This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Alexandra Petri normally writes a humor column for the Washington Post.

Not this time.

One of her most recent columns appeared under this headline:  “I’m starting to think Donald Trump is sounding like Hitler on purpose.”

Yes, Trump and Hitler, which strikes me as an apt comparison.

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Here is now Petri started her column:

“Sorry!  I know!  You are sick of hearing about Donald Trump!

“’Don’t worry,’ people keep saying.  ‘Donald Trump did just promise to ‘root out’ the internal enemies who ‘live like vermin’ in our country, but he only might be the next president.

“I don’t mean to worry you, but people are running around with their hair on fire, saying they are suffering from intense, nauseating levels of déjà vu, and those people are historians.  I don’t like seeing historians this stressed out.  If something in my house has to emit an ominous beeping, I want it to be the alarm clock, not the smoke detector.”

On Veterans Day of all days, Petri reports that Trump made this pledge:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

When people complained that sounded like something Adolf Hitler would say, a spokesman responded that “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

More Petri:

“Which, to be fair, also sounds like something Hitler would say.  When you say, ‘What you just said sounds very much like Hitler’s rhetoric,’ you don’t want that to be taken as a challenge.  The response you are hoping for is something more like:  ‘Oh no!  That was not how we meant to sound like that, and we are going to leave political life and rethink everything about ourselves and hope that by our final day, we can say we atoned a little bit.”

Obviously, like Petri, I did not live through Hitler’s time in Germany, but I have read just enough to recognize the dangers of the Hitler approach.

Root out everyone who doesn’t agree with me.  Kill many of them.  More than six million Jews.  Yes, six million!

More Petri:

“To those who say, ‘Just because Trump is using openly fascist language now, and his team is threatening to crush people who point this out, doesn’t mean that he’s going to do fascist things when elected.  And just because he has promised to round up undocumented immigrants and put them into camps, and to fire huge swaths of federal employees, and to surround himself with loyalists, and to get revenge on his political enemies, those things also don’t mean that he’s going to do fascist things when elected.’”

All of this from Petri and others comes against a backdrop of a reality that Trump could win the presidency again.

And, if he gets to the Oval Office, he already has said he will use all the resources of government to rid the country of anyone who has opposed or would oppose him.

Just like Hitler.