Sean Spicer White House Press secretary forgot the first rule of politics during a press briefing on Tuesday. Do not compare anything or anyone to Adolf Hitler.
While answering a question about Russia’s potential complicity in the Syrian chemical attack last week, he tried to pull a Hitler comparison.
“You had someone who was as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons,” he said. “So you have to, if you are Russia, ask yourself is this a country that you and a regime that you want to align yourself with.”
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HUH?? Everyone knows that Hitler definitely , used lots and lots of chemical weapons — in the sense that he ordered the executions of millions of Jews in gas chambers during World War II.
Mr Spicer was asked later in the briefing to clarify his comments.In doing so,things went from bad to worse real quick.
“I think when you come to sarin gas, [Hitler] was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing,” he said, adding: “But in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns and dropped them down to innocents in the middle of towns.”
Could it get any worse than this?
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Spicer is arguing a technicality — that Hitler didn’t specifically “drop” chemical weapons on Germans — in an attempt to put Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s action on the same level as what Hitler did. But, in over-generalizing he’s eliding some facts and getting others totally wrong.
He did try to get it right the third time around when he released this statement about 30 minutes after leaving the podium: “In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust. I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers. Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable.”
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