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The Dreadful Prospect: Faux More Years!

Just as Hitler’s image-makers turned this mousy brown-haired little man into a larger-than-life Arayan god in the minds of a gullible German public, the marketers behind George W. Bush are re-positioning a Connecticut-born prep-school cheerleader into a faux war hero, and gullible Americans are buying it.

Years ago when I was a high school student spending a year in a school in Darmstadt, Germany, there was a little dark-haired man named Hans who was the handyman in my father’s host technical institute. He once explained that his real name wasn’t Hans, it was Adolf, but that during the Hitler years, the Nazis had pressured him to change his name “because they said I was too small and scrawny to have the same name as Der Fuehrer.” Of course, Hitler himself was small and scrawny and brown-haired, but the whole thing was image, and the image of the Fuehrer had to be mega-macho.



The same thing is happening now with President Bush.



Here’s a guy who was a New England preppy and cheerleader in his youth, who has more recently been “re-positioned,” as Madison Avenue likes to put it, as a Texas cowboy, a guy who can make jokes like, “People criticize me saying I swagger. Well we have a name for that in Texas—it’s called walking,” and who tells insurgents who are killing American GI’s every day to “bring ‘em on.” Here’s a guy who supposedly supported the Vietnam war but who, after getting his politically well-connected father to pull strings and get him safely into the Air National Guard, carefully checked a box saying he did “not want” to be available for overseas duty (there are probably a lot of Guard troops in Iraq today who wish they’d had a box like that to check when they signed up). And yet now this faux cowpoke and weekend warrior is being touted as a tough-guy hero while his opponent, John Kerry, who did sign up to go fight in Vietnam, and did go, getting wounded and earning badges for valor under fire, is mocked as some kind of wishy-washy wimpy New England preppy.



The marketing effort being applied to the Bush candidacy is so intense that, just as the Nazis made my father’s technical assistant Adolf change his name to Hans, Bush’s own father, George H.W. Bush—former president and World War II bomber pilot—was not invited to speak at the convention. Why this remarkable and insulting omission in a convention that featured references to Bush’s “tough-love” mother, Barbara, and to his wife and daughters? Because Papa Bush, with his whiney voice and limp-wristed mannerisms, has always suffered with this image of being a wimp.



With the Republican Party, image is everything, and Daddy Bush was an embarrassment to his own son! Now that’s Family Values for you.



Image is everything and reality is brushed aside. Bush, in his acceptance speech at the convention, spoke of Kerry’s campaign promises as representing $2 trillion in new spending, completely ignoring that his own four years in office have actually added $2 trillion to the deficit. He talked of improving the nation’s health care, ignoring that five million more people have lost their medical insurance during his term of office. He spoke of improving the nation’s economy and adding jobs, when his first term of office has seen a net loss of nearly 2 million jobs—the first such decline during a presidency since Herbert Hoover.



The incredible thing is that such image-making works. No one is interested in hearing about what the reality is.



Just as most ordinary Germans thought of Hitler as an ubermensch, a larger-than-life super Arayan, a god-like leader, many average Americans seemingly believe the bilge being put out there by Bush’s marketers, that he is a strong, heroic leader. Like the German public, which turned to the “heroic” Hitler to “save” them from the Jews and Reds who were allegedly threatening to destroy the German nation, Americans are turning to the “heroic” Bush to “save” them from the terrorists and gays and liberals who are allegedly threatening to destroy the American way of life.



Of course, it’s only fair to point out that John Kerry has played right into the Bush campaign’s hands.



For the rest of this column, please go (at no charge) to This Can't Be Happening! .

 
 

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