Republicans and independents often complain of being an outcast political minority in the heavily Democratic Washington, D.C. However, one parent was unprepared for the homework assignment that his child brought home from McKinley Tech Middle School: asking students to draw comparisons between Adolf Hitler and George W. Bush.
No, this was not an art class comparing painting styles (here and here if you want to compare and contrast)
The students were told to fill in a Venn diagram comparing and contrasting the two figures:
“Now that we have read about two men of power who abused their power in various ways, we will compare and contrast them and their actions. Please refer to your texts, ‘Fighting Hitler — A Holocaust Story’ and ‘Bush: Iraq War Justified Despite No WMD’ to compare and contrast former President George W. Bush and Hitler. We will use this in class tomorrow for an activity!”
The parent called to complain and was told that the assignment was part of a curriculum unit approved by the school system as part of a focus on both the Holocaust and the Iraq war.
A spokeswoman for D.C. Public Schools later said the two readings were among suggested curriculum the school system had previously approved but that the texts were not meant to be compared in the manner assigned by the teacher who “deeply regrets this mistake, and any suggestion to malign the presidency or make any comparison in this egregious way.” “Suggestion [of] . . . any comparison in this egregious way”? A bit more than a suggestion, I would think. It is like comparing Obama and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and has a certain loaded quality. It is like saying “Ebola has killed thousands of people. Bush killed thousands of people. Compare and contrast.” This is bit misleading without a tad more information.
What is interesting is that the assignment has the same quality as a push poll designed to influence or voters under the guise of conducting a poll. It has the same impact as the neutral poll used recently against a Democratic candidate when people were asked “What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if I told you she had had an abortion?”
How is this for the next Venn diagram: “Propaganda is used to to give biased or misleading information from a particular political point of view. Your last assignment sought to compare a recent president to a genocidal murdering fanatic that killed millions. Compare and contrast.”
Source: Washington Times
markkernes: “there’s no denying that Bush committed war crimes by instigating a war based on fraudulent data that he KNEW was fraudulent”
You’re wrong.
One, by procedure, the pre-war intelligence could not and did not trigger OIF. Operation Iraqi Freedom, as with all the enforcement actions for the Gulf War ceasefire between 1991 and 2003, was triggered or instigated by Saddam’s noncompliance and material breach of the UNSC resolutions.
As such, OIF was triggered by the March 2003 UNMOVIC Cluster Document (“about 100 unresolved disarmament issues”) in the same way that Operation Desert Fox was triggered by the December 1998 UNSCOM Butler Report.
Two, the pre-war intelligence that Bush presented was simply the intelligence that was available. Congressmen, Democrats and Republicans, who independently reviewed the same pre-war intelligence largely shared Bush’s determination. In 2008, a partisan Democrat-slanted Senate Select Committee on Intelligence analyzed pre-war statements by Bush administration officials and concluded they were largely “substantiated by intelligence”.
See http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/080605/phase2a.pdf . *
* Make sure to read the minority views statement beginning on page 100 of the report. My criticism is the markedly partisan Committee report stripped out the context of President Clinton’s Iraq enforcement precedent, UNSC resolutions, burden of proof and standard of compliance for Iraq, contemporary Congressional assessments of the pre-war intelligence, and much of the Duelfer Report’s findings. The position that the US President should emphasize dissenting intelligence analysis in public presentation of policy is also abnormal.