Corporal Hitler, circa 1917

Has anyone not had the following conversation over a large pitcher of beer at some point in life?

“If you had a rifle and a clear line of vision on Adolph Hitler in, say, 1922 — when he hadn’t done anything terrible yet — would you take the shot, knowing what you know now?”  

It was always a brief conversation. The answer, of course, is “yes.” The only one’s who feebly wavered, muttering inanities about psychological interventions, were either too drunk or too inveterately argumentative to state the obvious.  They would come around before the hangover set in. 

So here we are today, with the UN in session, listening to drivel from the Iranians about Israeli assassins picking off its nuclear scientists.  (This from a country that denies flooding neighboring Iraq with tens of thousands of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that have killed and maimed thousands of Americans.)

The oil-rich Iranians laughably maintain that their nuclear activities are peaceful in nature, while President Ahmadinejad spews gems about Israel, calling it a “fake regime” that “must be wiped off the map.” He refers to Jews as  “the most detested people in all humanity” and the murder of six million Jews during Hitler’s Holocaust “a myth.”

Are we really supposed to feel sympathy for the highly coincidental demise of several Iranian nuclear engineers? 

Every time I read  about another Iranian scientist driving off a road or forgetting to shut off the gas to his stove, I can’t help but chuckle quietly at what must be going through the heads of their fellow scientists. “Oh, القرف! I should have gone into figs!”

Take the shot.