THEY TAXED ME (AND IT FELT LIKE A HOLOCAUST)

Politico's Ben White looks at the freakout of the super-rich and scratches his head:

The co-founder of one the nation’s oldest venture capital firms fears a possible genocide against the wealthy. Residents of Manhattan's tony Upper East Side say the progressive mayor didn't plow their streets as a form of frosty revenge. And the co-founder of Home Depot recently warned the Pope to pipe down about economic inequality.

The nation's wealthiest, denizens of the loftiest slice of the 1 percent, appear to be having a collective meltdown....

In the latest example, Thomas Perkins, co-founder of legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, wrote a letter to The Wall Street Journal over the weekend comparing Nazi Germany’s persecution and mass murder of Jews to "the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the 'rich.'"

He went on to say he feared a progressive "Kristallnacht" ...

I don't want to minimize the possibility that the super-rich really think they're going to exterminated en masse by jackbooted have-nots, but to some extent, the juxtaposition in the first two sentences of White's story -- Perkins "fears a possible genocide against the wealthy" while one-percenters in New York City "say the progressive mayor didn't plow their streets" -- suggests a different explanation: that the rich think they're suffering like Jews under Hitler when they're merely inconvenienced. They have no perspective on the massive gap between the horrors of the Holocaust and what's happening to them now (a little criticism here, a modest tax increase there) because what's happening to them now is pushing them to the limits of their endurance, which is very limited, given how accustomed they've become to having their own way at all times.

****

Meanwhile, the rich's lackeys in the commentariat are doubling down on the notion that liberalism is Nazism -- not in embryonic form, but in full flower, right now. It's not just the defense of the Thomas Perkins letter on The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, titled "Perkinsnacht"; it's Glenn Reynolds, as guy who's made a second career of unseriousness, who responds to an Atlantic piece titled "Why Do the Super-Rich Keep Comparing Obama to Hitler?" with the following:

MAYBE BECAUSE HE KEEPS TELLING US THAT A SMALL, INSULAR MINORITY CONTROLS EVERYTHING AND MUST BE PUNISHED?

Um, Glenn? Haven't you and all your wingnut friends been telling us for years that a small, insular minority controls everything and must be punished -- namely, us evil liberals? So is it OK if we call you Hitler?

Reynolds goes on to link a post by PJ Media colleague Ed Driscoll, which argues that Kristallnacht already happened a year and a half ago, and any attempt to reason with the new Nazis is corporate Neville Chamberlain-ism:

Incidentally, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers quickly distanced themselves from its co-founder's original remarks, presumably in the hopes that should Occupy Wall Street rise up again, it will devour them last. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the Occupy-friendly appeasement tactics of the Oakland Mens Warehouse in November 0f 2011, before their own storefront windows were shattered, during what might be described as an evening of wanton socialist violence and destruction characterized by million of crystalline shards of broken glass.

For lack of a better term, of course.

Yeah, a Men's Wearhouse in Oakland did put a "We stand with the 99%" sign its its window before an Occupy demonstration in Oakland that turned violent, and the window itself was smashed.

But do you know what else happened during that demonstration? Multiple arrests, as well as other police acts against demonstrators and journalists that have been described as excessive force.

I'm not going to address the particulars of what the police did. I'm just pointing this out because, if there are window-breakers in the streets and the government is unambiguously on the opposite side, then YOU ARE NOT LIVING THROUGH KRISTALLNACHT.

Idiot.