DETROIT -- President George W. Bush's deceit has no limits. His attack on Sen. Barack Obama, suggesting the Democratic presidential candidate wants to "appease" terrorists, reaches a new low, and we should brace for more as the Busheviks desperately and ruthlessly try to cling to the White House.
In identifying his candidacy with Bush's slurs, Sen. John McCain is showing his vile style and the direction the Republicans will take throughout the campaign -- anyone who does not agree with us is unpatriotic, a coddler of terrorists hellbent on destroying the nation. McCain has descended into becoming Bush's poodle, a loyal lap dog.
Bush peddled his assault on Obama in a speech before Israel's Knesset. Never before in our history has a president used an appearance before a foreign legislature to so brazenly attack a political opponent at home.
Bush wallowed in the most putrid muck ever, coating himself with everlasting stench and forever staining the Republican Party. His soul is as hollow as his imagination. He has no dignity. He has no conscience.
Speaking on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Israel, Bush unleashed his partisan smear and cheap-shot attack, invoking the Nazi Wehrmacht storming into Poland and the start of World War II.
Playing to his Jewish audience, many with family members killed in the Holocaust, Bush used emotionally charged imagery and historically false parallels in a vile and shameless attempt to score political points in Israel and the United States.
"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," Bush said, offering a ridiculous straw man argument.
He continued, "We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, 'Lord, if only we had talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."
Bush showed stunning chutzpah, dropping the Nazi bomb in his speech. Recall that his grandfather Prescott Bush was enjoying the comfort of money in 1939 after his investment firm, Brown Brothers Harriman, helped feed and finance the Nazi war machine.
In 2004, Britain's Guardian scoured through National Archive documents and records in the Library of Congress that detailed Prescott Bush's firm's role in providing financing and banking services for Fritz Thyssen, a German industrialist and early supporter of Hitler and the Nazis.
Thyssen, owner of the largest steel and coal companies in Germany, controlled New York-based Union Bankers Corp., and Prescott Bush served as a director. He continued to do work for the bank even after America entered the war.
Prescott Bush -- who would later become a U.S. senator from Connecticut -- also had ties with the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company, based in a mineral-rich region along the German-Polish border. The Guardian reported how the company "made use of Nazi slave labor from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz."
The U.S. government seized the company under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1942, and a report determined the steel and mining companies Prescott Bush worked for "have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country's war effort."
So does this make Bush's granddaddy a Nazi sympathizer and enabler? Not necessarily. It was just business. The Bushes wouldn't let the stigma of being linked to a murderous, totalitarian regime get in their way of making a few (or millions) of dollars. Making money from war and death is genetically ingrained in the Bush family.
Bush did not bother mentioning that little chapter of his family history when he was sucking up to the Israelis. He went on distorting the history of World War II. His suggestion that an earlier military confrontation -- violence, instead of talking -- would have prevented Hitler's aggression does not stand up to even modest scrutiny.
Dubya, no reader of history, tosses out the "appeasement" line devoid of any context or informed perspective. Bush's writers grabbed a slogan used to justify his reckless aggression in Iraq and refusal to talk to the Iranians 70 years after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier cut a deal with Hitler in Munich in 1938, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the current geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East.
The "comfort of appeasement" gave Der Fuhrer the green light to march into and seize the Sudetenland, an ethnic German region in Czechoslovakia, thus delaying the inevitable armed conflict with Anglo-Franco forces.
The French and British were ill prepared to challenge Germany militarily, and the memories of the horrors of World War I were still fresh. At the time, there was virtually no public support in those nations for a confrontation. As fashionable as it is to call Chamberlain and Daladier "appeasers" for allowing Hitler to take Czechoslovakia, what could they have done to stop him?
Even when the British and French did stand up to Hitler after the invasion of Poland in 1940, two years after Munich, the Anglo-Franco forces were hopelessly mismatched and the Wehrmacht drove them into the sea.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wisely noted, "I trust that a graduate student will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the 20th century (and now 21st). Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multiple errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938."
Bush also failed to mention the senator who lamented not talking with Hitler was William Borah, the Republican isolationist from Idaho. In 1939, Republicans in Congress did not want to appease Hitler; they pretended he didn't even exist.
They opposed President Franklin Roosevelt's lend-lease program to help Britain, France and other nations with vast amounts of war material to help them in their fight with Hitler. If the Republicans prevailed from 1939 to 1941, we'd all now be speaking German.
While Bush scoffs at talking with our perceived enemies, his defense secretary, Robert Gates, is certainly not on the same Neanderthal page. Rejecting the "my way or the highway" mentality of the cowboy president, Gates wants to open a dialogue with Iran.
The Washington Post reported on his desire to engage Tehran using incentives and pressure.
"We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage ... and then sit down and talk with them," Gates said. "If there is going to be a discussion, then they need something, too. We can't go to a discussion and be completely the demander, with them not feeling that they need anything from us."
In the Bush administration, that kind of enlightened thinking will get you fired. Gates also wants more people-to-people contacts between Americans and Iranians. Last week, he told the Academy of American Diplomacy, a group of retired diplomats, "My personal view would be we ought to look for ways outside the government to open channels and get more flow of people back and forth."
Bush prefers arrogance and isolation. It is beyond him to consider anything other than the bellicose bellowing that's created a foreign policy in the Middle East marked with serial failures. In his Knesset speech, he made one single reference to Palestine, offering cheap lip service to a situation he ignored through seven years of his presidency.
Yossi Beilin, an Israeli lawmaker and key architect of the Oslo peace accords, summed up Bush's remarks for Canada's CTV: "It was an embarrassing speech, a collection of slogans that someone wrote for him in order to be nice to Israel, or what he thinks is Israel, and to steer clear of anything concrete. It's a shame and a scandal, in my opinion."
Obama called Bush's gutter speech "exactly the kind of appalling attack that's divided our country and that alienates us from the world." He added Bush's message "wasn't about an actual policy argument, it was about politics ... about trying to scare the American people. And that's what will not work in this election."
Obama's rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, said, "President Bush's comparison of any Democrat to Nazi appeasers is offensive and outrageous, especially in the light of his failures in foreign policy. This is the kind of statement that has no place in any presidential address."
But Sen. Joseph Biden, the usually verbose chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said it best and was splendidly succinct in describing Bush's speech: "This is bullshit."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | May 20 2008 |