July 26, 2008

Man with German name fails Nazi history

James Rowen reports that a legislative assistant to State Senator Mary Lazich (R-Neue Berlin) failed both history and comparative politics when he likened the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to the Gestapo, Nazi Germany's secret police.

The aide, whose name is K. Fischer, alleged that the DNR is thwarting Big Cranberry with "Gestapo-like" regulatory tactics.

However, the proper Nazi political corollary to the Wisconsin DNR is not the Gestapo but the Reich Interior Ministry, which similarly shuffled its bureaucratic feet in 1942 when the German Council of Municipalities put in a request to lower the forced labor wages of female Jews under the age of 16 from RM 0.20 to RM 0.19 per hour.

Indeed, by the time the Reich Interior Ministry acquiesced to the local authorities, the uncooperative Gestapo had already deported most of the forced laborers in question by boxcar to retirement facilities in what is now Poland.

Ms. Lazich, a high school graduate, is a former member of the Neue Berlin Historical Society and a current member of the Wisconsin Senate Committee on Education, something with which Herr K. Fischer could probably stand to be inoculated immediately.

Related: Ben Stein compares Barack Obama to Der Führer.

4 comments:

AutismNewsBeat said...

Arbeit macht Preiselbeeren

James Rowen said...

I learned something reading this post, which is why we need to provide more information and facts to the blogospheric discussions, lest the chaff and confusion, some deliberate, some not, ends up clouding perception.

I have a post up, inspired by an earlier item by one Emily Mills, whom I do not know, about the continual misuse of the label "Democrat Party" by the right.

That's a simple and important point, and I am going to do more of this.

It's why I got into the discussion of "thug" the other day.

In our own way, we can be sources of facts and better interpretation based on them.

Cindy K. said...

Forget Fischer, can I steel your BNN blog rank?

Cindy K. said...

Of course, I might rather steal it instead. Dang it's awfully easy to hit enter before proofreading a comment.