I've got a much longer piece on this sitting on the shelf, half-baked, but I wanted to make a note of this before it rolled forever into my browsing history.

To make a really long story short, GW Bush's grandfather once sat on the board of directors of a bank which held some investments in Germany during WWII. From this, one is supposed to draw the inference that Bush's grandfather was an avid Nazi supporter. Sounds good until you hear, as Paul Harvey puts it, the rest of the story...

One of Phillips's most attention-grabbing chapters posits the theory that the Bushes were involved in the rise of Adolf Hitler. While he correctly notes that Brown Brothers Harriman, an investment-banking firm employing Prescott Bush and George H. Walker (George W.'s great-grandfather), invested in Nazi-era German companies, Phillips fails to note that it was Averell Harriman, later FDR's ambassador to Moscow and Truman's commerce secretary, who initiated these investments (and some in Soviet Russia) before either of the Bushes joined the firm. Prescott Bush did not oversee these investments; the reality is that he was involved almost exclusively in managing the firm's domestic portfolio. It was Harriman who largely managed the foreign investments and, accordingly, it was he who met German and Soviet leaders.

Phillips also makes much of the fact that Prescott Bush was involved with the Union Banking Corporation, which was seized by federal authorities in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, a story frequently cited on left-wing websites. But what Phillips fails to mention is that Bush had only a token role in the bank: Of the more than four thousand shares, Prescott Bush owned only one — urged on him by Harriman. Moreover, despite the conspiratorial argument that members of the WASP elite always work together hand in glove, Bush and Harriman were never as close as Phillips leads one to believe: Harriman actually campaigned aggressively against Bush in his 1952 senate race.

The ironic thing here is that if were looking for an American political dynasty whose partiarch WAS, in fact, clearly and avidly pro-Nazi, we'd have to look no further than Ted Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy. Does that make Ted Kennedy a Nazi? I'm sure most Democrats would (correctly) reject that inference. But different rules apparently apply depending on whose political ox is being gored.

(The real truth, if you must know it, is that both Ted Kennedy AND George Bush are actually shape-shifting reptilians.)

H/t Jonah Goldberg.