As  the Obama administration descends into a whirlpool of scandals, a race has begun  among Congressional committees and news organizations to find the proverbial  smoking gun -- the document that will link President Obama directly to the IRS's  targeting of conservative groups, or to the Justice Department's unprecedented  legal actions against the Associated Press and Fox News reporter James Rosen, or  to the Pentagon's ghastly failure to launch a rescue mission when our consulate  in Benghazi came under attack last September.

 

Study  history, and you will understand why no such document is ever likely to be  found: That just isn't how these things work.  Very few people are aware of  this, but there is no document -- not one -- linking Adolf Hitler to the  Holocaust.  Why not?  Because Hitler didn't need to sign a document  ordering the slaughter of six million Jews.  All he needed to do was to  demonize his enemy in speeches at the Reichstag, on the radio, and from  one end of Germany to the other -- then hire thugs like Herman Goering, Heinrich  Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, and Josef Goebbels.  They knew what der Fuhrer  wanted, and der Fuhrer knew he could trust his henchman to get the  job done -- no matter how, no matter what may be the law -- and to not bother  him with the gory details.

 

Reader,  take a deep breath.  Nowhere in this essay will I suggest, or even imply,  that President Obama plans the mass murder of his opponents the way Hitler  murdered his.  That's absurd.  I am merely pointing out that President  Obama has been going about the business of demonizing his political enemies, and  then hiring thugs to destroy them without regard to the law, in precisely the  same way that Hitler and his fascists did it in Germany.  This isn't an  accusation; it's an observation.

 

Look  at the record: From the moment he took office in January 2009, President Obama  has spoken before Congress, on television, and at countless rallies across the  country describing his political opponents in terms we haven't seen before in  the United States.   Time and again he's insisted that Republicans  aren't merely wrong, but evil.  Hardly a week goes by without yet another  sneering comment about "millionaires and billionaires" -- by which he means  those men and women who actually built the businesses that created jobs for all  the rest of us, not the ones he and the First Lady party with in Hollywood and  on Martha's Vineyard.

 

Hatred  for the Tea Party

 

His  rhetoric heated up fast after the Tea Party movement gave the GOP enough  oomph to win back the House of Representatives in 2010, and as the  president geared up for the 2012 election.  He urged Latino voters to help  him "punish our enemies and reward our friends."  He told his supporters at  one rally to think of voting for him as "an act of revenge."  Did you see  the president at that Georgetown University forum on the future of Medicare when  he trashed Paul Ryan's own plan, then went out of his way to publicly insult  Ryan, while the Congressman himself was sitting in the front row too stunned --  and too decent and respectful of the presidency -- to respond in kind?  Do  you remember that television campaign ad describing Mitt Romney -- one of the  most capable, financially astute, thoroughly decent men who ever graced public  life -- as "not one of us"?

 

And  while demonizing his political enemies, what sort of people did the president  appoint to key jobs in his administration?  His attorney general is Eric  Holder, a sleazy Democratic operative who not only called the American people  "cowards" for their approach to racial issues -- this after the majority of us  elected a black president -- but who played a crucial role as deputy attorney  general in the scandalous and still-uninvestigated pardon of Marc Rich in the  Clinton administration's dying hours.  The national security advisor is  Thomas Donilon, another Democratic Party operative who got rich while serving as  executive vice president for law and policy at Fannie Mae.  And who was our  secretary of state when the consulate in Benghazi came under attack?  The  same Hillary Clinton who, as the wife of Arkansas' up-and-coming governor, made  an overnight $100,000 killing by trading cattle futures -- a feat no  professional cattle-futures trader has ever been able to explain, or  duplicate.

 

No  one who's spent time in our nation's capital comes away with a romantic view of  party politics and the people who do this for a living; the  Saint-Per-Square-Mile ratio in Washington has always been fairly low.  But  David Axelrod?  David Plouffe?  Have you ever come across two  Chicago-style, hardball-playing creeps like these clowns?  They make  Richard Nixon's two White House thugs, Bob Haldeman and John Erlichman, look  like choir boys.

 

Demonize  your political enemies, then hire people like these, and the result is precisely  what happened in Germany after 1933 and what's happening now to us: a kind of  bureaucratic coup d'etat in which the legitimately elected government  overturns the established relationship between the individual and the State and  replaces it with something very different; a relationship that no one voted for,  saw coming, or imagined could happen so quickly and so  quietly.

 

Forget  About a Coup d'Etat

 

This  is the United States in 2013, not Germany in 1933, and there's no real  possibility that President Obama will get away with his attempted coup  d'etat.  There are members of Congress in both parties who are  appalled by what the president has been doing, and even a few liberal news  organizations are starting to wake up.  But while the hunt for some  document that would be the smoking gun will be entertaining -- and while it  would be nice to see a special prosecutor appointed who'd throw at least a few  members of this administration who've perjured themselves before Congress into  prison -- it would also be a mistake.

 

Education  is more important than prosecution.  Right now, the best use of their time  and energy would be to expose the Obama administration's wrongdoings; to  illuminate for Americans just what's been going on in Washington and to show  voters -- especially young voters -- what sort of country we'd be living in if  the president had gotten away with this.  Never before have our politicians  and our news organizations had a better opportunity to demonstrate just what  happens when we vote carelessly, elect a zealot who appoints operatives with no  sense of honor or comprehension of right-and-wrong, then parties with rock stars  while his coup d'etat unfolds.

 

Yes,  I realize that throughout this essay I've used an analogy that some people will  find offensive or even repugnant.  But I've done this deliberately, because  this is no time to hold back or to mince words.  And if the president  doesn't like being compared to a Nazi -- he should stop acting like  one.

 

Herbert  E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the  Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National  Intelligence Council.   He is the recipient of the National Intelligence  Distinguished Service Medal, the intelligence community's highest honor, and the  author of How to Analyze  Information and The Cure for  Poverty.