Bush goes to Munich.

[Inland]

Inflammatory? Provocative? Unfair to Bush or for that matter, UAE by analogizing it to Hitler’s Germany? Sure, but the Bush base is going to do make that VERY connection. Bush as traitor.

Bush’s national security theme is that he’s entirely without restraint. Bush, in rhetoric and in fact, put BEING ON THE ATTACK over laws, diplomatic relations, innocent civilian deaths, fairness to our own military, even attacking the proper target. Nothing, nothing, nothing will prevent him from pulling a punch. He only takes his fingers out of his ears to sign the attack order. He can't defy the laws of physics, but they don't faze him any.

Bush’s indiscriminate attacks satisfied that segment of traumatized Americans who see the world as nothing but hostile and dangerous and deserving of a whupping. There’s no arguing with them that North Korea was more dangerous than Iraq, that more Iraqi civilians are being killed than people hostile to the US, or that we are making more enemies. In their mind, there’s plenty that are going to get their turn out there, the world couldn’t hate us more than it does now and vice versa, and God can sort them out.

Bush is the perfect president for people who want the foot on the accelerator and thinks there’s been all too much braking. Or he was.

There is blinking astonishment over the port matter. Not merely because Bush favors handing over port management on American soil to what he and his supporters have assumed, from the right wing’s implicit and explicit statements, The Other.

No, the Bushbots are shocked and stupefied that Bush defends the ports deal on the ground that we are working on delicate diplomatic relations with an Arab state and we wouldn’t want to seem unfriendly.

Diplomacy? With the Arabs? A state that doesn’t recognized Israel, did recognize the Taliban, actually HAD connections to 9/11….Suddenly Bush turns into Kerry…..well, actually, Bush turns into the caricature that the right wing drew to mock Kerry. Elevating foreigners’ happiness over security, letting foreigners make decisions for us, telling everyone that they are just too stupid or unaware to understand the delicacies of the situation, that diplomacy is the means to a victory in war, would be the punch lines in an anti-Kerry radio skit. The same president whose prior comment to international law is a dismissive “Heh, better call my lawyer, heh heh heh” now tells us that following through on business deal IS national security. The ability of an arab government to make a few bucks is, in his judgment, all about protecting the Homeland.

And we know that there ARE distinctions between good and bad actors, that diplomacy does matter, and that the US shouldn’t and can’t occupy the entire world, and we must be smart to make an effective defense. But we too see Bush as a bad caricature of Kerry, because Bush isn’t being smart about anything. Bush is making exactly the sort of clownish mistakes that the scared and traumatized thought they were avoiding by keeping a psycho warmonger millenarian in office.

The segment of the populace he catered to in his national security persona is going to call him an Appeaser. For five years Bush has made it clear that nobody has to care about making fine distinctions between good foreigners and bad foreigners, and they won’t. For five years Bush and his allies have has scared them daily so that they would sign on to a constant, forever war against the world was the solution. Bush thought they were signing on to him and him alone, and he is wrong. They’ll be saying that Bush is going to Munich. I’ll google it in a week.

[sui generis]

1. uh Munich has nothing to do with anything

that pesky Nazi thing was half a century ago, and for the record, there are more neo-Nazi's in America than there are in Germany.

Munich is actually very liberal and progressive, and the people are warm, wonderful and laid back, unlike religious freakazoid monolingual monocultural uptight America.

Do NOT slime Munich with references to Bush.

[Inland]

2. It's a metaphor. And not my metaphor, either. nt

[sui generis]

3. I know - but there are people who still think Germans

are a special subclass of humans, and who don't understand subtlety and metaphor.

I personally think Mr. Bush is heading more towards a stalinist regime at this point, although there are clear comparisons to the rise of the nationalist party in Germany.

Ironic that the freepers who call us commies support someone whose politico-economic policies are as extreme for capitalism as stalin's were for communism.