I didn’t think that Bush could piss me off anymore. The malaise set in a while ago. I’d never seen someone make so many wrong decisions without making a single right one. Since his job is deciding — you might even call him the “The Decider“– you would think that he’d get occasionally get lucky and do the right thing. But it never happened and my Bush rage burned out.

Yesterday, he managed to reignite it. Speaking at Israel’s Holocaust Memorial, Bush said that FDR should have bombed Auschwitz. Now, this was bad enough but it was really a run of the mill stupidity from someone who constantly says outlandishly stupid things. What stoked my Bush-Hate fire was this line:

“I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls – young and old – stood strong for what they believe.”

This quote utterly reduces and misunderstands the horror of the death camps. A lot of people in Auschwitz did not stand strong for what they believe. A lot of them broke. A lot of them forsook their God. A lot of them went insane. A lot of them did terrible things to each other, not because of some moral fault, but because the situation was so fucking terrible. A lot of people were not strong. And most were murdered for no reason at all.

Are these people any less brave?

Is there bravery in a death camp?

I doubt it. In a death camp, you try to live. You do whatever it takes to live. You believe in death. You believe in rape. You believe in torture. You believe what you can see and what you see is shit. You become utterly dehumanized. There’s no bravery, no nobility and no fucking fun. You are a pig in a slaughterhouse and you are there to die. You do everything you can to live.

This cloud has no silver lining.

And it is not the duty of Bush or anyone who has not survived the experience to sit in judgment of those who have, to lightly throw around words like “bravery.” Even implying that those who remained religious were more brave than those who became atheists is offensive madness. It really says something about Bush.

And what it says it not good.