Last week we noted that Richard Land has written a letter of apology to the Anti-Defamation League for his recent statements comparing Democrats to Nazis and Ezekiel Emanuel to Josef Mengele and noticed that much of his “apology” seemed to hinge upon his claim that it was never his “intention” to make such comparisons. Which is absurd, because that was precisely what he intended, as he made fully clear in his original remarks:
“I want to put it to you bluntly. What they are attempting to do in healthcare, particularly in treating the elderly, is not something like what the Nazis did. It is precisely what the Nazis did,” said Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
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“The Nazis said people should be euthanized when they had lives unworthy of life. … Well, at the very least Dr. Emanuel, [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi, [Sen.] Max Baucus and President Obama are saying that some people have lives less worthy of life. And the older you are, the sicker you are, the less valuable your life is and the more likely they want to terminate your care,” Land said.
Now Land is doubling down, asserting that the same philosophy that drove the Holocaust is now driving Democratic efforts to reform healthcare while insisting that he never equated Democrats or Obama with the Nazis:
“There were very lethal and deadly philosophies loose in 20th century Germany prior to the Nazis’ ascendancy to power that called for devaluing some human beings as less worthy of life than other human beings,” he said, recalling there were arguments for euthanizing those who were perceived to be “useless eaters” and those who had “lives unworthy of life,” lebensunvertes Leben, in the 1930s and beyond.
“These poisonous philosophies became ever more deadly as the Nazis applied them to ever wider categories of people, such as Jews and Gypsies,” he continued.
Land said there are some involved in the health care debate who appear to believe some lives are less valuable and less worthy of medical treatment than others.
In noting he had previously used “imprecise language,” Land said he should have said some of the philosophies that are being espoused “bear a lethal similarity in their attitudes toward the elderly and the terminally ill and could ultimately lead to the kinds of things the Nazis did.”
“To equate expressing concerns that such a mindset could be carried to such an extreme at some time in the future as the equivalent of saying the Obama administration is like the Nazis or that Barack Obama is Hitler is either delusional or deliberately misleading,” Land said.
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Land also took issue with an article in New York magazine that linked him with those who call President Obama Hitler.
“I saw an article titled ‘The Right Calls Obama Hitler.’ I thought to myself, ‘What loon did that?'” he said. “Then I read the first paragraph and discovered they thought it was me.”
Calling this assertion “absurd,” he said, “There is no way to honestly and legitimately get from what I said to the idea that I was in any way, shape or fashion calling President Obama Hitler or anyone in the Obama administration a Nazi.
“It defies logic,” he said.
The only thing that defies logic is Land’s ability to claim that he never intended to equate Democrats with Nazis (when he most obviously did) while simultaneously comparing Democrats to Nazis once again.
