All Those Little Hitlers

There's a lot of talk about Iran's president Ahmadenijad being another Hitler. There are several things to note in this rhetoric. While the Hitler analogy has become so empty of meaning as to prove intellectually worthless, it still carries great emotional charge.

Much in the way that telling a child that the boogeyman is coming, the Bush admin hopes that calling every two-bit dictator a Hitler will raise the appropriate stink such that people will simply react to its noxiousness. ...

Most people don't have the historical consciousness to see the disanalogy in the Bush propaganda. Instead, Hitler is a symbol of incarnate evil and as such can be floated across the one-dimensional consciousness of most Americans and create paranoia and angst.

Since few Americans have that historical awareness required to see the fallacy in the Hitler analogy, they must attach it to something in their lives. The common fare on the 24/7 news channels creates a great petrie dish for breeding fear, paranoia, and hysteria.

Continually barraged with false alarms about bombs at airports, cannibal pedophiles, tornadoes, new episodes of 24, and so on, the media seem intent on maintaining that level of anxiety in which such emotionally charged symbols as the next Hitler can shed their nightmarish chrysalids.

Let's hope that the blogosphere can reach out beyond its borders and provide some actuality to dispel these ghouls and goblins that the Bush nightmare machine fabricates.

In this regard, the closely argued and logical approach adopted by Glenn Greenwald is certainly a part. But I fear that the Bush admin is beyond logical persuasion. As in any dialectic, the Bushites can pull in as many experts and facts as can their opponents. So ultimately, the issue becomes a pissing match.

That means the decision to go to war is prisoner to Bush's warped way of looking at the world. Immune to public opinion now, always giving credence to "gut" versus brain, this leader requires something more than logic to sway him.

Perhaps this is something the generals are lining up to bring to bear on him. I imagine that Seymour Hersh is right, and we'll begin to see some resignations of the generals en masse in the offing.

The brick bat might get through, although again that is a strategy that is the most precarious of all. Is there really anyone or anything that stands in Bush's way right now?