sorry, Sowell, that syllogism won’t fly, because all oratory is not equal.  Great oratory does not necessarily lead to pogroms, world wars, and genocide.  It greatly depends on the orator and the message of the oratory.

Instead of thinking of Adolf Hitler as Obama’s antecedent, why not think of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.?  Or of Abraham Lincoln?

Ask the Jews:  The central message of Hitler’s oratory was to divide humanity into his “master race” of Aryans and everyone else, the “inferior” races – including Jews and Blacks.

The central message of Obama’s (and of King’s and Lincoln’s) oratory is the polar opposite of that – to bridge our diversities, to unify us, to extol our common humanity and challenge it to a common purpose, the one enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

I will gladly take the reasoned, well-thought out speeches of Barack Obama, and the programs and policies he explains with his magnificent rhetoric, over the never-ending bombast of John McCain and the simplicities of Sarah Palin.

Obama is no Hitler.  If there’s any parallel to be drawn between Hitler and an American politician today (and there isn't), I suggest a closer match would be with the say-anything, do-anything-to-win war-mongering rhetoric of McCain and Co. 

But in the Sowell playbook, Hitler was just for starters. 

He then played the tried and true “tax and spend” card, when the facts are that it’s Obama who pledges to cut taxes for most of us and invest in American jobs, and McCain who would continue to reward the wealthy. 

Sowell quotes the French cynic, Jean-Frangois Revel, to argue that people are gullible, that “image…affirmation…repetition…(and) prestige” sway them much more than do “idea(s)…proof…arguments…(and) competence.”

Sounds to me more like a condemnation of John McCain’s veep-pick Sarah Palin than Obama, who has demonstrated his competence to advance ideas, develop proofs, and persuasively argue his policies.

Obama’s “competence” shines through every step of his career from president of Harvard Law Review, community organizing, and the Illinois Senate to the U.S. Senate.  Belittling it cannot erase the facts.  As John Adams reminded us, “Facts are stubborn things.”

You want to talk incompetence?  Check the real record of the governor of Alaska. 

I’ll take Obama’s “rhetoric” over her memorized talking points any day.  He speaks with the intelligence and foresight of a Jefferson, a Franklin, a Thomas Paine, and yes, a Martin Luther King, Jr.  Caught in a situation that calls for actual knowledge and forethought, Palin repeats her talking points, over and over and over and over.

Sowell, like his fellow-Republican neo-cons, eschews the (untried) possibilities of real diplomacy (instead of the cowboy bluster we’ve had these last seven years).  He even scorns the United Nations, the world’s last best hope for sanity.  Sowell’s shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later crowd will surely drive us into yet more ill-advised, tragic wars – and into moral and financial bankruptcy in the bargain – if we aren’t already there.

It’s especially sad to know that Sowell himself traveled much the same academic path as Obama did – Harvard, Columbia, the University of Chicago, albeit starting about 30 years earlier – and wound up in such a foreign cuckoo-land of rejected ideas. 

To take the true measure of the man, consider a few of his outlandish often-quoted statements:

“Most wars…are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.”  Sound familiar?

 “‘Global warming’ is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible.”  This little more than a year ago.

“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”  In other words, only the veneer of civilization saves us from our inborn savagery, we are all really war-makers at heart?

With enlightenment like that, we desperately need more intelligence in high places.

Richard Hebert is a freelance writer based in St. Augustine,Fl. This article is in response to a column written by Thomas Sowell. Read it at