Hello?!! Bush != Hitler

Hitler was a transformational leader who used his superlative oratorical and visionary talents to a very evil purpose.

Bush is a handpuppet with sundry GOP operatives' hands up his @ss.

Also, he has not yet gotten to the point of determining the "final solution" for us Democrats yet. So...as far as you could go is he is a failure who blames his failures on some group outside himself just like Hitler.

Hitler is no longer just a historical figure. The word and concept of "Hitler" is just too unoriginal of an argument with no logical connection and all of the wrong emotional buttons pushed.

We should just stick with contrasting him to our most recent president, Clinton, and see how both have done as regards domestic and foreign policy.

Democrats do not think Bush is a Hitler. Bush will never be comparable to any of the significant figures of political history.

on this issue I guess I'd quote the apocryphal LBJ story about smearing his opponent as a pigfucker: "well, let the son of a bitch deny it."

BUSH: "And I categorically deny being Hitler. This just isn't true.'

ROVE: "When I said it was like a 'Nazi rally' - I, uh... meant it was a Nazi rally that wasn't linked to Hitler. These were good Nazis."

but you can understand how people get confused.

hell, so a few people compare him to Hitler. This is a BAD THING... should we really concern ourselves with the Monkey's public image? Let Karl Rove handle Bush's defense, why freelance for him and feign shock and righteous indignation?

comparison is valid, in a very broad sense. Obviously, Bush isn't as intelligent as Hitler, and he's not an anti-semite, and he doesn't have a little square moustache, and he isn't a painter or a vegetarian, or etc., etc., etc.

But Bush's presidency recalls the style of the Nazis in many ways. The cult of personality, the rabid nationalism built around a domestic attack, the fear mongering, the dismissal of dissenters as traitors... you could go on forever listing the similarities.

People immediately get offended by the comparisons, but I think we do the country a disservice when we allow ourselves to believe that fascism can't happen here- or that a Hitler couldn't happen here.

I don't think Bush *is* Hitler. But I think the Neoconservative agenda is very Nazi. And Bush sells it.

is that Hitler was a smart man, even though he was the most evil thing that ever reared its ugly head on this planet.

Bush is just plain stupid.

Hitler took a shattered economy and revived it with a massive war machine, while Bush took a thriving economy and shattered it with a massive war machine. I think the better anology is that the GOP is a state apparatus comparable to the Soviet Communist Party. Invasive, secretive, punative and self serving.

Hitlerism/Stalinism/Nixonism/Reaganism/Poppyism

we now have the refined product of decades of ideological inbreeding... ladies and genteel gentlemen... I give you... George W. Bush, Man of Peace and Perpetual Freedom!

What are we going to do about it? I don't mean to seem defeatist, but there are millions of people in this country that don't get their information from DU. Hey, this is my first post. I've been lurking (and loving it) for about a week, but I'm already in the choir at large.

I don't have Republican friends to influence. I couldn't respect them if I knew that. I guess I'm not a politician. It's true that my family is very neo-con stupid, but we had to call a truce to political discussions in order to maintain a civil exchange. They don't "get" how they're being screwed. And according to them, I don't get it either.

That's why I think that we need someone like Clark that can appeal to the potential swing voter. If they're swinging or haven't made up their mind they ain't stupid yet.

I might be confusing stupid with apathetic. So, how do we get the "aps" out and on our side?

:hi:

not the means.

the exact opposite a few weeks ago. I've been forced to alter my stance on this.

Adolph Hitler could be referred to as evil personified, politically brilliant (at least, for people who were of his 'master race'), a unifying leader (again, with some horrid qualifications), and a whole host of other things.

Bush, on the other hand, is the opposite: personified by his evil, brilliantly political, and a polarizing leader. Surprise- the one is as bad as the other.

However, there is a crucial difference at work. Where Hitler eventually murdered and conquered overtly, invading and killing populations that resisted, Bush has killed off something far more subtle. That something is called patriotism.

Hear me out. Ten years ago the policies that pResident Bush* and his administration are currently putting into place would have been met with immediate and open calls for impeachment. We would have kicked his sorry ass out of office faster than Andy Card ran to get burgers.

Instead, we hear the same sad refrain: the world has changed since September 11, 2001. The fact is, if we ever bothered to open our eyes a bit and read archives from international news (which we here at DU are known to do, but we're a minority for these purposes), we would see that events such as 9/11 have been happening all over the world for a great many years. In other words, what has truly changed is our perception of the world.

Realistically speaking, it was only a matter of time that a terrorist group would score a major hit against someone, somewhere. In the ever-perfect hindsight we are blessed- or cursed- with, it appears that it was a combination of policy and simple, bad luck that allowed 9/11 to occur.

Our reaction to the policies like the Patriot Act that the Bush 'team' have put into place would have been rejected back then. So why is the "climate right" now? Because we've been manipulated. But that's a whole other post.

I do wonder what's happened over the past decade. I wonder because I happen to hate the Great Glass Teat. I avoid television whenever possible, and I find the only reason I do watch even TV news is because I want to know what the 'enemy' is doing.

Their rape of our collective rights would never have been tolerated until now, with this administration. It is very, very good at deflecting and redirecting issues and debates in such a way that their message and only their message is what the viewers of the exchange remember. They have either to have done focus groups and statistical analyses to test what parts of a conversation people commonly remember or used preexisting data from studies into the same to become adept at doing so.

Is this to say we should just throw up our hands and say, "oh well?" Of course not. The fact is our country has been dismally poor at keeping our eyes on the traffic on the road, rather than the numbers on our cellphone. We're easily distracted. A bad wreck could easily result from that, and that's a pretty good description for what happened on 9/11.

Now here's a question: how far, in response to prevent such a tragedy, is too far? I'm absolutely certain that our Founders well knew that our country would have covert enemies; after all, they themselves were known to have used precursors of modern-day covert tactics. These were not any kind of stupid men; they were, on the whole, both intellectually and politically astute. Very astute.

So much so that they founded a country, fought a war to do it, and won. We should be so lucky. Instead, what we currently have in office is a man who is willing to co-opt his own current and future citizens to sponsor the enrichment of business and family and friends. We can already assume, if this man is in office even one more day, another citizen of our own country could well die as a direct result.

Unending war was never envisioned by them; maybe they made a mistake in that. Or maybe they had faith in the system of laws they had created, that it itself would be safe if the people kept a vigilant eye. We have failed in that duty, mostly because Bush* has manipulated us into doing so, for his own benefit.

And there, friend, is the crucial similarity between the two men. One was the most prolific murderer in modern history; a man who believed in a 'master race' and conquered his neighbors. The other is a fortunate fratboy son, a failure in all of his major endeavors, a man who is completely out of touch with and incurious to the world around him, who is waging war overseas while transfering the bulk of the benefit to the rich upper business class; a man who is bankrupting our country, our future generations, and in some measure, our very souls as citizens via his overall restriction of Constitutional rights.

However, both are examples of men who do not care, period, unless it benefits them. They are indifferent to the plight of their fellow men. That's what, ultimately, makes them similar.

Hitler may sit at the head of the class, but Bush certainly isn't near the back.

***EDIT***: UPDATED because it made NO sense when I hit 'post'. Apologies.

As I understand the term comparison, it means analyzing analogies and differences between two objects. It does not mean to view two objects as identical.
It may well be that certain aspects of the politics of these two politicians are identical, while others are not. And that can be found out via a comparison.