Wow, Tech, a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory, I'm impressed!

I was tempted to kick over your sand castle with a precise slash of Occam's Razor and a hurled New York Times Bestseller of my own, but then I thought, why not play along? I enjoy a good after-dinner conspiracy theory every now and then, and this one has possibilities for entertaining elaboration.

See, Tech, your timeline is too recent, too much the tip of the temporal iceberg. To really understand the world today, you have to go back a lot farther...

...back to 1942, nine months into World War II, when Prescott "Your Reichsmarks look green to me, Herr Hitler" Bush was busted for trading with the enemy. The well-connected Bush patriarch didn't suffer any serious punishment, but his hopes to be a power in the post-war Thousand Year Reich were dashed. Perhaps in a Turtledovian universe the first Gauleiter of Nord Amerika was His Excellency Prescott Bush; or maybe the forms of democracy were preserved, and America had three generations of Presidents Bush. Luckily, we'll never know.

But in this universe, you can't keep a good Robber Baron down, and the family landed on its feet, reemerging to prominence a couple of decades later, prosperous and wealthy, and with close ties to another foreign power, this time the Royal House of Saud.

OK, Techie, back to you, you take the next installment.