Germany, Bush, Neanderthal and Marx

I read an article on ZDnet today. The article reported that the Germans had been depicting Bush in editorial cartoons as a chimpanzee but just today, German officials had referred to Bush as a Neanderthal because of his lack of ehrm, well, judgement on environmental issues that face the entire globe.

The author remarked that he thought Neanderthal was further advanced than Chimpanzees.

I thought I would put my degree in anthropology to use for once and answer his question for him. So I went to the "Talk Back" portion of his article to reply and before replying started reading some of the things people had posted there.

I confess that I got completely caught up in answering the ignorantsia who had posted there. By the way, I just made up the word, 'ignorantsia' to combat the anti-intelligence, anti-science, anti-environment, etc., masses who call anyone that is smarter than them the intelligentsia. Please feel free to use it and pass it on.

I should know better than to get into online arguments with the ignorantsia but I couldn't help myself. One guy was equating Marxism and socialism with the issue of global warming. How could I not respond to that? He thinks that the environmentalist movement is all some evil plot hatched by anti-capitalists, anti-American Marxist types. Huh?

Another guy in California was posting six year old like arguments, basically if someone didn't agree with him, his answer was, "if you hate America so much why don't you leave?"

I wasted at least an entire hour posting replies. At first I attempted to use reason to make these crazy paranoid people realize that not everybody is out to get them. It didn't help that one of the people I agreed with was a British citizen with an inelegant fondness for the term, "fat-sucking Americans".

One reasonable and compassionate person was getting bombarded with hate replies because he used Al Gore in one of his posts. It makes me sick that the neo-conservative machine has somehow managed to make a Nobel prize winning American into a goon.

But back to the original content of the article. Apparently the Germans have regularly been depicting Bush in their cartoons as a chimpanzee like character. But after the frustrations of his unbending unrelenting policies or lack of policies on the enviroment, one German official was said to have referred to our little Texas president as a Neanderthal.

Now I take issue with that. Homo sapien neanderthalis was not the brute that science museums of the 60's created. HSN (or Neanderthal) was thoughtful, intelligent and this has been proven. HSN buried his dead. HSN took care of the elderly and the sick. Unfortunately by referring to Bush as a neanderthal, the Germans have once again relegated the hard working, caring HSN to uncaring brute and I for one, am mad about THAT.