Vinyl Turnip:
The point is that calling Bush all those things when it was evident to pretty much everyone that he wasn’t was the political equivalent of “crying wolf.” And now that there’s a real wolf (or something much closer, at least) in the White House, people don’t listen when you yell, “Wolf! Wolf!”
It IS foolish. Words mean things and how they are taken means things as well. It’s ‘boy who cried wolf.’ When you over-exaggerate a position, it leaves you less rhetorical room later for a more egregious violation. It normalizes the rhetoric so that it is easier to ignore it when a worse case comes along. Let’s not pretend that Bush was a good president and let’s certainly not pretend that the majority of his policies were good. Escalating the rhetoric though to extremes made it easier to ignore the same rhetoric when applied to a much more dangerous person. So back then when we were talking about Bush’s brownshirts and how democracy was under attack (and I know that apparently some of you don’t remember that, I don’t know what to tell you. I can certainly remember those exact phrases, some of which came out of my mouth.) it was ignored as needless alarmism. Now we need those words about attacks on the justice department and rather than being seen as real warnings, they are similarly being seen as rhetorical excess.
Clearly we need some kind of rhetoric hedge fund.
But at the time no one in their wildest imagination thought that someone like Trump was in the wings. With the possible exception of Nixon, Bush was the most incompetent president we had seen in nearly a hundred years. He bungled us into two wars that we have been unable to completely extract ourselves from some 15 years later, and nearly brought on the second great depression. Strong language was entirely called for. Its just that it with 20/20 hindsight out that as bad as he was he wasn’t quite to the level of what we see now.
Should we stop calling the Trump administration, a corrupt, dumpster fire, with fascist leanings just on the off chance that a future president will moon the UN and send out the Secret Service to arrest journalists who write against him? And should we avoid criticizing that one because his successor could decide to nuke Los Angeles because they didn’t vote for him?
Well, yeah. We need to be honest and avoid exaggerating. There’s no need to exaggerate, because Trump is bad enough without it.
I mean, I’m not exaggerating when I say Trump is evil. He clearly would hurt others to help himself, and that is always the definition of evil I use when talking about it. I have harsher words for someone who actively intends harm, should such arise.
I will compare Trump to Hitler, but I won’t say he is Hitler, because I know that he isn’t Hitler.
I never engaged in the rhetoric about Bush, either. And I didn’t really see much of it on my own. I think it was in certain lefty circles, and I wasn’t a part of those. I actually was in the circles where it took some time to actually hear about everything bad Bush did.
Exaggeration gives your opponents a way to undermine you, so I find it useless as a rhetorical strategy. Great for venting, though.
I must protest! Dick was outstandingly venal, paranoid and twisted but he had some basic core competencies. Thank Og we did not get him in the age of the socialnet reinforcing algorithm.
Comparisons between GWBush and Hi1ter existed, but not among serious or half serious people. If you want the leftie bumper sticker slogan of the day, it would be Bush Lied, People Died.
Searches for Hitler on google have a well-known seasonal trend, peaking in April. They were higher in 2004 and 2005 but from 2006- the present they didn’t change too much. I don’t see evidence of any exceptionally high amount of comparisons to Hitler during the Bush era, except insofar as 2005 was the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII.
“Well known”: I kid. But it is striking. Chart: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=hitler
I tweet: https://twitter.com/MeasureMeasure/status/1072710223318540288