Ridiculous. This is the quintessence of the freakout from leftists and Big Media (but I repeat myself) over the election of Trump.

Howard Dean, who is in the running to become the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman and current senior strategic adviser, Stephen Bannon, a “Nazi.”

Speaking of Trump in an interview with a CBS affiliate in Texas, Dean called the president-elect a “complicated guy.”

“He appoints a reasonable person, who’s much more conservative than I am, but for somebody who can talk to, as chief of staff, and then his senior adviser is a Nazi,” Dean said, referring to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Bannon, respectively.

“[Bannon is] anti-Semitic; he’s anti-black; and he’s anti-women,” Dean said.

Oh, Good Lord. Howard Dean is going to make me defend Steve Bannon, isn’t he?

Yes, he is.

Look. I am no fan of Steve Bannon. I don’t like the way he treats people. I don’t like his promotion of a trillion-dollar infrastructure program. And I don’t like the fact that he has (by his own admission/boast) used Breitbart.com to promote the alt-right, a movement that is deeply infected by collectivism on the part of whites . . . to put it kindly.

But let’s get real. While Bannon seems to be an exceedingly mercurial, autocratic, and unpleasant individual, I know of no evidence that he is personally a racist or an anti-Semite. In addition, much of Big Media criticism of Breitbart.com as a racist, sexist, homophobic site that promotes birtherism and the notion of Obama as a foreign-born Muslim is lazy, inaccurate, and exaggerated. One might even call it “fake news.” Breitbart.com is far more likely to accuse Hillary Clinton of promoting birtherism than it is to promote birtherism itself.

Now we’re getting to the point where Howard Dean calls Bannon a “Nazi”? Absurd and irresponsible. Dean owes Bannon an apology.

Remember how Bill Maher said he had cried wolf about Republicans before Trump? Dean is doing the same with Bannon. There are actual Nazis and Neo-Nazis who support Trump (though, as streiff noted, the number is vanishingly small). If, as I consider very unlikely, Trump were to actually bring one of those people into his administration, what rhetorical arrows would remain in Howard Dean’s quiver?

The Nazi phenomenon was a real phenomenon, and a very scary one. A populace of largely educated people, with one of the greatest cultural backgrounds in the world, came under the sway of a madman. I have argued many times that we would be fools not to be on guard for the possibility that it could happen again. And the actual Nazis didn’t come out and say in their speeches in the early 1930s: we are going to round up all the Jews, put them in concentration camps, and slaughter them by the millions. The signs were there, but they weren’t as explicit as people seem to assume these days. So, while it’s easy to say any given emerging figure is not Hitler, neither was Hitler. Until he was. And then it was too late.

But leftists have been crying wolf for decades now. Literally every major Republican figure who comes along is deemed the second coming of Hitler by the radical left. And my fear is, if we ever get a figure that absolutely does resemble Hitler, the left’s lazy accusations will have numbed other Americans to the accusation so much . . . we may not recognize the threat at that point.

Howard Dean’s hysterical scream was the end of his presidential aspirations, back in the day. This nonsense ought to be the end of his DNC aspirations today.

But I suspect it’s not, and I’m guessing he knows that. Screaming NAZI! these days is all the rage among crazed leftists.

[Cross-posted at RedState.]

[guest post by Dana]

Yeah, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing…

This is how the New York Post reported on it :

Donald Trump scolded media big shots during an off-the-record Trump Tower sitdown on Monday, sources told The Post.

“It was like a f–ing firing squad,” one source said of the encounter.

“Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,’ ” the source said.

“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing down,” the source added.

A second source confirmed the fireworks.

“The meeting took place in a big board room and there were about 30 or 40 people, including the big news anchors from all the networks,” the other source said.

“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the source said.

“Trump didn’t say [NBC reporter] Katy Tur by name, but talked about an NBC female correspondent who got it wrong, then he referred to a horrible network correspondent who cried when Hillary lost who hosted a debate – which was Martha Raddatz who was also in the room.”

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s spokeswoman, disagreed with the characterization of Trump’s actions at the meeting:

“No that’s not true at all. I sat right to his left. He did not explode in anger,” Trump aide Kellyanne Conway said Monday, disputing the account during an interview on Bloomberg Politics’s “With All Due Respect.”

“By the way it’s an off the record meeting so whoever said that and mischaracterized it should think twice,” she continued. “But no he did not explode in anger.”

Anyway, the question is, who leaked this, and why? Some suggest it was Donald Trump John Barron.

Aside from that, I doubt there is anyone here who doesn’t think that Big Media deserves a serious dressing down, and to have their viciously destructive biases against Republican candidates repeatedly exposed and thrown back in their faces (See: Palin, Romney, George Bush). Yet the media is a necessary part of any administration. How the MSM finds their footing with such an unknown quantity who seems impervious to their smug dictates remains to be seen. And it remains to be seen how much access Trump will grant the press. With that, Trump plans to meet with the New York Times’ publisher Arthur Schulzberg tomorrow.

Oh, and speaking of the NYT, today’s edition had a front page story, snarkily titled, Trump Turns Staid Process Into Spectacle as Aspirants Parade to His Door, in which the writers snobbily sniff about the President-elect having been a bit too grandiose when meeting with various individuals at his golf club who might hold positions in his administration. The writers also took the opportunity to point out that this wasn’t how President Obama did it…

President-elect Donald J. Trump has turned the vital, but normally inscrutable, process of forming a government into a Trump-branded, made-for-television spectacle, parading his finalists for top administration positions this weekend before reporters and the world.

The two days unfolded like a pageant, with the many would-be officials striding up the circular driveway at Trump National Golf Club here, meeting Mr. Trump below three glass chandeliers at the entrance and shaking hands while facing the cameras. To build suspense, Mr. Trump offered teasing hints about coming announcements.

“I think so,” he said about whether he would make any appointments on Sunday. “I think so. It could very well happen.”

…

The very public process — CNN trained a camera on the golf club’s wooden front door throughout the day on Sunday — has borne few similarities to attempts by Mr. Trump’s predecessors to project an image of careful, private vetting of cabinet-level hopefuls.

Officials running President Obama’s transition in late 2008 took pains to keep under wraps his plans to select Hillary Clinton for secretary of state, and they orchestrated a secret meeting at the firehouse at Reagan National Airport to discuss keeping Robert M. Gates as defense secretary.

–Dana

I tried. I scoured the headlines for something interesting. But all the news is stupid today.

The L.A. Times has a blueprint for how Dems will attack Republicans for trying to repeal (parts of) ObamaCare. Of course, repealing any program that large will inevitably be disruptive, but of course that doesn’t make the original program a good thing. It ain’t popular, I can tell you that. Predictable.

The New York Times has an article that evokes a specter of people giving Nazi salutes to Richard Spencer. But I don’t trust the reporter. Read the piece and you’ll see why. I don’t even feel like explaining it. Annoying.

Other places they’re still talking about Hamilton and Mike Pence. Kill me now.

I picked the wrong day to get out of bed. I’d go back, but, you know. Work.

Have a nice day. Maybe you have something more interesting than I do.

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