My Grandpa Sense is Tingling (An Old Man vs. Obama vs. Hitler vs. Godwin's Law)

My wonderful BYU college paper printed the following editorial this morning:

Hitler and Obama

My wife and I took a trip down to St. George this weekend and we had an opportunity to talk with a great uncle who lived in Austria during World War II. He remembered he was six years old when he heard Hitler speak for the first time. He told us he had a very distinct feeling of how evil Hitler was. The conversation switched to politics later on and he told us that he had the exact same feeling when he heard Obama speak for the first time. There's the common saying that those who don't learn from history are bound to repeat it. I'm not a hard-core Republican or anything like that, but since he received the same revelation for these two people, shouldn't we be doing something?

CHRISTIAN ANDERSON
St. George

The wonder of this letter pretty much speaks for itself. Were it an anonymous letter, I would presume it some sort of sly satire against the sort of people who might actually write something like this. Unfortunately, this student has elected to have his name attached to the actual letter, something that no sly satirist would ever allow without some sort of winking comment in the letter itself to indicate that, no, I am not in fact that stupid.

I was immediately inspired to fire off the following response, which undoubtedly will not be published on Monday:

My Grandpa Sense is Tingling

Daily Universe,

Friday's letter from Christian Anderson has set a good many of us straight. After all, if his great uncle in St. George feels that Barack Obama is eeeevil - the same way he felt as a child in Austria when he heard Hitler (gasp!) speak - then all of this debate, issue-weighing and consideration of the abuses of the current administration is naught but a waste of time.

As Christian said, "I'm not a hard-core Republican or anything like that, but since he received the same revelation for these two people [Hitler and Obama], shouldn't we be doing something?" As a man of unrestrained passion and principle, I felt compelled to punch out a couple of bull moose and read the collected works of Walt Whitman before issuing a resounding "Yes!"

I'd like to thank the Daily Universe for printing that cogent, astute letter, but there's still a long way to go. Now that secondhand accounts from octogenarian immigrants are the standard, I'd like to suggest an elite force of such individuals determine the next election, rather than the farce we currently have in place called the electoral college. "McCain is a kind man", one might say, prompting a hundred thousand people in Miami to register Republican and watch reruns of the Dick Van Dyke show on Nick at Nite.

Dustin Steinacker

Christian's letter has been the butt of many jokes around campus. I left the following line out in the hopes that it wouldn't be venomous enough to entirely dismiss for publication: "I am inspired by the thought that this "Christian Anderson", an honest-to-God college student, may be receiving an actual University Degree in the foreseeable future. Good luck with that, Christian, though I wouldn't stick with a major until you consulted Herr Unkle Anderson first. One must not be a hardcore Republican to maintain a personal status as a dedicated idiot."