My Chanukka Bush

The image at left comes from the invitation  to George W. Bush's 2008 Chanuka party. Note the tree? See any menorah? Now, of course this was written off as simple little mistake and like Bush's calls for a Palestinian state, and the pressure he put on Israel to freeze construction, this funny little fo-pah (sp?) has been excused and forgotten.

Another great Bush Chanukka moment came in 2005. Unwilling to re-arrange his precious vacation, the panderer in chief staged a mock Chanuka celebration at the White House two weeks ahead of time. Some poor unwitting Jew even had to light the candles (8 of them for some reason) for the president's amusement and say the blessings. If Bush cared about Chanuka, and not the photo-op, he'd have had some Jews over to his vacation mansion on the actual holiday. But that's not what he did.

Though I didn't collect Bushisms - those funny lapses of syntax, grammar and sense, for which he was famous - I remain amused at the stupid thing he said on Chanukka 2001. “I couldn’t imagine someone like Osama Bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah.” This fails on two counts: First, "understanding the joy of XXX" sounds like something from a Christmas special. I expect Bush, like most moron gentiles, simply presumes that Chanuka and Christmas are interchangeable, so the tropes of one holiday can be farily applied to another. Second, Osama Bin Ladin, the guerrilla fighter at war with a superpower to establish a narrow theocracy, might be the one person on earth who BEST understands Chanuka. Politics and personal preferences aside, who is more of a modern Maccabee than he?