It was a stupid comment, and Stewart rightly had fun with it. But like Limbaugh, why spend time worrying about political entertainers? True, Matthew's isn't as wild as Beck, but he's of the same poison.
Also, the Nazi think isn't exactly WWII reacting. The candidate hs stated he was honoring the Nazis. The good Nazi, the average Nazi solider. So, while I wouldn't go too far down gotcha lane here, I'm not sure thie particular group he belong to was exactly WWII reenactors.
Here's the issue. Rich Iott, the candidate who dressed up for re-enactments, didn't dress up as an average Nazi soldier. He dressed up as a member of the Waffen-SS. There's a very clear difference.
The average Nazi soldier was a member of the
Wehrmacht, the name for the German military. It consists of the
Heer, or army, the
Kriegsmarine, or navy, and the
Luftwaffe, or air force. The "average Nazi soldier" would likely belong to one of these branches, and most likely to the
Heer.
Rich Iott dressed up as a member of the Waffen-SS. Originally, the Waffen-SS was not a formal part of the
German military. Rather, the Waffen-SS was a paramilitary branch of the
Nazi Party. That means that prior to the outbreak of World War II, the Waffen-SS enforced the rulings of the Nazi Party and was separate from military command.
This also means that the Waffen-SS were the ones who administrated the concentration camps and had a direct role instituting the Holocaust.
So Rich Iott isn't re-enacting any average anything. He is re-enacting as a member of an organization that was committing a genocide.
While the Waffen-SS did a lot of hard core acts of military tactics and strategy as a paramilitary force fighting alongside the Wehrmacht, they also separated Jewish families, slept with Jewish women prisoners by promising to "look out for them," shot them, gassed them, buried them in mass graves, and incinerated them, but not before pulling out the gold in their teeth fillings.
There's a clear difference between those two things, and either he doesn't know the history that he is re-enacting as well as he should, or... Well, the alternative leads to rather unfortunate implications for him.