Israel Matzav

Jaw dropping comment of the day: Ahmadinejad, Bush: more similar than different?

A simply appalling hatchet job on US President George W. Bush appears at the Moonbat web site Common Ground News. What's more appalling is that Israel's YNet News site has chosen to reproduce the article. I, on the other hand, feel sorry for those of you who have recently eaten. So I will give you only a small teaser of the article, and then you can choose whether you want to sicken yourselves.

Both are highly controversial in their home countries and abroad, and would at first glance seem to be polar opposites. Yet, some common threads seem to link the two men – both in terms of their rise to power and their views on religion and the state.

Both men are leaders with shadowy pasts and a strong spiritual bent. To understand both Ahmadinejad’s and Bush's similarities, it is vital to analyze their rise to power. Both were outsiders on their respective national stages, and used this status to gain entrance into politics.

...

Election results from the US in 2004 revealed a country divided to the core and put the political divisions between rural and urban areas into focus. The Bush campaign was effective in appealing to red (rural) state voters who emphasized “moral values” deemed higher than their blue state counterparts’ when picking a candidate.

Interestingly, Ahmadinejad appealed to a similar rural population of Iran just as Bush had to rural America through a mix of social conservatism and promises to improve the lot of Iran’s underclass.

In both the US’s 2004 and Iran’s 2005 elections, religion’s role in politics was greatly increased. Both Bush and Ahmadinejad were able to tap into feelings of marginalization among conservative religious groups that were frustrated by liberal political forces in their countries.

Even more interestingly, the percentages of both countries’ populations who would classify themselves as religiously conservative are roughly the same.

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Once in office, these two leaders have also taken similar roads, particularly with regard to foreign policy.

Read it all if you can stand it.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:06 PM