Mao Zedong or Sun-tzu? Perhaps to White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, they’re just a bunch of Chinese and they all look sound pretty much alike.
Mickey Kaus thinks that may be the animating factor behind Dunn’s excuse for touting Mao Zedong as her favorite philosopher. Dunn said she was merely parroting Lee Atwater, the late Republican election guru:
“My source for the Mao quote was actually the late Lee Atwater, either in an article or bio I read after the 1988 election. Now that I’ve revealed this I hope I don’t get Keith Olbermann angry with me,” she wrote, noting that she had also quoted Mother Teresa.
But Atwater was a big fan of 
Sun-tzu, a military strategist whose writing predates Mao Zedong by about two and a half millennia. Kaus can’t find anything in the record suggesting that Atwater was a fan of Mao Zedong, but notes that he regularly carried a copy of Sun-tzu’s Art of War with him.
But hey! No biggy. Can’t we just agree with Dunn that one Chinaman is pretty much the same as another, even if one of them is credited with the deaths of 50 to 70 million people and the other one isn’t?
Just keep telling yourself that Bush was stupid and Obama is smart, so the fact that Obama has surrounded himself with idiots can be overlooked.
