Thursday, January 17, 2008

YW Cheers Bush, Sun Rises in East

I'm really disgusted at the hyperbolic praise Bush has been getting for stating the obvious. During his recent trip to Yad Vashem, our famously incurious president saw an aerial photo of Auschwitz and, according to an eavesdropping museum director, asked his Secretary of State: Why didn't Roosevelt bomb it?

A perfectly obvious question, no? And one most of us ask well before our fiftieth birthday. So why is the Yeshiva World community throwing roses at his feet? I don't blame the YW readers for being unaware that Bill Clinton expressed precisely the same sentiment at the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 1993 --and not in the form of a wistful, infantile question, either. But why haven't they read to the bottom of the article referenced in the post? That's where they would have discovered that Bush isn't the first American president to have acknowledged the glaringly self-evident: The Allied war managers blew it.

It's also a little odd to see the YW crowd celebrating the president for weeping a little as he toured the museum. Bill Clinton also cried when he went to Yad Vashem, though if memory serves, the right dismissed that another Slick Willie trick. They said the same thing when Hillary Clinton cried in NH a few weeks ago. Her tears were a cold and calculating move to make herself appear human, but Bush's were real? How can you tell?

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