Who would bin Laden vote for?

By Capt. Fogg

It's been called Godwin's Law, the idea that the longer a political dialog continues, the more likely Hitler will be brought up. Of course, it's not a law; the longer any conversation continues, the more likely that anything will come up, but reductio ad Hitlerium as other wags have dubbed it, does seem to occur all too often when the subject is a government we dislike, a political figure we hate or when a policy we are trying to justify needs a good old fashioned bogeyman to override considerations of accuracy, truthfulness or sometimes even sanity.

The notion that trying to deal with any bogeyman without the use of bombs and tanks and sanctions is "appeasement," has been a standard gambit since British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the Munich Agreement of 1938, but rarely if ever has it been an apt analogy but rather a clumsy attempt to denounce diplomacy as a political tool. Is it any kind of surprise that it was used by the neocons against continuing to inspect and assess Iraq's nuclear potential? If that were true, airport security checks would be "appeasing terrorists" which makes no sense.

Did Nikita Khruschev really back Kennedy over Nixon because Kennedy was "soft on Communism?" Did Ho Chi Min really want Hubert Humphrey to win? Are we really not sick and disgusted of all this idiocy by now?

Hardly surprising that the strutting little Commander Guy has little other defense to the suggestion that talks with "evildoers" may sometimes be productive. No, talking to Adolph Hitler in 1938 wasn't a way to keep him from invading Poland the following year, but then not talking to Fidel Castro hasn't done a damned thing while we continue to appease the Saudi Royal Family and their medieval monarchy.

Let's be honest. Dealing sensibly with the Germans in 1918 might have made a difference and dealing with Palestinians differently in 1948 might have made a difference, but when it comes to deciding when it's time to stop trying and to start bombing isn't something the "Decider" seems to be good at deciding, is it?

Analogies can be helpful, but only in so far as they are honest and accurate. Neither of those terms applies to much we hear from the "Warpresident" and his latest jive from Jerusalem insisting that Barack Obama and other Democrats would endanger Israel and perhaps the world by actually engaging Ahmadenejad and other bogeymen in a conversation. "rewarding bad behavior" is the typical administration phrasing, as though trigger happy America is the world's school teacher, but either way, it's an opinion much related to past failures and with little success to its credit.

It's the sort of thing he hopes Israel will buy into, since he would love to have them pressure American Jews into supporting Republicans. In my opinion, that's bad behavior; the kind dishonesty and cowardice usually produces and I would hate to see the losers, crooks, cowards and failures we flatter by calling Neocons, rewarded for it.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)