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Rep. Louie Gohmert Cites Sowell’s Comparison Of Obama To Hitler On House Floor, Calls Him ‘Brilliant’

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) drew a comparison between President Obama and Hitler in a speech on the House floor last night that quoted a recent op-ed by conservative columnist Thomas Sowell. In his op-ed, Sowell argued that Obama’s call for BP to set up an escrow account to help oil spill victims in the Gulf was a sign that “American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes.”

Gohmert praised Sowell as a “brilliant man” and used his words to warn that there are “useful idiots” who want President Obama to be a dictator:

There’s a brilliant man named Thomas Sowell. And, um, I didn’t vote for Barack Obama in 2008, but I sure would have voted for Thomas Sowell. This man, well, his article says quite a lot. His editorial, um, says here — and it’s just been posted this week — but it says, “When Adolph Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920’s” — and I’m quoting from Thomas Sowell in his editorial:

‘leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics. Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler’s rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions. ‘Useful idiots’ was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.’

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And this isn’t in the article — this is my comment — but we do have useful idiots today, who are heard to say, ‘Wow, what we really need is for the president to be a dictator for a little while.’ They know not what they say.

Gohmert then read another section of Sowell’s editorial that claimed that Obama’s push for the BP escrow fund violated the Constitution. “Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation?” read Gohmert. “Nowhere.” Watch it:

This is not the first time Gohmert has made radical, sensational claims. For instance, in 2009, he said that Democrats want another terrorist attack in order to pass a jobs bill. It’s also not new for someone on the right to equate the Obama administration with Hitler’s Germany. (HT: Political Correction)