Op-Ed, Jack Cashill – The Left’s Sad Little Slapdash Reichstag
Thursday, January 13th, 2011Published with permission.
Just a few days after the November election, Democratic strategist Mark Penn said out loud what many of his peers were thinking.
Penn told Chris Matthews on his MSNBC show Hardballthat President Obama needed the kind of Reichstag moment that Bill Clinton enjoyed after the Democrat’s electoral drubbing in 1994.
For the record, in 1933 Germany’s newly elected Chancellor, Adolph Hitler, used the mysterious burning of the Reichstag building, the home of Germany’s parliament, to scapegoat the Communist Party and suspend civil liberties.
To be fair, Penn did not use the word “Reichstag,” but he might as well have. He told Matthews that it took the Oklahoma City bombing for Clinton to “reconnect” with the American people. He then ventured that Obama needed a “similar event” to compensate for his party’s midterm disaster. (more…)