I should have seen this coming. I’ve been around the edges of it for years now. After watching the Bush machine slowly grind America into a second-rate debtor nation, I figured we were on our way to becoming Great Britain or France. I even thought – if the Chinese changed their mind and decided to call in our $9 trillion note or trade in Euros instead of dollars – we had a shot at becoming Argentina. So how did I miss that we’re already Germany. I’m not talking about modern, post-Commie, no more east and west, you can get a Mercedes anywhere Germany; I’m referring to blackshirt, goose-stepping, Poland invading nation of yore. For those of you who are history-challenged, that would be bad old Nazi Germany.
And I’m not blaming it all on Bush, although he did get the ball rolling by invading a sovereign nation which had done us no harm, then adding domestic spying and torture to the American value-meal menu. But there is an historical irony here: like Germany’s push for world domination back in the ‘40’s, the war is dragging on, our army is broken, our economy on the brink of collapse, and our fearless leader – who is actually less popular than that German guy – is doing his version of hiding in a bunker waiting for the end.
Yet it’s bigger than just Fuehrer Bush, (not that his stone and barbed wire fence along the southern border should bring anything particular to mind: “Papers, you hef papers, ja.”)
If you squint, you’d swear Karl Rove is Joseph Goebbles reincarnated. Goebbles was the Nazi propaganda boss, and there isn’t a trick he used that wasn’t picked up and made nastier by Rove. The politics of hate and separation, and let’s not forget homophobia and racism…it’s too bad Rove left office before he could blame everything on the Jews again.
And it’s bigger still.
Republican nominee and hip replacement candidate, John McBush, (thank you Mo Dowd), has embraced Catholic-hating minister John Hagee. Back in the Tag, next to Jews, the German boss had a real dislike of Catholics.
Even Billary got into the act with a bit of racial distrust. Some of it coded, “Obama can’t win with white working people,” some of it not, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina.” See, if you can’t scare voters with white folk, scare ‘em with a black guy.
We have the anti-gay stormtroppers gearing up for another fight and, if you’re still not convinced, Mississippi – always a bastion of liberal good sense – recently introduced legislation that makes it illegal for restaurants to sell food to fat people. (The obese rarely look good in those tight uniforms and jackboots…although the black is slimming.)
And finally.
“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
I thought it was Fearless Non-Golfing Leader Bush too, but it’s a report from WWII, (circa 1943), from the Office of Strategic Services, titled, “Hitler As His Associates Know Him.”
Sometimes I just hate being right…