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In article . net,
says...

Let's compare the two Hilter ads submitted by people nobody ever heard
of to the current spiritual leader of Republican anti-tax initiatives...

I give to you the formidable Grover Norquist...

Out of Their Anti-Tax Minds

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A17

This is the way things happen in my business. In October the extremely
influential GOP activist and White House insider Grover Norquist was
interviewed by Terry Gross on her National Public Radio program, "Fresh
Air." By December a portion of that interview was reprinted in Harper's
magazine, where, over the holidays, I happened to see it. I am writing
about it today because, among other things, Norquist compared the estate
tax to the Holocaust.

This remark, so bizarre and tasteless that I felt it deserved checking,
sent me to the transcript of the show, where, sure enough, it was
confirmed. In it Norquist referred to the supposedly specious argument
that the estate tax was worth keeping because it really affected only "2
percent of Americans." He went on: "I mean, that's the morality of the
Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. I mean, it's
not you. It's somebody else."

From the transcript, it seems that Gross couldn't believe her ears.
"Excuse me," she interjected. "Excuse me one second. Did you just . . .
compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?"

Norquist explained himself. "No, the morality that says it's okay to do
something to a group because they're a small percentage of the
population is the morality that says the Holocaust is okay because they
didn't target everybody, just a small percentage." He went on to liken
the estate tax to apartheid in the old South Africa and to the communist
regime of the old East Germany. How he neglected Iraq under Saddam
Hussein I will never know.

It's hard to overstate Norquist's importance in contemporary Washington.
He is head of Americans for Tax Reform, is an intimate of Karl Rove, the
president's chief political aide, and has easy access to the White
House. He presides over a weekly meeting of important Republican
activists and lobbyists where the agenda -- at least Norquist's -- is to
ensure that taxes are reduced to a bare minimum, the government is
starved and everyone, the rich and the poor, is taxed the same, which is
to say almost not at all.

The Bush administration has mindlessly applied this doctrine. It has
three times reduced taxes -- mostly on the rich -- careening the federal
budget from a surplus to a deficit without end. The rich, who can afford
their schools or health care, will not suffer. But the poor and the
middle class will hurt plenty -- and state and local taxes, often the
most regressive, will go up.

To my mind, the Holocaust should be compared only to itself. I make some
allowance for, say, Rwanda or the massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica or
the gulag of Stalin's Soviet Union. But when it comes to legalized
murder by a state, almost nothing can approach it -- not in its size,
not in its breadth and not in its virtually incomprehensible bestiality.
The morality of the Holocaust, I would argue, is somehow different from
that of the estate tax.

For some time now, the estate tax has been a demagogue's delight.
Republicans, including George Bush, like to call it the "death tax." It
is said to have produced the demise of the cherished family farm --
although the government can offer not a single example. It is, however,
the tax most hated by those who hate taxes the most.

Inexplicably, Norquist's "Holocaust" has somehow left quite a few
survivors. Among the 10 richest Americans, for instance, are five
Waltons -- heirs to the fortune left by the storied Sam, the founder of
Wal-Mart. Forbes magazine says they are each worth $20.5 billion. The
rest of Forbes's list of the 400 richest Americans is peopled by other
heirs, although some got only a billion or two.

In fact, the moral equivalency Norquist concocts is his own -- and it
speaks volumes about the morality of anti-tax Republicans. To them, the
rich owe nothing -- just like the poor, they would say. (The difference
between rich and poor escapes them.) This is unbridled selfishness in
the guise of ideology and makes wealth the moral equivalent of ethnicity
or religion or even sexual preference. To Norquist, distinguishing
between rich and poor is like making a selection at Auschwitz. It not
only trivializes the Holocaust, it collapses all moral distinctions.

When Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond, the longtime segregationist (and
laundry room Lothario), he revealed a mentality that not even Senate
Republicans could publicly support -- and Lott had to resign as majority
leader. Norquist has gone even further, likening the morality of mass
murder to the imposition of a tax on the rich. At his next meeting of
GOP activists, someone ought to ask him if he's out of his mind. If no
one does, it's because they all are.

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