Nutty Bunny Sean Spicer poked his head out of the White House Press Burrow today to commit another in the endless series of gaffes that have portended an early spring for the next 40 years—this time telling reporters that Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons” during World War II. The statement came as part of Spicer’s attempt to shame Russia for its alliance with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a man whom Spicer posits may be actually worse than Hitler for dropping sarin gas that has killed scores of civilians. And yet, as with everything that emerges from Sean Spicer’s gummed-up works, somehow even a lob like “gassing people is bad” became a snowballing rhetorical fuck-up the likes of which a thousand Curb Your Enthusiasm writers typing at a thousand typewriters would struggle to create.
Spicer’s assertion that not even Hitler gassed anyone was fact-checked by MSNBC, using the kind of parenthetical chyron that may as well replace E Pluribus Unum on our money at this point.
Spicer’s comments were also fact-checked in real time by the reporters in the room, who gave him the chance to clarify his assertions—something he did gratefully, clarifying that, well sure, Hitler may have murdered millions of Jews (or as the White House would put it, “all of those who suffered”) by gassing them with hydrogen cyanide, it’s not really the same because they weren’t really his people.
As Spicer explained to a press corps that must live in a constant, confusing mélange of amusement, reflexive pity, and horror, “When you come to sarin gas, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing.” Furthermore, Spicer said, Hitler kept his genocidal gassing nice and confined to the designated Holocausting area: “He brought them into the Holocaust centers,” Spicer said, as opposed to just gassing people in the “middle of town.” Say what you will about Hitler’s sweeping abduction of millions of innocent people to imprison them in extermination camps, but at least he believed in zoning, right?
Unfortunately, while Spicer said he appreciated the chance to clarify, saying it was “not the intent” to diminish the Holocaust for the second time in the, Jesus, first 82 days of the Trump administration—and in particular on the second day of Passover—the media, both social and otherwise, seemed to disagree.