While the Decider is out of the country, we’ve been focused on national politics, and bitching at each other over which of our candidates is most pure, most electable, most liberal, most progressive, most like ourselves.
A recent news story about the Flightsuit’s tour of the Holocaust Museum in Israel was interesting, however.
Bush was visibly moved as he toured the site, said Yad Vashem's chairperson, Avner Shalev.
"Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes," Shalev said.
This little piece of propaganda showed up in a BBC report, the London newspapers, and the morning TV news here in Baltimore. OK, great – still don’t want to have a beer with the phony bastard, but it’s good to know he can muster up an ounce or two of empathy.
What caught my attention, however, was this little tidbit:
JERUSALEM -- U.S. President George W. Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial yesterday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial's chairperson said.
Think about that for a minute. The one guy on the planet that spent a trillion dollars on a war for oil and didn’t get any gasoline out of it, the guy that directed the sledgehammer of US military might against the flea of tyranny in Iraq now wants to criticize the military decisions of 60+ years ago?
Who does he think he is? Captain Courageous is the first US president to say this, that FDR was wrong. I would like to say to the Shrub, "You sir, are no FDR".
John J. McCloy, Roosevelt's assistant secretary of war, laid out the American rationale for inaction in a letter on Aug. 14, 1944.
"Such an operation could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere, and would in any case be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not be warrant use of our resources," he wrote.
Isn’t that interesting? Could we say exactly the same thing today about taking the focus off Afghanistan and instead directing a huge chunk of our military assets into Iraq? The guy that made that very same blunder, going into Iraq when the war should have been focused in Afghanistan, comes out and says "we should have bombed Auschwitz".
Now, maybe they should have bombed Auschwitz and maybe they shouldn’t have, I’m in no position to second guess the military minds that fought WWII.
Considering what’s happening right now in Iraq, The Chimpster has no right second guessing those guys either.