Hinderaker’s Man-Crush on Bush Unabated

John Hinderaker, aka “Assmissile” of the increasingly absurdist Powerline Blog, once described our current President Bush as a “man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius,” and later cooed about his “an amazing record of progress” in Iraq.

Well, he’s at it again. Proving once again that idiot neocons shouldn’t attempt historical analogy, Assmissile compares Bush to Winston Churchill:

Our situation is a little different from the one Churchill faced in the 1930s. Rather than being a voice in the wilderness, our Churchill is actually President. But taking a firm stand against the great evil of our time has made President Bush as unpopular as Churchill was before Munich.

This comparison is inapt to the point of cretinism, on so many different levels. But let’s attempt a little deconstruction. First, Churchill versus Shrub.

Starting with literacy: Churchill likely wrote more books and articles than W has read in his life. He was a highly sought after correspondent, penning hundreds of articles. Churchill was a master wordsmith, who toiled to use the perfect word, in the perfect context.

Bush thinks “disassemble” means to “not tell the truth.”

Churchill was a brilliant writer and perhaps the greatest orator of the last century. Bush is a banal speaker, who spews trite nonsense like “I think any time you murder somebody, you’re a criminal,” once bragged that he never stop thinking of new ways to harm our country, and inspired Norman Mailer to remark, “”What he [Bush] does to the English language is a species of catastrophe all by itself.”

Churchill was a brilliant man of diverse interests and talent. He wrote plays. He was an accomplished painter. He built lakes, and was an artisan bricklayer. He was a visionary who fostered the development of the modern tank, and the introduction of the 15″ gun into the British Navy.

Bush hacks brush and rides a bike.

In terms of policy, as President of the Board of Trade, Churchill helped usher in important reforms to protect Britain’s working class from poverty, disease and unemployment, and protect them from the anomalies of the free market. Bush has sought to erode those protections for the working class and the poor in his own country, and during his presidency, millions of more Americans have slipped into poverty, and gone without health insurance.

When Churchill took the office of Prime Minister, he was one of the most savvy and experienced politicians and statesmen of his era, and had experience in several cabinets and virtually every department of Britain’s government from Admiralty, Munitions, Home Secretary, and the Treasury. Bush was governor of Texas, a weak governor state, and possessed no practical experience in federal government.

Churchill possessed amazing intellectual curiosity. He was a voracious reader, who tried to master every subject with which he came into contact, until he could lecture the experts on their own subject.

Bush possesses the intellectual curiousity of a titmouse. He was shocked to hear that Iraqis were both Sunnis and Shiites; he had thought they were Muslim.

Finally, Churchill possessed enormous personal courage. As a soldier, Churchill repeatedly sought combat assignments, using family influence and pulling strings to get into the fighting. Bush spent his nation’s war cowering in Texas and Alabama, after using family influence to stay out of the fighting. Churchill did more fighting as a reporter during the Boer War than Bush did as a soldier.

Churchill was able to master himself, and master his use of alcohol. He drank nearly every day, without ill effect. Bush is a dry drunk who couldn’t handle his booze and had to stop drinking because drink became his master.

Churchill was an inexhaustible worker, staying up into the wee hours of the morning to finish an article, work on a book, or polish a speech. Bush likes to watch TV, and go to bed early.

Sorry, Assmissile, but George Bush is no Winston Churchill.

Now, I would be remiss if I failed to note the most idiotic part of Assmissile’s flattery:

But taking a firm stand against the great evil of our time has made President Bush as unpopular as Churchill was before Munich.

First of all, Bush is not unpopular because he took a firm stand against the great evil of our time. He’s unpopular because he led this country into a costly, uneccessary and disastrous war on the basis of a pack of lies and a pile bullshit.

When Churchill warned about the dangers posed by German re-armament, he backed his position with solid data on German war production, citing actual numbers and capabilities of aircraft, artillery, and armaments.

When Bush warned about the dangers posed by Saddam’s WMDs, he backed his position with “false” and “deliberately misleading” data gleaned from dubious sources like a drunk named “Curveball” and suspected Iranian agent Ahmed Chalabi.

Churchill can be admired for his warnings about the threat of Nazi Germany because his warnings were proven correct. Hitler demonstrably acquired the armed might to threaten his neighbors. Saddam’s Iraq was weak, economically, politically and military, and Bush’s warnings that Iraq was on the verge of acquiring nukes turned out to be utterly false. But Hinderaker, blinded by BAS (Bush Ardor Syndrome) cannot see the difference. It took the all the world’s great powers tens of millions of men and nearly 6 years to defeat Hitler; Saddam’s regime was toppled militarily in a few weeks with a couple of divisions. Only in the shallow, fetid, Bush/idol-worshipping mind of John Hinderaker and his ilk is Bush entitled to an equivalent level of admiration for being dead fucking wrong about everything to which Churchill is entitled for being right.

I realize it is unfair to expect Assmissile to take enough time away from Bush-fluffing to actually learn anything about the great man to whom he is comparing Bush, but responsibility for Churchill’s unpopularity before Munich had more to do with his positions on India and on King Edward’s abdication than it did with his Cassandra-like warnings about Hitler. In fact, his quixotic support for Edward in the wake of the Mrs. Simpson affair undermined growing support he had garnered for a tougher position on rearmament prior to Munich.

But it shouldn’t be too much to expect Assmissile to recall recent history. When Bush first took “a firm stand” against evil in the wake of 9/11, he experienced unprecedented popularity. When he launched the invasion of Iraq, and landed on a carrier flight deck to proclaim “Mission Accomplished” he was wildly popular.

Bush’s current dismal approval ratings do not result from his making a stand against evil, they result from his sheer incompetence, his misleading the American people (unintentionally or otherwise) and diverting the fight against terrorism through Iraq. Five years after 9/11, bin Laden is still at large, and has succeeded in rebuilding his terror network, largely because of Bush’s egregious mistakes. That is why he is unpopular.

What Hinderaker does to history and to Churchill’s memory by comparing him to Bush is, to borrow a phrase, a species of catastrophe all by itself.