Is Barack Obama A Nazi?

In the past couple weeks or so, I've heard a few comments that had the intent of linking President Obama with "Nazi." A drunk guy at Erb's and Gerb's talked about stimulus money from "Barack Nazi Obama." A student in my Nazi Germany class, when the prof posed the question "could Nazism ever happen again?" muttered, "Obama." While most people would automatically reject the idea that Obama could be a Nazi without even thinking about the specifics of the question, I'm going to examine it.

1. What is a Nazi?
If you're looking for historical specifics, a Nazi is a member of the German National Socialist Party. Technically speaking, it was a movement that was unique to Germany and focused on 'the pure German race,' so unless you go along with the whole supreme pan-German race thing, you can't really be a Nazi in the true historical sense of the word. But don't let that stop you. The Nazi party aside from all of the German-specific stuff was a socialist party, and believe it or not, Obama has proposed some very socialist things for this country. So let's start with the basics.
The Nazi party platform consisted of 25 points, which I have summarized below, with the exception of all German-specific ones.

1. The State's primary responsibility is to provide the opportunity for livelihood and way of life for its citizens
2. Immigration of non-Germans must stop now, and existing non-Germans must be forced out of the nation
3. All citizens have equal rights and obligations
4. The first obligation of every citizen is to work spiritually and physically. Individual activity must benefit the entire community, therefore we demand:
5. Abolition of unearned incomes
6. All war profits must be confiscated
7. All associated industries (trusts) must be nationalized
8. Heavy industries must profit share
9. Expansion of old age welfare
10. Assistance for middle class and public housing
11. Abolition of property taxes and legal provisions for public use of all land
12. Any activity that injures the national interest (national criminals, usurers, etc.) are to be punished with death
13. The State is responsible for a national education program, starting from preschool
14. Child-labor is outlawed, physical fitness is encouraged by means of legal obligations to sport and fitness
15. "Known lies and their promulgation through the press" must be outlawed and opposed legally (all writers and employees of newspapers must be German, non German-papers must have the government's approval to be published). "Publications which are counter to the general good are to be forbidden." Any artistic and literary project that exerts "a destructive influence on our national life" must be legally prosecuted
16. Freedom of religion as long as it does not oppose the State. "Common utility precedes individual unity."

How does President Obama measure up to the Nazi party platform? Going through the points:

1. There is no question that Obama believes that the primary goal of the State is to provide for the livelihood of all citizens. We have already seen this in the recent "stimulus" where massive amounts of government jobs were created at the expense of private jobs. Forget "opportunity for livelihood", which is what America is all about: Obama wants to ensure outcome of livelihood.
Take that along with the proposal to require all businesses to provide a week of paid sick leave per year.
2. Obama is just the opposite of the Nazis on this one. Rather than force all illegal immigrants out of America, his administration has made it clear that they have no intent of making them leave at all.
3. As far as I know, Obama has not proposed anything that de facto rescinds the 14th Amendment... but he has said that he wants to sign the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act and empower the Justice Department to vigorously prosecute "hate crimes" thereof; essentially rescinding the 14th Amendment.
4. Does anyone else remember Michelle Obama's comment? "Barack Obama will require you to work... that you engage... [he] will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninformed, uninvolved." Granted, that doesn't say much about the substance of what his administration is doing. However it is important to note the proposal to require all middle/high school students to complete 50 hours of community service per year and all college students to complete 100 hours per year. Take that, along with the proposal to ensure that 25% of all work-study funding goes to give college students jobs in public service rather than campus work.
5. I'm not 100% sure on what an unearned income is, but when taxes increase, anyone who earns such an income will probably lose it (gee, doesn't that sound simplistic?).
6. Please see the recent defeated proposal to force returning vets to pay costs for health care services incurred resulting from injuries in the field. As well as: "Obama and Biden will end the abuse of supplemental budgets by creating a system of oversight for war funds as stringent as in the regular budget. Obama and Biden will restore the government's ability to manage contracts by rebuilding our contract officer corps. They will order the Justice Department to prioritize prosecutions that will punish and deter fraud, waste and abuse." There's nothing wrong with that graf in theory, but in practice, I'll bet that it's going to involve castration of the military.
7. Socialized health care and nationalization of banks.
8. Hmm... not sure on this one.
9. Socialized health care, once again. (it must be noted that one of the biggest expansions of government in recent history was under Bush, with the Medicare Part D expansion in the early part of this decade.)
10. All that Obama is doing to "help the middle class" is foment class envy by portraying the wealthy of America as evil, greedy, manipulative shysters. It doesn't take an economics class for someone to realize that when the "rich" are punished for being successful, it reduces overall incentive to succeed. Remember that whole bit about "95% of Americans getting a tax cut"? Income taxes may take a slight dip, but net taxes are going to be increased. It's a lie.
11. Not sure on this one either.
12. I don't think that Obama's that extreme.
13. Obama probably believes this one too, judging from the billions he wants to pour into Head Start and other parent-replacing programs like "Zero to Five."
14. A cursory glance at Google results doesn't bring anything up for this one.
15. I could have a field day with this one. Last year, a Southern Republican group made a television ad that criticized Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers. Obama's response was to send a letter to the Justice Department, requesting that the DOJ pull the plug on the ad and criminally investigate the group. When writer Stanley Kurtz took to a Chicago radio program to discuss Obama's ties with Ayers, the Obama campaign sent out an Action Alert, telling all Obama supporters to jam the phone lines of the show with scripted talking points; disrupting the show. Ben Smith also reported that the campaign blasted Kurtz as a "slimy character assassin." All of this because... why? Because Kurtz had the nerve to criticize a controversial relationship of Obama's, something that is technically protected speech under the First Amendment (and if John McCain had once been friends with a closet Klansman, the Left would have been up in arms about it, but of course the same standard doesn't apply to them...).
This is the same crowd that wants to reinstate the "Fairness Doctrine." The law would effectively kill all conservative talk radio in pursuit of "fairness." Sound familiar? I'm thinking of the Sedition Act of 1918.
16. Obama hasn't proposed anything that repeals the First Amendment... yet...

So, if we just look at the party platform, Obama's got some ideas that are clearly in sync with those of the Nazis. Or are they just compatible with socialism as a whole? Most of the ideas that weren't German-specific in the platform are boilerplate socialism, which makes sense, given the clever name "National Socialism." But Obama isn't completely off the hook yet.

2. The Cult
"...this is the moment that the rise of the oceans will begin to slow, and the planet will begin to heal!"
That was at the tail end of Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, the premise being that if Obama were elected President, he'd reverse global warming. Messianic? Maybe. Rhetorical excess? Definitely.
Hitler-esque? We'll find out.

"I will be faithful and obedient to Barack Obama, President of the United States, to observe the law, and to conscientiously fulfill my official duties, so help me God."
That's from the end of Ashton Kutcher's "I pledge" video, pledging to do patriotic and inspiring things like serve the President, use less plastic, plant 500 trees a year, and drive slower. The cynics might say that this video is harmless and only represents how far celebrities are willing to go in order to inflate their egos and brown-nose our President.
Oops! That was a cutting and pasting mistake. The oath above isn't from the Obama video; it's a shortened version of the Hitler oath, public servant edition.
"I pledge to serve President Obama... I pledge to be a servant to our President and all mankind, because together we can, together we are, and together we will be the change that we can seek."
Now, did Ashton and his idiot friends really try to make an oath that was as eerily similar to the Hitler oath as possible? Probably not. Most of them probably think that "Hitler" was George W. Bush's college nickname. But that doesn't change the fact that the oaths are similar in many respects, and that pledging to serve Obama is just as creepy as pledging to serve a totalitarian madman. We are not an "Obama nation," we are an American nation, and Obama is our President. We pledge allegiance to America, one nation under God; not whoever is in office.
"Adolf Hitler is our Saviour, our Hero. He is the noblest being in the whole wide world. For Hitler we live. For Hitler we die. Our Hitler is our Lord who rules a brave new world."
"We're gonna spread happiness. We're gonna spread freedom. Obama's gonna change it, Obama's gonna lead 'em. We're gonna change it; we're gonna rearrange it. we're gonna change the world. Now's the moment where we will sing, sing with all our hearts. Sing for joy and sing for peace. Sing for vision, sing for unity. Yes we can."
I found a video on YT that compares the infamous "Obama Youth" video with footage of German schoolchildren singing a song of praise to Hitler. There aren't too many differences, except one's in German, the other in English; one's in B&W, the other's in color; and of course, one's directed to Hitler, the other to Obama. These differences are trivial: having groups of schoolkids in Germany don the Nazi uniform and sing worship to Hitler is no different from having American kids in Venice, CA wear professionally-designed Obama shirts and sing worship to Obama.
What about 'American Prayer'? This was another celeb-produced video that featured celebrities like Forrest Whitaker and Jason Alexander (remember him?) singing a song to Obama and clasping their hands in a prayerful motion. There's even a black choir at the end that sings a paraphrase of Luke 23:42! "When you get to the top of the mountain, remember me." Funny, that sounds like something that the thief said to Christ as they were crucified: "When you go into your kingdom, Lord, remember me." The same thing happened in Germany. German churches preached obedience to Hitler, kids sang songs about Hitler being their "intercessor and redeemer." Where else do you see a man taking over the role of religion in a nation? Totalitarian dicatorships (the cult of Mao in China, of Kim "I'm So Ronery" Jong Il in North Korea).
Did Obama approve of any of this? "... a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany ... and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama." Well, if that quip of his at a January 2008 New Hampshire campaign stop is any indication, he sure didn't come out opposing it. I remember some months back that there was a controversy regarding something that Obama said about men making a "new creation," but I can't find what he actually said... once again, if anyone knows where a primary source for this is, help me out.

All that been said, there are definitely eerie similarities between the Obama leadership cult and the Hitler cult. But is the cult unique to Nazism? Mao Zedong, Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, and Nicolae Ceausescu were all idolized and worshipped. Their images flooded public life and the media, schoolchildren sang songs of adulation to them, and propagandists cultivated images of them as not being merely men, but gods. Enter Barack Obama. Images flooding public life and the media? Check. Schoolkids singing songs of worship? Check. God-like propaganda? Check.

3. Anti-Semitism
I don't need to explain how Hitler was anti-Semitic; anyone with half a brain can figure that one out. But Barack Obama?
As far as I know, he hasn't said anything that is directly anti-Semitic. His associates take care of that by themselves. His former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was friends with Louis Farrakhan, a radical Muslim who has called Jews "bloodsuckers" and Judaism "a gutter religion." Wright heaped praise on Farrakhan time and time again, by reproducing Farrakhan's talking points in the church magazine and bestowing a church award on Farrakhan in 2007. Wright himself is no stranger to anti-Semitism, as an anti-Israeli excerpt from one of his poisonous sermons will show:
"The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost 40 years now. It took a divestment campaign to wake the business community up concerning the South Africa issue. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism."
And then there is a guy named Rashid Khalidi. He's a professor at Columbia University, he helped organize the Woods Foundation with terrorist Bill Ayers, and he's a radical anti-Semite. He has given aid to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, decried Israel as a "racist" state, and praised suicide bombers and terrorists for their oh-so-inspiring murders of Israelis. Khalidi has also expressed that Obama is "sympathetic" to the Palestinian cause, something that should send chills down the spine of every Jew and Israeli.
Before Khalidi left New York for a new job, his friends held a going-away party at his house. One of the attendees spoke warmly about the experiences with his friend, the Jew-hating Rashid: "[My many talks with the Khalidis are] consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It's for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation..." Thus spoke Barack Obama. The party, which featured pro-Palestinians reading anti-Israel poems and comparing "Zionists" to Osama bin Laden, was videotaped and a copy obtained by the L.A. Times, but it was never released.
President Obama, while on the campaign trail, spoke of his desire to meet with Iran's Jew-hating dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, without preconditions. Mahmoud is the same guy who every other day calls for the destruction of Israel, denies the Holocaust, and rants and raves about international Zionist conspiracies. But we don't have to worry about the moral ramifications of such a meeting, because it is doubtless that President Obama will issue a press release stating that the "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that I had lunch with last week is not the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad I knew..."

What conclusions can we draw from this? President Obama was surrounded by anti-Semites, from his own political advisers to his close friends, and he never decried any of their poisonous talk until it became politically necessary to do so ("The Jeremiah Wright that I saw yesterday is not the Jeremiah Wright I knew for 20 years..."). Is that ipso facto proof that Obama is anti-Semitic? No, but it is troubling nevertheless.

4. The Conclusion
While Obama has many things in common with Nazism, the commonalities are not with Nazism specifically as much as they are with socialism in general. Obama wants the State to take over as much private industry as possible and has proposed that the State take up an even larger role in the education and raising of children (an idea that has fascism at its core, as Jonah Goldberg documents in his book, Liberal Fascism). Heck, Obama ran in 1996 as a member of the New Party, a radical leftist group that was explicitly socialist:
"Illinois: Three NP-members won Democratic primaries last Spring and face off against Republican opponents on election day: Danny Davis (U.S. House), Barack Obama (State Senate) and Patricia Martin (Cook County Judiciary)." -the New Party website
He also signed a contract in 1995 promising to maintain a visible relationship with the New Party. Whether or not he has maintained the relationship hasn't been documented, but he let the mask slip for a brief moment last year, when he said, "We just want to spread the wealth around," responding to Joe the Plumber when asked about what effect his tax policies would have on the middle class. Seizure and redistribution of income as proposed by Obama is pure socialism, as the country is just starting to (hopefully) realize after Obama's spent more money in his first month than Bush spent in eight years.
Obama ran as the candidate who would "transcend" politics; as the Third Way that was better than the Left or Right. The problem with this is that historically, the only people who have run on such a platform have been megalomaniacs and dictators. Hitler ran as the Third Way, as the Savior for Germany. Does this mean that Obama is a Hitlerian dictator in the making? Not necessarily. But the similarities must be noted.
In conclusion, no, Barack Obama is not a Nazi, nor is he Adolf Hitler. But he is a socialist, and he wants to fundamentally change America; he's said so himself. The problem with socialism is that it ultimately leads to the crushing of the human spirit and the destruction of freedom. And we have elected a President who views the office as a platform for pushing radical ideas on the nation instead of upholding the Constitution.

the hypocrisy of "science"

At the beginning of my Physics class, we talked about the scientific method and the meaning of a theory. Here's the definition of a theory, more or less, judging from my notes:
"A theory is a logically consistent and falsifiable framework used to predict or explain a naturally occurring phenomenon."

Except when it comes to the theory of evolution, we can throw out that whole "falsifiable" bit.