Some Thoughts On Comparing The President To Hitler

They seem to have won back their democracy, no thanks to the White House.

As a test of the state of “Bush the Nazi” rhetoric, I went to Google and typed in “Bush is a Nazi” and got 420,000 hits, well behind “Hitler was a Nazi” (654,000 hits), but then Hitler WAS a Nazi and had a 75-year head start. (Computer searches like this are very crude instruments. They sweep up many references that cannot fairly be listed as slurs. But they do offer a rough idea of the amount of name-calling.)

President Clinton did fairly well in the Nazi sweepstakes (158,000 hits, but that’s only 20,000 references for each presidential year, compared to 120,000 annually for the 3 1/2 year-incumbency of George Bush.) The odd thing is that I typed in the names of every Nazi I ever heard of, excluding only Hitler himself, and the group total was still less than George Bush gets alone. This might indicate that either that George Bush is by far the second most important Nazi of all time, or that the Democrats and the left now require some sedation.

But that was then, this is now…

And remember, that was five years ago. I’ll bet that a similar search now would provide much larger results.

18 thoughts on “Some Thoughts On Comparing The President To Hitler”

  1. Hmm… Very rough indeed. The search will also catch all the sites that complain that someone else said “Bush is a Nazi”, including the post I’m commenting on (and including this comment). What percent of the hits are actually vicious lies, as opposed to complaints about same? Therein lies the
    Tale, but doubtless less complaining is done for Hitler or Goebbels than for Bush or Clinton.

  2. Trilateral group was a nazi: 47,500
    Bilderberg group was a nazi: 42,800
    Council on Foreign Relations was a nazi: 169,000

    Meanwhile the bankers remain cloaked in secrecy.

  3. Josh, don’t you think that, in this case, you should put quotation marks around the expressions you are searching for?

  4. For that matter, putting quotation marks around all of the expressions in question yield a much lower number of results. Try it for yourself. And this is a much more informative test, even allowing for the issues raised by Mark-the-good-one above.

    “Bush was a Nazi” 4,530
    “Bush is a Nazi” 26,000
    “Obama is a Nazi” 8,200
    “Hitler was a Nazi” 3,080,000

  5. In Google, it might make more sense to search for Bush * Nazi, Obama * Nazi, and so on (“*” is the proximity search function, spanning two (unknown) intervening words). And, of course, many of the Nazi allusions to Bush involved Hitler (i.e., Bushitler), so there’s a lot out there that could be missed.

    You can also play around with more advanced searches, like Obama * (Hitler OR Nazi OR fascist).

  6. If you want to use an asterisk (the wild card operator) as a proximity search tool, you still need to use quotation marks around the expression you are searching for. See “www.googleguide.com/wildcard_operator.html” (or click on my name) for the details. And of course, for “Bush * Nazi”, we’d be lumping in “is” with “is not” as well as any other relationship.

  7. You can tweak the search, but nothing will be perfect unless you review the search results. One thing you can play with is the OR operator with various phrases.

  8. “Bush is a Nazi” site:dailykos.com 27,700 hits
    “Bush is a Nazi” site:thinkprogress.org 8,460 hits

    Your results may vary.

  9. Results 1 – 10 of about 27,700 from dailykos.com for “Bush is a Nazi”. (0.07 seconds)

    Results 1 – 10 of about 8,460 from thinkprogress.org for “Bush is a Nazi”. (0.06 seconds)

    The funny thing is when I click to see the next page of results:

    Results 11 – 11 of 11 from dailykos.com for “Bush is a Nazi”. (0.06 seconds)

    Results 11 – 18 of 18 from thinkprogress.org for “Bush is a Nazi”. (0.06 seconds)

    Sounds like Google is having problems. One more reason I’ve abandoned it. Bing is 28 and 136 respectively, and keeps those numbers as you move pages.

  10. I was thinking another problem with searching forums like dailykos is that people quote posts in their replies to show what they are replying to, and a search engine might or not be sophisticated about it handles quoted text.

  11. Google hides redundant search results. That plus the unusual structure of dKos’s posting system, probably accounts for the apparent disappearance of so many posts.

  12. I could be mistaken but I expect that plenty of Unitarian*Universalists were comparing U.S. President George W. Bush to Hitler and his policies to those of Nazi Germany not so long ago. . . Good letter to the editor though. Hopefully it well be published.

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