Free Republic

Can we imagine a scenario in which two titans of World War II, the German battleship Bismarck and the Japanese battleship Yamato, would come into conflict? Difficult, but not impossible. Had the Battle of the Marne gone the other way, Germany might have forced France from the World War I in the early fall of 1914, just as it did in the spring of 1940.

In an interview this week, Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush weighed in on one of the zeitgeist's silliest questions: If you could go back in time, would you kill a baby Adolf Hitler? "Hell yeah, I would!" Bush told the Huffington Post when queried on the subject in New Hampshire. "You gotta step up, man." -snip- [The question raises] ethical dilemmas - could you murder an infant on the assumption it would save millions of lives? - and even prompt[s] overly elaborate discussions on the theoretical mechanics of time travel. It's not clear how much of these considerations Bush chewed...