Grover's Back

Right-wing impresario Grover Norquist has not backed down from his belief that the Estate Tax is a policy comparable to the Holocaust. And the forum in which he chose to revisit this issue is none other than The Forward, New York's Jewish daily:

He told the Forward yesterday that the analogy was perfectly valid because "the Nazis were for gun control, the Nazis were for high marginal tax rates."

It's too bad my grandfather's not still alive. I'd love to ask him whether it was really high marginal tax rates that sent my family on a desperate struggle to get out of Germany and over to FDR's America.

I've come to think that Norquist is basically an adolescent, with the adolescent's strange obsession with saying the thing that is most likely to get a reaction. I saw him speak the other day, and you can see just that smug teenager's gleam in his eye when he says something that he thinks will get everyone all atwitter, especially a nice earnest NPR host. If he weren't doing politics, he'd be a second-string Howard Stern-type DJ.

On the other hand, there is a substantive role that Norquist apparently plays in coordinating the right-wing strategies in various states, such things as putting "paycheck protection" initiatives on the ballot in seven states at once, with the goal of diverting organized labor from other causes. I wish one could find out more about what he actually does for the right, and hear less of his shock statements, like that he wants to drown government in the bathtub.

p.s.: Meanwhile, in perhaps the lamest performance by a newspaper columnist so far this year, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post wrote about Norquist's original, widely reported outburst, which took place in October, on January 6. "This is how it happens in my business," Cohen began, explaining that he didn't hear about Norquist's remark until it was reprinted in Harper's which he happened to read over the holidays. Lame.