Bush Offers Saudis Tongue for Oil

While CNN this morning has a headline implying that Bush is offering tongue to the Saudi King to get oil prices down, there is one other historical piece of illogic that has too often shaped U.S. foreign policy and is clearly winning what little mind George Bush has.

It's always Munich 1938 for Bush and his kind and they are always Churchill and the rest of us are always Chamberlain. Someone else, whatever the convenient target is, is Hitler.

For years, it was the Soviets. And though they had their own criminalities they could be excoriated with, it was easy to call anyone in favor of dealing with them as an "Appeaser"; then it was Mao; then it was Ho Chi Minh; Castro; Khomeini and Iran; the Sandinistas; Saddam; Chavez; and now it is back to Iran again. So many faux Hitlers so little facts.

Poor Chamberlain, let his foolish ghost rest in peace, and stop making the most powerful country on earth, the U.S., into the Sudetenland.

But time after time the rhetoric goes there. And again on his latest awkward trip overseas, the alleged history major Bush and his black and white, pop history, version of the world came on full bore and should scare us shitless.

There are two key moments when this incredibly insipid and dangerous predeliction was exposed and I am hardly the first one to note it.