How Would Our Politicians Have Handled The Hitler Mocking Finnish Dog?

A bit of a whimsical post today as we look into a theoretical situation and try to imagine how our political class may have handled a historical situation. The specific historical situation we are referring to was described in a January 7, 2011 Associated Press report. Historians found a set of World War II documents that revealed a weird obsession that Hitler's German government had with a Finnish dog.

A Finnish husband and wife owned a mixed breed dog that the wife, a German living in Finland who despised the Nazis, had named Hitler. The reason for the name: the dog raised his front paw in a manner that looked like the "Hail Hitler" salute we have all seen in historical footage when he heard the name"Hitler" mentioned.

This dog and its imitation of the Hitler salute made elements of the German government crazy:

• Just months prior to the Germans massive invasion of Russia, Germany's Foreign Office ordered its diplomats in Finland to gather evidence on the dog and its owner.
• The German Vice Consul in the Helsinki embassy documented the dog's behavior which was sent to Berlin.
• The husband was ordered to the German embassy in Helsinki to be questioned by the German embassy personnel about the dog and its salute.
• The husband claimed that the dog did it only a few times many years before and denied that he called the dog Hitler. The embassy personnel were doubtful of his truthfulness and wrote back to Berlin that he was lying.
• According to the article, three ministries in the German government, the Foreign Office, the Economy Ministry and Hitler's Chancellery, meticulously filed detailed reports on the dog.
• The Economy Ministry tried to get a German company to stop supplying the husband's Finnish business with products in an attempt to drive it out of business, an attempt that was unsuccessful.
• The Foreign Office explored ways to bring the husband to trial for insulting Hitler but could not come up with any witnesses to testify.

All of these resources eventually gave up doing anything in reprisal  for the dog's reputed behavior.

Talk about screwed up priorities. The German nation and its army is in the middle of a World War across two continents, it is about to launch an invasion of Russia that will be instrumental in deciding who wins and who loses the war, and extensive government resources are being used in an attempt to punish a dog for doing a probably cute imitation of the Hitler salute. Not only did they expend a lot of time and effort, nothing ever came of the pooch vendetta. The dog died of natural causes years later.

However, I am not sure that our political class and the government it runs could have done much better. How might our politicians handled the situation:

• They could not have used the Security and Exchange Commission to ruin the husband's business from a financial perspective since dozens of SEC employees were found to be heavily into Internet pornography searching on work time and on government computers. Much like their failure to notice the looming Great Recession, they would have been unlikely to ever get around to crashing this Finn's business, given their Internet surfing obsession.
• The could not have used the State Department since those employees are so busy building grandiose embassies in Afghanistan ( $500 million) and in London ($1 billion) that they also would have never gotten around to contacting the Finnish government.
• They could not have used the Department of Education to re-educate the dog since the Department has no clue what is going on in other countries, even though those countries are doing a far better job of educating their kids; the Department apparently has done no benchmarking of their successful approaches to education. Forget about mind retraining an insulting foreign dog.
• They could not use Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac from a financial perspective since all those organizations do is require an endless supply of billion of dollars in government bailouts every month without solving anything. We could not afford them.
• They could not use our military forces since we have stretched them so thin around the world, mostly in unnecessary places to fight non-existent threats, that we would have no troops to spare to go after the dog.
• The could not use themselves since they tend to leave town early to campaign for their re-election and they get so tied up with trivial matters that they are never around to get anything substantive done. However, they would appoint a Presidential commission to look into the disrespectful dog with the intent of never using the Commission's findings.

Looks like the dog would be safe whether Hitler's cronies went after it or out political cronies went after it. It always amazes me that politicians, in this country and this era, or in other countries and other eras, can have such screwed up priorities and waste so much wealth and effort on trivial matters.

How much worse are the Germans obsessing about a dog in a foreign country than our political class who actually debated, drafted, and passed a law regulating the sound volume of television commercials in 2010? How much worse are the Germans obsessing about a dog in a foreign country than our political class that passed a failed economic stimulus program to study insects in Africa, replace windows in a shuttered visitors' center at Mt. St. Helen's,  or to replace a heating system in a church? How much worse are the Germans obsessing about a dog in a foreign country than our political class who formally debated how to set up a different playoff system for college football?

Before we judge the German's too harshly, we have to realize that our politicians and the government it runs have wasted a lot of resources and wealth chasing just as irrelevant issues and programs. As a Colorado Senator recently said, the political class has put over $13 TRILLION on the nation's balance sheet and we have nothing to show for it.

The bad omen is that the German's eventually lost the war. How much the Finnish dog contributed to their diversion of attention from the real issues is unknown. Let's hope that we never have to ask the similar question of our political class: were we brought down as a great and free nation because our politicians were chasing college football playoffs and television commercial sound volumes rather than fixing our failing public schools, developing a viable drug addiction program, developing a viable national energy policy, fixing our leaky borders, getting Federal spending under control etc.



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