Okay, so this comment from "anonymous" clearly came from either a mindless, knee-jerk liberal, or from a mindless, knee-jerk conservative who's making some sort of feeble attempt at googlebombing by associated the "Bush = Hitler" meme with the DKos community (when clearly it's more of a DU phenomenon. Sheesh)...Anyway, I think we all know which class is more populous, and who is more likely to drop such a bomb for shits, giggles, and brownie points with the likes of Michelle Malkin.
And while I'm tempted to trash it just because I can (expect no Free Speech Zones behind Freedom Camp's razor wire, and count yourself lucky I don't wipe my ass on your holy book of choice right now), I think I'll leave it up, because it touches on a point I want to address.
There's no reason for this Bush-equals-Hitler crap. As I pointed out to my anonymous troll, Bush-equals-Bush -- there's no need to equate him with another human failure, because Bush as an enormous miserable failure stands well enough on his own without making comparisons.
Bush is nothing like Hitler. For one thing, Hitler's government ran pretty well, at least in the beginning, and it was responsive to the people (sack-o'-nuts though *they* had become); we can't say the same about Junior. Hitler, in his youth, was a little slip of an artsy-fartsy (and possibly self-hating Jewish), syphilitic girly boy, with delusions of grandeur and ambition almost from the beginning. Bush was Ricky Schroeder's Silver Spoon character with no motivation and an attitude problem; a towel-snapping, falsely gregarious, boarding-school snot with a penchant for occasional bullying, who drifted through life with no direction, a Bizarro Midas who turned everything he touched to shit instead of gold, and was saved from gaffes that would have landed most of us in jail or in the gutter only by his family's money and connections. Bush is a uniquely American monster -- only we, a country that produced the likes of Joe McCarthy, the American Enterprise Institute, and the idea of a Supply-Side Jesus, could ever have created the likes of George Walker Bush.
Hitler was a psychopath.
Bush is a sociopath. He's not crazy. He's just not completely "connected." When confronted with the suffering of others, his first impulse is to laugh -- not because he's out-and-out hateful, but because he just doesn't give a shit. And when he realizes that his political circumstances require him to show some heart, anything he says sounds incredibly tin-eared, as though it's not what his feelings and intellect tell him to say, but what he dimly senses as being what "the rules" tell him others want to hear him say. And whenever he feels like someone's found him out, he goes for the jugular.
My freshman year of high school, "Joey" moved to town and enrolled. He was fabulously rich and handsome and tall and athletic, and ingratiated himself with alacrity into the pecking order of our local chapter of Guysville, finding a position somewhere near the top. He made no effort in classes, and drifted through the lowest levels he could take for his grade with a D-average. But he was socially talented: always knew the right thing to say, how to make people feel like he and they belonged. All the same, though, he never seemed to get close to anybody. As if they saw something "off" in him despite his best efforts, as if there was never any basic connections in him to the faculties of empathy and normal, natural emotions. He was weirdly, ineffably "removed" somehow...Nevertheless, other boys "followed" him (to an extent). But girls never seemed to crush on him, which at the time I thought kind of strange.
I once asked my friend "Josh," a football player, a popular kid in his own right, why he didn't follow the rest of the guys in hanging out with "Joey." He looked perturbed at the question, and just said "I dunno. The guy kind of creeps me out. He's sort of a fake."
"Joey" spotted me as an enemy right away: the well-read faggot from a poor family, who got straight-As in Honors classes, who had no enemies, was friendly with everyone, but on his own terms, in an unusual position outside of the normal heirarchies. And who saw right through his bullshit. But he was sufficiently wary -- I was built as well as any of the varsity guys, even at 15, and my other boy peers, the ones I had grown up around, had given up trying to physically intimidate me years before.
One day in shop class, without provocation, without a word, and out of the blue, he simply turned on me, looking at me with no expression on his face or in those chipped-ice blue eyes (a particular shade I've since come, fairly or unfairly, to associate with cruelty and madness), and sucker punched me in the stomach.
My body must have reacted without my brain thinking, as I tensed just the right amount, or else he had misgauged the force of his blow or the right proportions of fat and muscle in that part of my body. In any case, the punch did not have the desired effect. For a moment, I let him think it had, as I collapsed a little, my right hand sort of falling against the front of his shirt as I fell. But it was merely the appearance of relaxing, giving before actually rallying, as I, with all the strength available to me, yanked him bodily towards me, my crown aimed at his face. There was a sick crack, and a bit of a sting above my forehead, and he fell to the concrete floor.
He was still looking at me with those eyes from his position on his back. Dark blood bubbled and welled out of his nose, and he spit out half of his left front tooth. He didn't make a sound. He just stared, his expression never really changing.
Call it callow intuition or whatever, but I saw it in his eyes. The naked, coldly logical, predatory something, the black nothingness unaccounted for by any feeling of what we know to be humanity, that monstrosity that has from time to time terrified mankind from the parceling up of Canaan to the carting off of Polish Jews, from the bloodied altars of the Aztec Empire to the machetes of 1990s Rwanda. If he could have gotten away with killing me, by any means necessary, with out getting caught, he would have. I remain convinced that this was one of my first glimpses of evil.
That's the thing about true evil: it doesn't hate; it just doesn't care. About *anything* outside of suffering undesireable consequences.
I was more than a little shaken by this episode. I've never forgotten it.
There followed the usual recriminations. I was in detention for a week. Inexplicably, however, everyone sympathized with me -- even his mother. She met me and my parents in the principal's office, in her long and sophisticated gray Maxmara skirt, hands clasping and unclasping on her lap. She actually told me how sorry she was, how she had tried to raise him right, how she didn't understand why he had turned out so different from his brother and sister.
I squirmed under her contrition. I didn't blame her. Even then I knew that no matter what parents did, sometimes kids just turned out wrong.
All the same, somehow I don't expect to see Bar offering any apologies to the American people any time soon. Her own little "Joey" has his finger on the big, red button, and she couldn't be prouder.
[ back home ]
Comments for Bush In His Own Right
Do we have the government we deserve? Or is it possible we've been snookered by masters of crime, and we really don't deserve to be victims?
I'm going to go with the former, teh. As far as I'm concerned, the only 'victims' are people on the wrong end of our death machines (those launched directly and by proxy). We are all willing participants in this satanic charade. My only sympathy is for the generation of our progeny (or will it be us?) that will face the maelstrom of karma brought on by the evil that we and our forebears have inflicted on others. It ain't gwine ta be perty.
- Posted at 8:39 PM | By
Sam Holloway
Perhaps you're both right...But then, I can't help but think of the single mother with three jobs who couldn't help but get taken in by the Iraq-did-9/11 thing because, hey, why would cable news and the broadcast networks all lie?
That wasn't 'evil', that was a 'sociopath' you saw.
I used to date one, it became too creepy.
I used to date one, it became too creepy.
Someday, some knee-jerk raeactionary moron will say something like
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson = Bush
that would be so kewl if The Rock were president. Cuz he would totally give terrorists The People's Elbow. And they would be so smashed into the canvas and they would have to admit the sheer awesomeness of The Rock's Elbow and codpiece. Then there would be no more war and people wouldn't hate, but then the whiny liberals would be all, 'Dude, Where's my civil rights?'
Wow, that tangent totally swept me off my feet and into crazy land. Anyway, I just kicked people in the ablls a whole lot in high school because I was tiny. Then I got big and people feel threatened by me when I get angry. I can't win. But at least I still have a soul and conscience, which is more than anyone can say for Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld. Take your pick.
By the way, Che is getting waaaay played out.
afzya: After ya, ma'am
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson = Bush
that would be so kewl if The Rock were president. Cuz he would totally give terrorists The People's Elbow. And they would be so smashed into the canvas and they would have to admit the sheer awesomeness of The Rock's Elbow and codpiece. Then there would be no more war and people wouldn't hate, but then the whiny liberals would be all, 'Dude, Where's my civil rights?'
Wow, that tangent totally swept me off my feet and into crazy land. Anyway, I just kicked people in the ablls a whole lot in high school because I was tiny. Then I got big and people feel threatened by me when I get angry. I can't win. But at least I still have a soul and conscience, which is more than anyone can say for Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld. Take your pick.
By the way, Che is getting waaaay played out.
afzya: After ya, ma'am
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