Garfield with guns...

[bridgit]

'We're hearing a lot about Hitler, fascism and appeasement these days as the Bush administration tries to conflate today's military adventures with America's "good war", World War II. But Americans who like to portray the conflict in the Middle East in civilizational terms need to confront the notion that they are attacking what they call "Islamic fascism" not because it represents anything different from their own values, but because it possibly represents the future of their own culture. Like poles repel, after all.

America's self-image is of the lonely caped crusader of comics, Superman. I think a more appropriate analogy would be the faintly entertaining but almost always irritating fat cat Garfield, albeit with more lethal weapons than bad breath at its disposal.

The comparison to Garfield is not accidental, as the latest report by the Trust for America's Health showed a marked increase in the number of overweight and obese Americans. Another reason this analogy strikes a nerve is that the cat's handler is an incompetent buffoon - comparisons to the current leadership seem almost too easy from there. The analogy means, unfortunately, that the Middle East must be compared to lasagna, but that probably reads as among the nicest things said about the region recently.

Fat okay, but where do the guns come into it? Read on' http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HI02Ak03.html

[tocqueville]

1. Fascists? Look who's talking

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - The aggressive new campaign by the administration of President George W Bush to depict US foes in the Middle East as "fascists" and its domestic critics as "appeasers" owes a great deal to steadily intensifying efforts by the right-wing press over the past several months to draw the same comparison.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News Network and the Weekly Standard, as well as the Washington Times, which is controlled by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, and the neo-conservative New York Sun, have consistently and with increasing frequency framed the challenges faced by Washington in the region in the context of the rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s, according to a search of the Nexis database.

All of those outlets, as well as two other right-wing US magazines - the National Review and The American Spectator - far outpaced their commercial rivals in the frequency of their use of keywords and names such as "appeasement", "fascism" and "Hitler", particularly with respect to Iran and its controversial president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

For example, Nexis cited 56 uses of "Islamofascist" or "Islamofascism" in separate programs or segments aired by Fox News, compared with 24 by CNN, over the past year. Even more striking, the same terms were used in 115 different articles or columns in the Washington Times, compared with only eight in the Washington Post over the same period, according to a breakdown by Nexis.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HI02Ak04.html

[bridgit]

2. Ve haf vays to make you shut up...

...by playing the good old Nazi card. The American right-wing and neo-con press has been playing it with enthusiasm, paving the way for the Bush administration to smear its critics. - Jim Lobe

[tocqueville]

3. brilliant paraphrase

:toast:

[bridgit]

4. cheers tocqueville, friend...

:toast:

[Blue_Tires]

5. ttt

nt