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Posted on 01/04/2004 11:09:22 AM PST by normal conservative
1. Like Hitler, President Bush was not elected by a majority, but was forced to engage in political maneuvering in order to gain office.
2. Like Hitler, Bush began to curtail civil liberties in response to a well-publicized national outrage, in Hitler's case the Reichstag fire, in Bush's case the 9-11 catastrophe.
3. Like Hitler, Bush went on to pursue a reckless ultra-nationalist foreign policy without the mandate of the electorate.
4. Like Hitler, Bush has accordingly improved his popularity ratings, especially with veterans and conservative Republicans, by mounting an aggressive public relations campaign against foreign enemies. Just as Hitler cited international communism to justify Germany's military buildup, Bush uses Al Qaeda and the Axis of Evil to justify our current military buildup.
5. Like Hitler, Bush promotes militarism while in the midst of a major economic recession (or depression). He uses war preparations to help subsidize defense industries (Halliburton, Bechtel, etc.) and presumably the rest of the economy on a trickle-down basis.
6. Like Hitler, Bush glorifies patriotism to stir up public support. He treats our nation's unique historic destiny almost as a religious cause sanctioned by God.
7. Like Hitler, Bush quickly makes and breaks diplomatic ties, and he makes generous promises that he soon abandons, as in the case of Mexico, Russia, Afghanistan, and even New York City.
8. Like Hitler, Bush envisages a future world order that guarantees his own nation's hegemonic supremacy rather than cooperative harmony under the authority of the United Nations (or League of Nations). He is willing to break the U.N. Charter in promoting this end.
9. Like Hitler, Bush scraps international treaties, most notably the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Convention on the Prohibition of Land Mines, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Kyoto Global Warming Accord, and the International Criminal Court.
10. Like Hitler, Bush depends on an axis of collaborative allies, which he describes as a "coalition of the willing," to give the impression of having a broad popular alliance. These include the U.K. as compared to Mussolini's Italy, and Spain and Bulgaria as compared to, well, Spain and Bulgaria, both of which were aligned with Germany during the thirties and World War II.
11. Like Hitler, Bush possesses a war machine much bigger and more effective than the military capabilities of other nations. Today, Bush depends on a "defense" budget roughly equivalent to the combined military expenditures of the rest of the world.
12. Like Hitler, Bush is willing to invade other nations despite the opposition of the U.N. (League of Nations). He also has no qualms about bribing, bullying and insulting its members, even tapping their telephone lines.
13. Like Hitler, Bush pursues war without cutting back on the peacetime economy. He actually seeks to reduce taxes while conducting an expensive invasion and occupation of an "undesirable" nation.
14. Like Hitler, Bush launches unilateral invasions on a supposedly preemptive basis. Just as Hitler convinced the German public to think of Poland as a threat to Germany in 1939, Bush wants Americans to think of Iraq as a "potential" threat to our national security.
15. Like Hitler, Bush is willing to inflict high levels of bloodshed, with many thousands of casualties anticipated in Iraq, especially since the city of Baghdad--with a population of between 5 and 6 million--will be a primary target.
16. Like Hitler, Bush depends on a military strategy that features a "shock and awe" blitzkrieg beginning with devastating air strikes, then an invasion led by heavy armor columns.
17. Like Hitler, Bush is perfectly willing to sacrifice life as part of his official duty, as indicated by his unique record as a governor of Texas who was reluctant to commute death sentences.
18. Like Hitler Bush began warfare on a single front (Al Qaeda quartered in Afghanistan), but then expanded it to a second front with Iraq, only to be confronted with North Korea as a potential third front. Much the same thing happened when Hitler expanded German military operations from Spain to Poland and France, then was distracted by Yugoslavia before invading the USSR in 1941.
19. Like Hitler, Bush has no qualms about imposing "regime change" by installing Quisling-style client governments reinforced by full-scale military occupation under a military governor.
20. Like Hitler, Bush curtails civil liberties and depends on detention centers (i.e. concentration camps) such as Guantanamo Bay.
21. Like Hitler, Bush repeats lies often enough that they come to be accepted as the truth. Bush and his spokesmen argue, for example that every measure has been taken to avoid war (hardly true), that an invasion of Iraq will diminish (not intensify) the terrorist threat to the world, and that the U.S. is staging an invasion because the risks of inaction would be greater (not less). All of this is highly debatable. They likewise argue that Iraq is linked with Al Qaeda (which has yet to be proven), and that nothing whatsoever has been achieved by U.N. inspectors to warrant the postponement of U.S. war plans (which simply isn't true). They insist that Iraq hides numerous weapons it does not possess as well
as can be determined by U.N. inspectors, and they refuse to acknowledge the total absence of any nuclear weapons program in Iraq since the late nineties. As perhaps to be expected, they indignantly accuse everybody else of deception and evasiveness.
22. Like Hitler, Bush incessantly finds new excuses to justify war—from Iraq's WMD threat to the elimination of Saddam Hussein, to his supposed Al Qaeda connection, to the creation of democracy in the Middle East as a model for neighboring states, and back again to the WMD threat. As soon as one excuse for war is challenged, Bush shifts to another, but only to shift back again at another time.
23. Like Hitler Bush and his cohorts exaggerate ruthlessness by their enemies in order to justify their own. Just as Hitler cited the threat of communist violence to justify even greater violence on the part of Germany, the Bush team justifies a full-scale invasion of Iraq by emphasizing Saddam Hussein's crimes against humanity that were for the most part committed when Iraq was a client-ally of the U.S., supplied with both advisors and materiel (poison gas included) by our own government.
24. Like Hitler, Bush's Messianic ambition to bring about America's hegemonic dominance in the world makes him perhaps the most dangerous President in our nation's history, a rogue chief executive capable of waging any number of illegal preemptive wars.
25. Like Hitler, Bush has become so obsessed with his vision of a Manichaean conflict between good (U.S. patriotism) and evil (the anti-patriotic "other") that for many in contact with the White House he is beginning to seem as if he has lost touch with reality.
26. Like Hitler, Bush takes pleasure in the mythology of frontier justice. As a youth Hitler read and memorized the western novels of Karl May, and Bush retains into his maturity his fascination with simplistic cowboy values. He also exaggerates a cowboy twang despite his elitist education at Andover, Yale and Harvard.
27. Like Hitler, Bush misconstrues evolutionary theory, in Hitler's case by treating the Aryan race as being superior, in Bush's case by rejecting science for fundamentalist creationism.
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Yes, it IS an outrage, and I DO protest...missing another ZOT! Dang!
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