Nazis? Really? Leftist Academics Totally Wiggin' Over Tea Parties, Suggest Crushing Them Like the 'Wobblies'

Folks are making hay of Rob Reiner stupid freakin' comments, slurring tea partiers as Nazis:

But seriously, the real National Socialists were meeting up in the East Bay this weekend, "Lefty academics convene in Berkeley to try to make sense of the Tea Party movement." This is the elite of the elite, scholars and political scientists who feel simply violated that regular folks are more in tune with the country's founding than they are. And frankly, some of them are suggesting that's just not acceptable.

"I wonder if we're likely to see a Timothy McVeigh situation," says Nicholas Robert, an attendee originally from Australia, who basically wonders if any Tea Partiers can be arrested. "It seems to be that we're being very polite. I wonder if there are any legal mechanisms—one that comes to mind are the provisions used to crush the Wobblies."

The Wobblies. It was a Democrat administration that crushed them, and the ideological crises in Germany following shortly thereafter --- exacerbated by the Wilson administration's failed peace at Versailles --- helped give rise to the far right-wing extremism that elevated the Nazis to power in the 1930s. And here we have National Socialists in Berkeley calling for the exact same kind of repression. The difference is that the Wobblies were real communists and subversives. Today' tea partiers --- not so much.