Try throwing shoes at Hitler instead.

It was gratifying to see some negative comments about my take on the Bush shoe attack. Some of it wasn't worth responding to, though the assertion that the Left does not hate America contradicts all I have experienced the past thirty years. For instance, I have been told that I shouldn't wear my USA t-shirt at certain pubs in Wuxi because it pisses certain people off. Wearing the shirt in Canada had earned me hard stares. Canadians, I am one, often define themselves as not or anti-American. I have gotten sick of it. It was playing devil's advocate with a socialist in Canada that started me on on my road to Damascus. And I have seen enough talk about America that would be self-evidently bigoted if it was instead spoken about a chosen victim group. This anti-Americanism comes unsolicited to me sometimes that I wonder what it would have been like to live in Nazi Germany. Immigrants coming to North America have commented that the attitudes they have seen expressed about Americans reminds them of the anti-semitism they experienced in Eastern Europe and Russia.

So my anti-Left rants are those of an apostate who was above all interested in being fair. The criticism of Bush is so un-hinged that I worry for humanity. Shoes and worse items should have been thrown at Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Castor, Hugo Chavez, Hitler, Mugabe, and Amin to name a few. The people brave enough to try to kill Hitler, were hung off meat hooks. Imagine what dictators above would have done if someone tried throwing shoes at them. Bush has accepted the abuse as the consequence of the hard decision he had to make. Presidents do have to make life and death decisions. Bush is like the bus driver, with 40 children on his bus, forced to choose between running over a girl to save the bus and running the bus off the cliff to save the girl, being fiercely criticized for running over the girl. His decisions were not zero-sum. Bush isn't evil. If anything, he should be criticized for his idealism. The Left can't distinguish basic decency from evil, as their treatment of Bush shows. And I can't help but comment on this.