So, Congressman Steve Cohen said of the Republicans:

“They say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels…You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it.”

One of the countless reasons I find the Nazi-comparisons that are used so much in political debate to be so damned irritating is that often, in order to make them, people like to draw upon true, but purely superficial, similarities between whoever they are attacking and the Nazis.

Goebbels was not the first guy to ever use propaganda. The only reason to pick Goebbels, out of all of the other propagandists throughout history, seems to me to be to evoke a subtle association in people’s minds with the horrible atrocities he and the Nazi government he spoke for committed.

If Congressman Cohen had substituted “Bernays” for “Goebbels” in his claim, he would’ve been about as accurate, less disrespectful, and shown himself to be a man of learning beyond what we generally expect of our elected officials, besides.