Congressman calls Obama-Hitler comparison 'brilliant'

A Texas Republican congresswoman told colleagues on that House floor Wednesday that a columnist who accused Obama of planting the seeds for a Nazi state is a "brilliant man."

The little noticed quip was picked up by the liberal blog ThinkProgress late Wednesday.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) quoted conservative columnist Thomas Sowell, who declared in an opinion piece that Obama's effort to set up a $20 billion fund for those whose livelihoods were damaged by BP's oil spill signals that “American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes.”

Gohlmert's remarks?

There’s a brilliant man named Thomas Sowell. And, um, I didn’t vote for Barack Obama in 2008, but I sure would have voted for Thomas Sowell. This man, well, his article says quite a lot. His editorial, um, says here — and it’s just been posted this week — but it says, “When Adolph Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920’s” — and I’m quoting from Thomas Sowell in his editorial:

‘leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics. Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler’s rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions. ‘Useful idiots’ was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.’

And this isn’t in the article — this is my comment — but we do have useful idiots today, who are heard to say, ‘Wow, what we really need is for the president to be a dictator for a little while.’ They know not what they say.