Virginia Foxx Compares Regulating For Profit Education to The Holocaust

Either Virginia Foxx didn’t get the memo on how the repugican cabal should stop being the party of stupid or no one bothered to read it and explain it to her.
The Congresswoman from NC, who chairs the House Sub-Committee on Higher Education often  makes comments that are simultaneously hateful and stupid. Like the time she said she has no tolerance  for graduates with high student loans to pay. Virginia Fox also suggested that the story of Matthew Shepard was a hoax during a House debate on hate crime legislation. Sheppard’s mother was in the gallery to hear Foxx say :

“I also would like to point out that there was a bill — the hate crimes bill that’s called the Matthew Shepard bill is named after a very unfortunate incident that happened where a young man was killed, but we know that that young man was killed in the commitment of a robbery. It wasn’t because he was gay. This — the bill was named for him, hate crimes bill was named for him, but it’s really a hoax that that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills”.

She really outdid herself when she compared regulating for profit education with the Holocaust. Inside Higher Ed reports Foxx made the following statement while criticizing private college presidents.
“They came for the for-profits, and I didn’t speak up…” Foxx said. “Nobody really spoke up like they should have.” Foxx exploited Martin Niemöller’s famous statement in which he criticized German apathy toward the Nazi persecution.
To say this is offensive to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust is an understatement not only because comparing regulating educational institutions to genocide is both repulsive and ridiculous but also because this is part of a pattern of in the repugican cabal’s Alice in Wonderland rhetoric.  Moreover, as Secretary for the House Republican Conference,  Foxx is part of the repugican cabal’s leadership.  She is also considered a possible candidate for the Senate in 2014. As such she is one of the faces of the repugican cabal.  The repugican cabal will have a more difficult time trying to distance itself from Foxx’s attitudes than it did with others who made the mistake of telling America the truth about the repugican cabal’s attitudes and belief system.
It isn’t a surprise that Foxx would resist regulating of for profit colleges that contributed heavily to her campaign.  Think Progress reports that Fox received $48,668 from PACs or individuals affiliated with for-profit colleges.  That would also explain her attitude toward college students.
A week ago, Think Progress  reported that Idaho Senator Sheryl Nuxoll (r) compared Obamacare to the Holocaust, under similar “logic” as Virginia Foxx.

“The insurance companies are creating their own tombs. Much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps, private insurers are used by the feds to put the system in place because the federal government has no way to set up the exchange. Based on legislation and the general process that is written toward this legislation, the federal government will want nothing to do with private insurance companies. The feds will have a national system of health insurance and they will eliminate the insurance companies.”

And repugican fundraiser John Catsimatidis claimed taxing the rich is akin to Nazism in December.

“New York is for everybody; it’s for the poor, it’s for the middle-class, it’s for the wealthy. We can’t punish any one group and chase them away. We-I mean, Hitler punished the Jews. We can’t have punishing the ’2% group’ right now.”

When asked if he was suggesting that paying taxes is akin to putting people in a gas chamber, Catsimatidis  said: “No, no, I didn’t say that. I said we cannot pick any group and punish that group,”
Ok, maybe Catsimatidis did see the difference between asking the rich to pay their fair share and genocide.  However, his walk back illustrates the ignorance on which repugicans base their Holocaust analogies.  The Holocaust was not about punishing Jews. The objective was to eliminate every Jew on the planet because the Nazis believed they were genetically inferior.  They applied the same belief to Serbs, Gypsies, members of the LGBT community, people with neurological illnesses like epilepsy and mental illnesses.
To suggest that regulating for profit educational institutions, making healthcare accessible to everyone or requiring the rich to pay their share of taxes is akin to anything that Nazis did reinforces the fact repugicans are the cabal of stupid as much as they are the cabal of hate.