February 23, 2026

THE ATLANTIC’S GOT A FEVAH, AND IT NEEDS MORE NAZISM!

Previous Nazis detected by the Bletchley Park decoders at the Atlantic include that raving National Socialist, Mitt Romney, with a June 2012 headline, “Romney’s Odd Reference to Hitler:”

I used to think Romney’s klutziness was overstated. His much-ridiculed musing about how the trees in Michigan are “the right height”–struck me as a kind of earthily poetic way of saying that home always feels like home. But then three weeks ago BuzzFeed dug up a clip of Romney answering a question about energy policy and managing to drag Hitler in from left field:

The YouTube clip is now private, but it’s like a reference to this Romney quote from the 2008 campaign, which Time magazine spotted under the headline, “Romney’s Reich Turn:”

“Liquefied coal, gosh. Hitler during the Second World War — I guess because he was concerned about losing his oil — liquefied coal. That technology is still there.”

—Romney, ruminating on Hitler’s scientific achievements unprompted, in a Q & A about energy policy. As the New York Sun’s Ryan Sager said at the time, you wouldn’t think that anyone running for president would have to be told, “Don’t mention Hitler in a positive light.”

Of course, the winner of the 2008 GOP primaries was John McCain. After the election was over, a CNN host looked at footage from the GOP convention in Minneapolis that year and pretended he was watching a Nuremberg rally: CNN Host D. L. Hughley: Republicans ‘Literally Look Like Nazi Germany.’

CNN host D.L. Hughley turned to the standard left-wing tactic of playing the Nazi card against Republicans on his program on Saturday evening: “The tenets of the Republican Party are amazing and they seem warm and welcome. But when I watch it be applied — like you didn’t have to go much further than the Republican National Convention….It literally look[s] like Nazi Germany.” He went on to say that blacks weren’t welcome in the party: “It just does not seem — like not only are we not welcome — not only are we not welcome, but they don’t even care what we think.” He later described the GOP as “reactionary.”

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Steele responded to this by correcting Hughley’s timeline, at least as it related to himself: “There was a Michael Steele before there was a Barack Obama. I mean, the reality of it is, I had established — I was the only black lieutenant governor in the country at the time. I was the only statewide black elected official when I was lieutenant governor of Maryland from 2003 to 2007. And then Obama got elected in 2005. And so that wasn’t about, you know, oh, geez, let’s do this because of Obama.”

This isn’t the first time Hughley has expressed his disdain for Republicans on cable TV. In March 2006, the comic went on an obscenity-laced tirade against President George W. Bush on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher: “If I hear one more person tell me how this man is a man of faith, I think I’ll lose my mother-f***ing mind….When thousands and thousands of people were being, dying in New Orleans, this son of a bitch didn’t do sh*t, and that’s very un-Christlike to me.”

Flash-forward to CNN in April of 2023: Donna Brazile: Bush came through on Katrina.

And speaking of Bush, along with his VP, the late Dick Cheney, this was the left while they were in office for most of the first decade of 21st century:

These two were so Hitler-y and dastardly and despicable and the very font of evilness that Kamala Harris’s staffers fought tooth and nail for them to endorse their boss in 2024 — and won an endorsement from Cheney, despite Joe Biden being quoted by Reuters in 2008 that “Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history.”

In 2007 at the late lamented Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery wrote:

As Jonah Goldberg noted this winter when Gerald Ford died, lauded by a media that had little good to say of him while he was president, each Republican president is a fool, a bigot, and a dangerous warmonger while he is in office, responsible for sexism, racism, ageism, and general misery. Once dead, however, he acquires a Strange New Respect. In time, the jibes thrown at him are airbrushed away, and he is seen as a statesman, a true conservative, with all the best values, all the more so when compared with whatever Republican is now in office, who is seen in comparison as someone who really is dangerous, a warmonger, bigot, and fool. In their turn, Barry Goldwater, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush the Elder have become harmless and loveable figures, cherished for their good humor, their prudence, and tolerance–and for their distance from today’s modern conservatives, who have run their cause into the ground.

This pattern will not alter: In a few years, when President Rudy or Commander in Chief Thompson begins knocking heads, watch out for the press to express its Strange New Respect for Bush 43, whose government was nothing if not diverse as regards race and gender, and who at least made a pretense of being compassionate. In 2027, if Time is still around, will it run a cover, showing him shedding a tear?

Whatever is left of old media after 2028, their rehabilitation of Donald Trump will be both predictable and astonishing to watch.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll