There's a long-running maxim on the Internet called "Godwin's Law," which holds that if any argument -- Tiger vs. Jack, Kanye vs. Taylor Swift, Star Wars vs. Star Trek -- goes on long enough, somebody's going to call somebody else a Nazi. Does it make sense, invoking the 20th century's greatest horror to debate the merits of "Twilight"? Of course not, but it happens.

And now Godwin's Law has kicked in with our national politics, as evidenced by the vandalism at right. Somebody decided it would be cute to carve a swastika and President Obama's name into the green at the 18th hole of the Lakeville Country Club in Massachusetts. Unbelievable.

Strangely, though, this is the second golf/Nazi crossover this week. In Michigan, a couple has reported finding golf balls with swastikas scrawled on them scattered throughout their yard. (The swastikas, we're assuming, were hand-drawn; professionally-made models would have a limited market at best.)

Golf's connection to Naziism is a peculiar one, but it exists. In the late 1930s, Adolf Hitler held the inaugural "Hitler Cup," a means of having his German athletes reassert their superiority after getting beaten on their home turf by Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. Only it didn't work out that way; Great Britain won the Cup, and Hitler drove off in a snit, refusing to even present it. The Hitler Cup vanished into the mists of history, and was only rediscovered a few years ago.

Still, the clowns who performed these recent acts of vandalism obviously weren't looking to draw some connection between the Third Reich and the grand old game. I'll leave the political commentary out of this, except to say that anybody who throws around Nazi symbolism like this is a thundering moron. Here's hoping the idiots who did this get sentenced to a year of cleaning out the sump tank of John Daly's motor home.

Obama hate message scratched into 18th hole [Boston Herald]
Golf balls with Nazi symbols put in Michigan yard [Chicago Tribune]