Reed, Abramoff and Norquist

If you play around with the organization names and the dates a little, all of this sounds more like it was written by William L. Shirer. You know, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Instead of Hess, Himmler and Goebbels, we have Reed, Norquist and Abramoff.

Hitler's immediate task, therefore, was to quickly eliminate them from the driver's seat, make his party the exclusive master of the State and then with the power of an authoritarian government and its police carry out the Nazi revolution. He had been in office scarcely twenty-four hours when he made his first decisive move, springing a trap on his gullible conservative "captors" and setting in motion a chain of events which he either originated or controlled and which at the end of six months would bring the complete Nazification of Germany and his own elevation to dictator of the Reich, unified and defederalized for the first time in German history.

At a different time.

The three of them came together mostly as this troika that was running the College Republicans in the early '80s. And as I say in my book, they basically turned this fairly sleepy institution into a communist cell of the right, where they would purge --launched purges of moderates in the institution, they would conduct themselves like they were at war with the left. They were at war with Ralph Nader's PIRGs, for example, and they had a big map up on the wall with pins of where the PIRGs were on which college campuses and how they would go after them. So that was very much how the three of them came together. Abramoff was the head of the College Republicans and Grover Norquist was his Lieutenant. And then they drafted this young kid from the University of Georgia named Ralph Reed.

Same story. Different authors and dates. The basic political process is the same. Fascism grows from democratic institutions.