Several weeks ago, there was an Internet meme about whether it would have been ethical to kill the infant Adolf Hitler. Michael Tomasky poses a (somewhat) less-weighty back-in-time question: Could the Republican party’s current Donald Trump problem have been avoided?

Tomasky suggests that it could have been, but instead, during Bill Clinton’s first term in the White House, GOPers “played footsie with the then-burgeoning far-right militia movements in the run-up to the [Oklahoma City] bombing…Fringe elements never properly denounced then are now, under Trump, becoming an in-broad-daylight part of the Republican coalition.” In part because of that long-ago malignant neglect, Tomasky argues, “The Republican Party of Trump is becoming a white-identity party, like the far-right parties of Europe."

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Thursday that Joshua Williams "was sentenced ... to eight years in prison for starting a fire at a QuikTrip in Berkeley (a St. Louis suburb) after an officer-involved shooting there." The Dispatch apparently didn't think it important to tell readers that the crime spree which occurred after that shooting took place despite the fact that the suspect had pulled a gun on that officer.

I noted in a NewsBusters post a year ago that Williams' arrest on charges of "1st degree arson, 2nd degree burglary and misdemeanor theft," and his confession "to setting fires at the store in a videotaped interview" constituted a major establishment press embarrassment. You see, until then, outfits like the New York Times, MSNBC and others had, in the words of Ryan Lovelace at National Review, "depicted him as a hero of the summer protests" in Ferguson, Missouri.

On her eponymously named Sunday morning show, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry went into a mini-rant about racism in Star Wars as she complained about villain Darth Vader being "totally a black guy" when he was "cutting off white men's hands" who did not "claim his son," but then became a white man after he "claims his son and goes over to the good."

During a segment about the upcoming The Force Awakens sequel, after a discussion about Princess Leia's slave girl costume from the 1980s, the MSNBC host admitted to having mixed feelings about the popular movie series.

As he opened Sunday's Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, host Zakaria brought up his background as a secular Muslim as he condemned Donald Trump's "bigotry and demagoguery" in the show's regular "Fareed's Take" segment. At one point, he seemed to compare himself to secular German Jews who criticized Adolf Hitler in the 1930s as he referred to the diaries of Victor Klemperer and showed archival footage of Hitler inspiring an audience to chant, "Heil!"

On Friday's Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC, as guest and NBC host Chuck Todd attempted to psychoanalyze Donald Trump supporters, host Mitchell compared Trump voters to those who supported segregationist Alabama Democratic Governor George Wallace in the 1968 presidential campaign, as she and Todd both suggested that Trump supporters believe America was "great" when it was more "majority white."