Monumental, Staggering Ignorance

"We had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons."
"I think when you come to sarin gas, there was no, he [Hitler] was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing."
"There was not, in the, he brought them in to the Holocaust centres, I understand that, what I'm saying, in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns dropped them down to innocent, into the middle of towns, it was brought to, so the use of it, and I appreciate the clarification, that was not the intent."
"In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust. I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centres."
"Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable."
Sean Spicer, White House Press Secretary

"On Passover no less, Sean Spicer has engaged in Holocaust denial, the most offensive form of fake news imaginable, by denying Hitler gassed millions of Jews to death."
"[These remarks were] the most evil slur upon a group of people [ever expressed by a White House press secretary, and he should be fired]."
Steven Goldstein, executive director, Anne Frank Center

Stupefyingly clumsy and incoherent just about sums up the remarks, explanations and defensive statements uttered by a man who obviously, like his boss, simply blurts out whatever unformed and ill considered thoughts linger in his mind. As a spokesman for the White House, an explainer and defender of White House decision-making, the man has abysmally failed the test of competency. He bends himself into a self-forgiving pretzel rather than admit his stupidity.

What's more, the additional explanations brought to the fore of the astonishing statements and the public reaction to them, by White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus tarnished his own capacity to understand the depth of sheer, unadultered ignorance that would have a person in such a critical post spout that kind of intolerable nonsense betraying total ignorance of the subject at  hand being used as a flippant yardstick of comparison to make a point, that he would have been better off saying nothing, allowing his colleague to flounder in the vast ocean of his own abysmal ignorance.



"In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust, however I was trying to draw a contrast of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on innocent people", elucidated the hapless source of outrage. Not only does his original mindless statements of comparison betray a total ignorance born of obvious disinterest in reality, but each succeeding 'explanation' simply mires this man deeper in the morass of the public display of himself as an ignoramus, dismaying even incredulous critics.

Hitler was a mere dabbler in genocide whom Bashar al Assad could give lessons to. Holocaust centres obviously places where, like rural villages whom regime warplanes bombed into oblivion, people were gathered to await death by gentle means of persuasion, no Zyklon B gas required to send them on their way. If a comparison was needed to demonstrate utter revulsion at the acts of a barbaric brute, Islamic State jihadis would have done quite nicely. But obviously Mr. Spicer was looking for impact, and impact was what he produced.

But of course, Bashar al Assad targets his own population, at least that part of his population comprising the majority Sunni Syrians who have earned his vicious enmity by campaigning for equal treatment from an Alawite Shiite dictator. Hitler, on the other hand, could not appease his appetite leading him to destroy Jews whom he characterized as vermin (not 'terrorists') by merely killing German Jews; Europe in its entirety had to be swept clean of Jews to produce a Judenrein society.

This, a historical episode of mass annihilation of such monumental sweep and cruelty that it ranks as the world's most successful architecture in genocidal ferocity. Yet all that Sean Spicer could cram into  his mind were key words like 'Hitler', 'Holocaust', and 'Horrors', with no need for irritating little details deterring him from whipping out the comparison to 'Assad', 'Atrocity', and 'Airplanes', compelling the United States to exact a temporary, tentative rebuke.