How to support the troops: by Charlie Rangel
How, you might ask? Why, you make the Iraq war morally equivalent to the Holocaust, that’s how!
Powerful lawmaker Charlie Rangel has provoked the ire of the Anti-Defamation League by likening U.S. military action in Iraq to the Holocaust of World War II.
The Iraq war “is the biggest fraud ever committed on the people of this country. … This is just as bad as the 6 million Jews being killed,” the 74-year-old Harlem Democrat insisted during a Monday radio appearance on the WWRL-AM morning show with Steve Malzberg and Karen Hunter. “The whole world knew and they were quiet about it because it wasn’t their ox being gored.”When interviewer Malzberg challenged Rangel’s analogy, the congressman replied: “I am saying that people’s silence when they know things terrible are happening is the same thing as the Holocaust.”
Yesterday, after Malzberg sent me an audiotape of Rangel’s appearance, ADL President Abraham Foxman responded: “It is so outrageous that a leader of Congress would compare one thing to the other. Sometimes we say it’s ignorance. Charlie Rangel is not ignorant. Charlie Rangel has been there.”
To make matters more, uh, interesting and on the heels of ‘comedian’ Bill Maher’s “low lying Lyndie England fruit” comment about our military recruits, Rep. Rangel had this gem to add:
On the radio show, Rangel also suggested that proponents of military action – namely Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld’s former deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon adviser Richard Perle – don’t worry about the Americans in Iraq because they’re “black and poor white soldiers” from “the lower economic class.”
“They had a plan to put our kids in harm’s way long before 9/11,” Rangel said. “Because it’s not their kids … that’s exactly why. They go and pick a fight, and then say, ‘I’ll hold your coat.'”
What a low, lying fruitcake.