I'm looking for some names for my Binder Clip Monsters, pictured below. Right now all I have are Pretzel, Stouffer, and Bernice. Pretzel and Stouffer come from the name of a law firm that does business with our library from time to time - my coworker was reading their address out loud and I just couldn't help myself - and Bernice comes from, well, Bernice. These are fine names, all of them, but do they really do my creations justice? Send me an email if you'd like to suggest a name, and if I like it, I may send you a Clip Monster of your very own (some assembly required). No, really.

I don't know what angers me more: that our alleged President Bush used the term "Hitlerism" in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, or that "Hitlerism" is actually a word. Having not heard the speech myself, I was alerted to Shrubby's use of this seemingly made up word by the Rabbit Blog, one of my favorite places on the web since the untimely demise of Filler (which was the brainchild of Rabbit's Heather Havrilesky and artist Terry Colon). Intrigued and incensed, I immediately Googled "Hitlerism" to see if it was in fact kosher, expecting to get nothing but the transcript of Bush's address, but lo and behold, there were over four thousand hits. Pretty good for something coming out of the mouth of our Mangler-in-Chief. Here's the definition, from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:

The fascistic and nationalistic theories and practices of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

Okay. Straightforward enough. But why not use the term "fascism"? Or "Nazism"? Either would have been a little less obscure. Could it possibly have had anything to do with the Administration's inexorable march to oust Saddam Hussein, whom Bush the Elder labelled as "worse than Hitler" shortly before the First Gulf War back in 1991? Why else favor a term scoring 4,000 hits on Google over one that turns up 359,000? Now what seemed to me at first to be another amusing Bushism (hey, you've got one too, Mr. President!) is looking a little more clever. And a lot more sinister.

But before I veer off entirely into Gloom-and-Doom-Land - population roughly six billion - Googling "Hitlerism" did also yield a page called Hitlerism vs. Odinism. I bet Odinism could lay the smack down on Hitlerism any day of the week - Bushism, too. In fact, I think we should have a WWF (wait, it's WWE now, isn't it?) style Battle Royale between all of the isms, and see who's left standing when the dust settles. That would be fifty bucks well spent on Pay-Per-View...