If At First You Don't Succeed

A few months ago, I made a comment to someone that when we got into WWII, it wasn't really to stop the Nazis, it was to help change their venue. Apparently, I wasn't the only one to see parallels between the Reichstag (the German parliament building) fire and 9/11, because when I used the Google to search for those parallels, I got 13,500 results. It makes a grim sort of sense, though, when you think about it, though. After all, the Bush family (through Grandpa Prescott) paid a lot of money to develop the Nazi playbook and no one wants to lose such a huge investment. It's just that very few families have the political clout to safeguard that investment.

(The Bush family's involvement in politics goes back much further than most Americans realize. Mama Bush's grandfather was Franklin Pierce, who was widely regarded was the worst president ever until George. And as I've pointed out elsewhere, Grandpa Bush managed to avoid prosecution for treason and become elected as a New York Senator.)

Look at these parallels:

1. The Reichstag fire was officially blamed on communists and resulted in the passage of the Enabling Act which suspended certain constitutional rights; the attack on the WTC and Pentagon was blamed on Islamic terrorists and resulted in the the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, which virtually suspended the same constitutional rights.



2. Hitler used his power to declare war on his neighbors under the pretense of protecting German interests; Bush used his power to declare war on anyone who was "against us."



3. Hitler had his "good Germans" to support him, even when his abuses had become obvious to anyone with half a brain (I mean, how could you live near a death camp and not recognize the smell of burning human flesh?); Bush has his "patriotic Americans," who toe the party line, even when the smell has risen sky high.



4. Hitler valued loyalty more than education, experience, or connection to reality; Bush values loyalty more than eduction, experience or qualifications for the position to which he is appointing them.

Now, when you use the Google to search for parallels between Bush and Nixon, you get 12,700,000 hits. The newest connection is the CIA's destruction of two interrogation tapes, which immediately reminded me of the mysterious 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes. Forget the fact that destroying those two tapes was probably illegal as part of the material requested by Congressional investigators--it was DUMB. I can't be the only one that made the connection between the CIA tapes and the Watergate recordings, can I? With all of the speculatory connections being made between this Administration and the criminal cabal over which Nixon presided, why would anyone with any sense at all want to make tangible connections?

But there is one thing you have to give Nixon credit for: I doubt Nixon's press secretary would have ever done anything as stupid as Dana Perino's admission that she didn't know anything about the Cuban Missile Crisis. I mean, she is the spokesperson for the White House and she is admitting ignorance about something of such profound importance? Shouldn't the Administration's mouthpiece know at least a little something about an event that brought our country to the brink of nuclear war? I know it happened before she was born, but I was hardly out of diapers myself and I know more about it than that it happened in Cuba and was some kind of crisis. Didn't she have to take some kind of history class somewhere along the way to becoming White House Press Secretary? Ron Zeigler must be spinning in his grave.