*rumblerumble* Look Out! *rumblerumble* It's Awake!

Today is September the 10th. In American political discourse, metaphorically that date represents blissful ignorance of the "lurking terrorist threat." Significant that the following happened to me today.

Today I stumbled upon a site called "listverse" that has "top 10's" of a multitude of things. Among these are "Top 10 most evil men" and "Top 10 worst living dictators." These lists contain people like Stalin, Vlad "The Impaler" Tepes, Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe.

The first user comment on both lists?

"Where's Dick Cheney?"

Okay, look. I understand that thanks to Karl Rove's divide-and-conquer political scheming, Americans of opposing political stripes regard one another as irredeemably evil. But the Bush Administration, while jingoistic, furtive, callous and bound to an at-best questionable ideology, is not Nazi Germany.

The quasi-legal detention centre at Guantanamo is not a concentration camp. Toppling Saddam and installing even the most servile of Iraqi puppet regimes is not morally equivalent to annexing Poland or Tibet and systematically exterminating the indigenous population. Despite what your local anti-globo protester may tell you, Dick Cheney is *not* scheming to conquer, imprison and murder everyone on the Earth who disagrees with his political views.

This is *NOT* to say that I back the Bush administration, or even any particular policy they might espouse. But hysterically lumping the current bunch of semi-competent ideologues in with history's greatest monsters is, AT BEST, disingenuous and at worst, brazenly if not deliberately ignorant. "Godwinning" American politics by declaring Bush a Nazi or Hillary a Pinko Commie entirely defeats the purpose of public discourse.

Knock it off.

That is all.