George W. Bush is not a Nazi.
Obvious enough. The fact that the President of the United States is not a member of the Nazi Party should be as obvious as the fact that he is also not a Spice Girl, a Jedi Knight or French.
But I still have to point it out, because Bush-hatred and the time-honored practice of leftists labeling conservatives as "Nazis" have brought things to such a fever pitch that non-news has become news, even for allegedly "serious" networks.
Case in point: CNN ran a story Sunday night on Prescott Bush, George Bush Sr.'s father and George W's grandfather. Documents have just been released confirming that Prescott was one of several directors at the Union Banking Corporation, a New York investment bank that was owned by a bank controlled partially by German industrialist Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen had been an early contributor to Adolf Hitler in Germany but broke off with the Nazis in 1938 over their persecution of Catholics and Jews.
That's it. That's the whole story.
This is not news. This is trivia. This is not something for serious people to look into CNN cameras and read to the country, nor is it something for serious CNN commentators to call "interesting" because it has come on the heels of the news about Gov.-elect Schwarzenegger's "praise" for Hitler.
Yes, it is indeed interesting that a made-up news story about Bush being connected with Nazis followed a made-up news story about Arnold liking Nazis - that is, in the Bizarro World where good is bad, up is down, and McDonald's cooks its food less than three days in advance. But back to Bush.
In the New Hampshire Gazett, John Buchanan wrote, "For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the mainstream U.S. media." He went on to note that these "essential" facts about the Bush dynasty have popped up here and there on the Internet but "were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes." Well, now they're documented diatribes. Congratulations!
I wonder how long it will take Buchanan to uncover Hitler's sinister connection to Kevin Bacon.
The comparison of any politician to the Nazi regime is not acceptable. Joking aside, Nazis aren't funny. In fact, if someone's funny quotient were inversely proportional to the amount of innocent lives they'd ended, Hitler would be the third-least funny person of the 20th century.
So it should be no surprise that it's increasingly difficult for conservatives to laugh off such slander. Six million Jews were killed deliberately and systematically in the Holocaust alone. No fault or shortcoming of the Republican Party could possibly equal that - not even Rush's drug addiction or Bush's "lying" about WMDs in Iraq.
Jonah Goldberg of the National Review has pointed out that such vitriol ultimately adds up to only one thing: Holocaust denial. Goldberg is absolutely right. If "Nazism" has become the new liberal code word for "anything I don't agree with," then the tragedy of the Holocaust is cheapened, debased and eventually maybe even forgotten.
Hyperbole? Maybe. But such nonsense has turned some recent American journalism into "Six Degrees of Hitler."
Eric Spratling is a journalism senior. Reach him at eric.spratling@asu.edu.
