The Rubio-Crist Race Gets the Hitler Downfall Meme Treatment

Downfall was a pretty good movie about the pathetic, increasingly insane last days of Adolf Hitler, so the film major in me doesn't really know what to make of the fact it's best known as an internet meme.

The spoofs have been popping up online for years, and The New York Times Magazine documented the phenomenon a year ago:

By adding new English-language subtitles, they transform the movie's climactic scene, in which Hitler (played by Bruno Ganz) rails against his enemies and reluctantly faces his defeat, into the generic story of a rabid blowhard brought low...

...The meme of the parodies -- the cultural kernel of them, the part that's contagious and transmissible -- has proved surprisingly hardy, almost unnervingly so. It seems that late-life Hitler can be made to speak for almost anyone in the midst of a crisis.

So it was almost inevitable that someone would cast Charlie Crist, currently engulfed in a heated primary campaign against Marco Rubio, in the role of Hitler and go to YouTube town.

Marco Rubio doesn't get the joke (maybe it is reassuring to know he wasn't watching dumb web videos when he was Speaker of the State House) and Tweeted his disapproval:

Heard about youtube video using Hitler. It's offensive & grotesque I ask supporters not to forward & hope msm does not promote it.

Of course, Marco might also be uncomfortable with the perhaps unintentional undercurrent of the spoof: If Crist is the Fuhrer, does that make Rubio more politically extreme than Hitler?

As for the video, it's not the funniest version of the meme we've seen, but the last line is pretty priceless: "I should have been a US Senator by now ...President even. Now I'm going to end up running a day spa in St. Petersburg ...Greer, bring in my sun lamp."