EspressoPundit

Ruminations of an over-caffeinated political junkie

THE BASHA DEFENSE

Eddie Basha is a prominent Arizonan who won the Democratic nomination for Governor in 1994. He runs a chain of family-owned grocery stores.

In February 2004, Basha lashed out at Wal-Mart

"I call it the economic holocaust," Basha, chief executive of Bashas', the state's largest homegrown supermarket chain, said in an interview with The Arizona Republic. "It's no different than what the Nazis did in World War II. It's a blitzkrieg. They are doing economically what the Nazis did militaristically."

My gosh, is that the most insane quote you have ever seen? Wal-Mart beat the self-proclaimed chubby grocer's prices and "It's no different than what the Nazis did in World War II? Undercutting Basha's on milk and eggs is no different than the extermination of 6-million Jews?

This is a truly outrageous statement and is in need of a response, but notice that Basha gets a pass.

"Knowing Eddie Basha, there are few great champions for justice in Arizona," said Bill Straus, Arizona regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. "With that said, I think the last thing in the world he intended to do is to trivialize the Holocaust. ...We have dozens of Holocaust survivors living in Arizona. I can tell you any reference to the Holocaust strikes them extremely profoundly."

Oh, that's the ticket, Eddie is a "great champion for justice" so the "last thing" he was doing was trivializing the Holocaust when he compared Wal-Mart's lower prices to Hitler's quest for world domination.

There was no firestorm, no editorials, no calls to apologize or threatened boycotts, not one Republic columnist suggested that this statement by a former Democratic Gubernatorial nominee was offensive. It ended there, because years of advocacy of Liberal Democratic causes have made Eddie Basha a "great champion for justice" and therefore immune to media criticism for perhaps the most outrageous public comment ever spoken by a modern public official.

The truly amazing irony is that Basha's is a non-union shop whose practices have driven hundreds of mom and pop grocers out of business.

Now compare what well-known conservative Gover Norquist said on Fresh Air

The argument that some who played at the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, 'Yes, well, that's only 2 percent,' or as people get richer 5 percent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax.

I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. 'I mean, it's not you, it's somebody else.'

Norquist's point was that excusing a bad policy because it only affected a few people is inappropriate and that this type of reasoning was used to justify the Holocaust.

Here's an example of the national firestorm that ensued.

I advise my Conservative friends NEVER to mention the word Holocaust. A Conservative who says, for example, "I stayed at that little hotel, just down the street from the Holocaust Museum" is vulnerable to charges of insensitivity and faces the possibility of being forced to apologize or risk having a permanent black mark placed on his what's left of his tattered career.