I missed Bush’s speech tonight. It offended me to learn that the speech was far less important than Fear Factor or The Swan, at least in the eyes of their respective networks’decision-makers. It seems to escape certain people, along with these network execs, that the office of the President Of The United States itself deserves a modicum of respect, despite one’s dislike of whoever is sitting in it.

I have read the full text, however. While instant messaging with a friend, he asked me what the President was saying this time. I think that Bush’s speeches, despite sounding familiar in terms of content, amount to his own way of cheerleading the cause. And I think that is good too. But, as I told my friend, I think it’s also his way of explaining to those who indulge in games of equivalence that he is not Hitler.

Glenn Reynolds and Mike Hendrix discuss the Bushitler meme that has been floating around. Says Prof. Glenn:

If Bush really were Hitler, it would be different. A Nazi America wouldn’t be worth saving, and its polity would be worth separating oneself from. But we’re so far from that situation, as Young herself notes, that such discussions are entirely academic, and those who are rooting against America in Iraq have hardly demonstrated the moral courage and personal sacrifice that such a serious step demands, if it is to be taken seriously. If Bush is really Hitler, is filing slanted copy a sufficient response? But the real problem isn’t that Bush is Hitler – just that he’s a Republican, which puts a very different face on things.

— Glenn Reynolds

Says Mike:

But their vision of America, thankfully, is nothing like true. We’re not Nazis, we’re not imperialists hellbent on bringing the entire world under our direct dominion, and we’re not living in a police state, despite even my own occasional griping about the slow erosion of our freedoms – an erosion usually (but not always) exacerbated by the very people on the Left who claim to be most worried about that. All of this is easily discernible to anybody who has the sang froid to look objectively at the world as it currently exists.

— Mike Hendrix: The price of overstatement

It reminds me of this passage from Bill Whittle:

If you genuinely, honestly believe you can compare George Bush to Adolph Hitler, it is only because you are so removed from exposure to the genuine horrors of the Nazi regime – routine street beatings, confiscation and destruction of businesses, homes and property, then deportation and extermination of millions of your own countrymen — that you are functionally incapable of the most basic and fundamental level of discrimination. If you can compare Abu Ghraib to a Nazi death camp with a straight face then you have never been to Abu Ghraib, or a Nazi death camp, or either – that is patently obvious, and it would be comically so if the stakes were not so monumentally high. Having never been exposed to genuine evil, you have literally no conception whatsoever of what it looks and smells and tastes like.

— Bill Whittle: Strength (Part 2)

It leaves me to wonder, ultimately, why the Bushitler crowd has not yet done what I think, at least on my side of the fence, the proper response to a truly evil, madman, Bushitler should be.