A state senator's hometown office was attacked by a vicious assault of sidewalk chalk, and he has responded by explicitly calling the chalkers Nazis. Oy vey.

Sen. Todd Gardenhire (R-Chattanooga) is a conservative member of the Tennessee state Senate. He recently voted against Gov. Bill Haslam's Insure TN, an attempt to conservatively expand Medicaid in the most conservative way possible even though that's pretty much what Obamacare is, but whatever. Small victories. Apparently, Insure TN wasn't conservative enough for some senators, with seven of them voting against it and ultimately defeating it, even though almost all of them are on government health insurance.

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Shockingly, lots of poor people across Tennessee were mad that Republicans are down with poor people dying (whiners), so they struck back in the most vicious way possible: chalk drawings on the sidewalk. Fight the power!

The protestors drew in chalk outside the downtown Chattanooga office of Senator Gardenhire in what your correspondent's hometown paper breathlessly reported as an act of "vandalism." We weren't history majors, but it seems the Vandals who sacked Rome, raped villagers, and massacred thousands have really dropped the ball of late. It's not an act of vandalism if it can be undone with a garden hose.

Of course the mundanity of the crime didn't matter to Sen. Gardenhire (R-Overreaction), who told the local press in no uncertain terms that these preschoolers protestors were the moral equivalent of Nazis:

There's no place for this... People can agree or disagree, and that's fine, but when you deface property -- that isn't even mine -- to exploit me, that's something different. They might as well be in Nazi Germany, using tactics like this.

First they drew mean chalk pictures at the socialists, but I did not speak out because that was stupid.

Also too, we apparently missed that part of Kristallnacht in which the Nazis taunted the Jews they'd just rounded up and massacred by giving them nasty crayon doodles.

The reaction in town to this Holocaustian act of violence has been rather subdued, which is odd because if there's one thing Chattanooga loves, it's a good freakout. This is the town that required the intervention of a city councilman to settle the matter of a donut painting (done by Nazi donut painters? Maybe!). But for some reason, locals don't seem that concerned about this particular invasion. Or maybe these Nazi "tactics" just got washed away before everyone had a chance to see them.

[Chattanooga Times Free Press]