Bush ≠ Hitler
As always, I’m here to help.
The interwebs have been chock-full of news and opinion about former Prez Geo. W. Bush’s art gallery opening yesterday.
Some 30 paintings done by Dubya are part of a new exhibit in his presidential library in — where else? — Dallas, Texas.
Y’know, the same Dallas that essentially defined the big, exciting, we-love-the-rich 1980s in that eponymous soap opera about those lovable, plutocratic Ewings? Yeah, there couldn’t be a better locale for the Bush Prez Libr.
Bush, apparently, has been spending his time throwing paint on canvas, making pix of world leaders like Tony Blair, Vlad Putin, and, natch, Bush’s own daddy-o.
Hamid Karzai By Bush
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I suppose it’s all cool. I’m always in favor of people doing creative things in their lives, no matter how young or old they are, nor if they started a tragic war with a Southwest Asian country over some phonus-bolonus a-bombs and now that country exists in a never-ending state of violent chaos.
Good for Georgie-boy, I say.
Only loads o’folks are picking the low-hanging fruit off the politico-allegorical tree and making the all-too-obvious comparison between our dear former leader and a certain mid-20th Century dictator with a goofy mustache and one ball (or, so said one popular song during WWII.)
Diligent students of history may recall that before Adolf Hitler embarked on world conquest and Final Solutions, he was an aspiring artist who longed to be accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Hitler painted scads of pix, none of which was good enough to get him in the school.
We Wish You Luck In Your Future Endeavors, Herr Hitler
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It’s been said young Ad was so put out by the snub that he decided instead to take over Germany. Which seems a tad simplistic, as justifications go for the ensuing actions of history’s most reviled man. But I’m not here to referee that historical argument.
It’s this one I’m throwing the yellow flag at: A lot of folks on my side of the fence spent all eight years of the Bush II presidency comparing him to Hitler or flat-out calling him Hitler. And now that the two have painting in common, those same folks are calling Bushey-boy Hitler again.
They Both Had Dogs, The Fiends!
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Sheesh. It’s as if it had been revealed that Bush fils is missing a gonad.
So, my more rabid confreres who believe — as I do — that Bush the Younger was this holy land’s worst-ever president need me to reel them back into reality.
George W. Bush was not Adolf Hitler. Nor did he do much of anything even remotely resembling Hitler’s own actions. Bush’s crimes were his and his alone. Bushey-boy did not institute a program of genocide against the citizens of his own country. He did not annex sovereign nations. He did not oversee the government take-over of certain key industries. He did not declare himself one with the State. And, I’m fairly confident in asserting this last point, he had a pair.
Sure, George W. was a no-good son of a bitch. I’d love to see him and his creepy fellow mobsters, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, get hauled before some kind of court of justice for their crimes.
But — I repeat — he wasn’t Hitler. Got that? Good. Now, let’s move on.
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Questions
Did you notice (as I just did) that I referred to the German Fuehrer by a sort of cutesy diminutive in the section above?
Ad?
Am I the first human, post-1939, to do that?
And, if so, what in the hell is wrong with me?
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Chill, Babies
Scientists — you know, those folks who actually know things — tell us that the Yellowstone “supervolcano” isn’t due to blow anytime soon.
In fact, says a geologist who has studied the formation, the Y-stone blower is still petering out from its last pop some 640,000 years ago. It hasn’t even begun welling up in preparation for another series of blasts, a process that could take a million or two years before we’d all have to start wearing hardhats.
I mention this because the interwebs are buzzing in some precincts about said caldera in the western US. We’re about to be blown to bits — or at least covered with volcanic ash over a large portion of this holy land, goes the hysteria.
Much of the hullabaloo began when a video of bison seemingly “fleeing” the park went viral. The “explanation” given with the vid held that bison, like the rest of nature’s wonderful cartoon character creatures, have a sixth sense about volcanoes and they’re trying to get out of Yellowstone National Park ASAP.
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Not explained is why the beasts would be trying to escape the confines of a Department of Interior establishment, the confines of which, presumably, they would not be terribly well-acquainted with. Especially since the jigglings they’re purportedly sensing would be spread over an enormous area that dwarfs the park itself. So where are they running off to?
But, what do scientists know?
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