Richard Cordray has a Nazi problem.
Cordray, the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who is now the current Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Ohio, keep comparing Republicans to Nazis. He says his political opponents are no better than the fascists who, you know, conquered Europe and systematically slaughtered 6 million Jews.
First time around, Cordray called local Ohio lawmakers Nazi collaborators. Because they wouldn’t oppose Gov. John Kasich’s cuts to local government, Cordray said Republicans were complicit in evil.
“Somebody said to me last month that they’re ‘Vichy Republicans,’ which I didn’t fully understand,” Cordray said on June 25 in remarks first reported by the Cincinnati Inquirer. “I guess that’s ‘Vichy France’ during World War II, the ones who went over and collaborated with the Nazis.”
The cuts Cordray was talking about were part of Kasich’s campaign to eliminate the estate tax and balance the state budget. Standard limited government fare, the GOP rallied to the cuts, and now Ohio cities and counties have $1.2 billion less in 2017 to clear snow, fill potholes, and rescue stranded kittens out of trees. Controversial? Sure. Collaboration with the most evil regime in world history? Not at all.
A Cordray spokesman eventually apologized but not before trying to shift the blame. “Rich believes Ohioans deserve elected representatives who will stand up for what’s right, even if that means speaking out against people of their own party,” Mike Gwin, Cordray’s campaign spokesman, told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “He regrets repeating someone else’s inappropriate comparison in making that point.”
If Cordray regretted make that comparison, the remorse didn’t last long. Three days later, the Washington Free Beacon reported on a video of the candidate comparing the White House to Nazi Germany at an earlier campaign stop.
“I will say, that as I said, the tone that you set in government and leadership matters,” Cordray said at a June 15 campaign stop. “I mean, right now we have a tone being set by the White House, which is absolutely against everything I’ve understood for America. You know, trying to find people to scapegoat and blame? That’s like Nazi Germany.”
“I mean, I don’t want to make too strong a point about it, and I don’t want to compare it to the Holocaust, but it is trying to find people that we can knock down and drag down and blame and say, ‘it’s their fault, not our fault,'” Cordray continued. “That never builds people up, to knock somebody else down. When our kids do it on the playground, we tell them, ‘stop that.’”
And when our politicians slander their opponents by invoking the spirit of Hitler, we also tell them to “stop that.” But apparently, Cordray isn’t listening. The Democrat hasn’t apologized for his gross slander.
Side by side, these two Nazi episodes illuminate the fundamental un-seriousness of a candidate widely and ironically respected in Washington, D.C. as a political wonk. His campaign is the equivalent of an Internet chat room where everyone races to the bottom and “reductio ad Hitlerum” is inevitable. If Cordray was serious, he would argue about issues instead of lobbing offensive and idiotic slanders.
