Keith Devens .com

How is this any different than the RNC actually running attack ad's on TV where they put decorated triple-amputee Vietnam veteran Max Cleland in the same headspace as Saddam and Osama?

Does pure calculated politics make it okay to do that, while a person sitting in front of their computer at home who is really annoyed with the guy in the White House can't?

Have the RNC now also lost all credibility or does it take an act of Matt Drudge to say they have?

I'm not familiar with that ad, though I'd be interested to see it. If the video's online, I'd really appreciate a link if you have one.

My point, however, is that the Bush = Hitler claim is something you normally hear from the looniest fringes of the left, and now we're hearing it from a supposedly "mainstream" left organization. It's something no rational person can believe, and I've said in the past that the Bush hatred we see from the left simply is highly irrational. When you get to that point, I think you lose credibility, both because of your lack of judgement, skewed moral compass, and probably a propensity to twist whatever facts exist for your own political agenda (think Michael Moore).

It now appears there was yet another ad comparing Bush to Hitler. Check out the link above for a link to the second one.

Whoa, just watched it. These people are nuts.

Here's some more from Drudge on this:

Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress, writes in Monday's WALL STREET JOURNAL: "MoveOn.org informed potential ad makers that 'we're not going to post anything that would be inappropriate for television.' Two of the ads posted on the group's Web site compared Adolf Hitler to George W. Bush. One ad morphed an image of Hitler into President Bush and says that, '1945's war crimes' are '2003's foreign policy.'" Rosen says MoveOn.org is "using the memory of that genocide as a political prop. Their comparison diminishes the reality of what happened, and their actions cheapen the memory of a horrific crime. It also does a terrible disservice to this country at a perilous time, when we need to examine the dangers we face with clarity and purpose." Leadership is "about confronting threats to freedom everywhere. President Bush has shown that leadership in Iraq, and our troops have liberated a people who were oppressed by another murderous dictator. MoveOn.org compares this liberation to the Holocaust. It deploys a picture of Hitler to vilify President Bush. Comparing the commander-in-chief of a democratic nation to the murderous tyrant Hitler is not only historically specious, it is morally outrageous. Comparing an American president, any American president, to Hitler is an outrage. The MoveOn.org ad was inexcusable. Political figures such as Al Gore, who have associated themselves with MoveOn.org, have a special responsibility to condemn these ads; donors to the group such as George Soros have the same responsibility. They owe it not just to the memory of the millions who died in the Holocaust. They owe it also as a simple matter of decency.

Even the Anti-Defamation league is condemning the ad:

NEW YORK, Jan. 5 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today said it was deeply troubled that MoveOn.org had allowed an outrageous and highly offensive political ad that directly compared President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler to be posted on its Web site.

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL national director and author of "Never Again: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism," issued the following statement:

"It is shocking that a mainstream political group like MoveOn.org not only allowed this vile and outrageous comparison of the American President to Adolf Hitler to be entered into its "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest in the first place, but that they even went so far as to make it available to the public on the Internet. Those responsible for this contest at MoveOn.org should have immediately identified this advertisement as one going far beyond legitimate criticism and rejected it out of hand. Instead, they made an irresponsible decision that has given legitimacy to the exploitative manipulation of images in a campaign season.

"MoveOn.org clearly would not have accepted a pornographic ad as legitimate criticism of a candidate. Why did they think that images of Hitler, the Nazi whose evil regime was responsible for the slaughter of millions of people during the Holocaust, was a fitting and credible expression of criticism of President Bush and his policies? Their lack of discretion cheapens the level of political discourse in America, and their comments explaining it were hardly comforting."

Just for completeness, this was also found via Drudge, the Simon Wiesenthal Center is also condemning the ad.

I don't believe the ad is online unless someone appalled by the viciousness of the Georgia Senate race kept it archived somewhere. They showed the entire thing on Meet The Press one Sunday and even I thought it was a low to say a guy who left three limbs on the battlefield and voted for the Bush tax cut against his own party supported terrorism, because he disagreed with implementation issues regarding the department of Homeland Security.

Is comparing Bush to Hitler wrong?
Absolutely.

Is it shocking that the left hates Bush with the same ferocity that the right hated Clinton? (Neil Bush being the one enjoying the company of ladies who are not his wife this time around.)

Not at all.

What I'm shocked at is how Sean Hannity & Rush Limbaugh and registered Republican but claims he's independent, Bill O'Reilly, and many Republicans can act surprised and say 'Oh they are driven by hatred, quickly forgetting the fact that when the shoe was on the other foot and it wasn't a time when the Republican party with a hammerlock on almost every office which mattered, The amount of spittle sprayed and the stuff screamed about people on the other side was so corrosive that it was like throwing battery acid at someone's face.

I've a question, and I'm not being in anyway snotty here, but is this the Republican party you folks voted into power?

Every now and then I've spoken to working class conservative republicans, what I'd call "main street Republicans"; they want low taxes, the ability to put their kids through school, a small government which generally leaves them alone and rights to pretty much do and say as they want.

I know things have seriously changed in the past few years, but it looks to me like that's exactly <strong>not<strong> what an almost Republican everything, from the hill to the White House, is giving you people.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm not.

See, I'm completely unfamiliar with the other ad you're referring to, so I have no opinion on that.

As for the left hating Bush as much as the right hated Clinton... to me it seems like no contest that the left is far more vicious and hate-filled. Though, I could be wrong. I wasn't very politically minded during the 90's, so maybe I missed it and don't have a proper basis for comparison.

I've a question, and I'm not being in anyway snotty here, but is this the Republican party you folks voted into power?

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm not.

You're absolutely not wrong, and I completely agree with you. I hear Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, et. al. say all the time that the Republican Party has left behind the principles that got it to be the majority party. I'm personally disgusted by it, and I've stated in the past that I no longer like Bush domestically. For instance, I was all for the tax cuts, but they don't mean a damn thing if we don't have a balanced budget or if we're creating massive new entitlement programs (like the prescription drug thing just passed). They just create upward pressure on taxes in the long run, so the tax cuts become just like a short-term stimulus, and not part of any kind of coherent policy to reduce the size of government and to let people keep their own money.

I've said before that there is no longer any major party that cares one bit about limiting the size and growth of government, and that's scary.

Here are two articles I found on Drudge detailing some of the massive spending increases under Bush.

Maybe you should read MoveOn's response to get a better understanding of the GOP's attempt to discredit a grass roots organization:
http://moveonvoterfund.org/smear/release.html

Move On scares the crap out of Karl Rove. He has no idea how to deal with 2 million people coming together to straighten out the damages being done by the Bush administration.

I read this earlier today (via Drudge), which I think is based substantially on that press release. Though, thanks for the link, I appreciate it.

I don't think the GOP had much to do with discrediting moveon.org, besides simply hosting the videos after moveon.org removed them from their website. Everything I heard about the video came from other sources such as Drudge, and most of the outcry came from Jewish groups and the Anti-Defamation League.

To be honest, I didn't know that there were as many as 1500 submissions, and that those Hitler videos weren't part of the group of finalists. However, it doesn't change the fact that those videos were considered by moveon.org to be "[appropriate] for television".

Anyway, I laughed when the New York Times referred to moveon.org as a "left-leaning Internet group", both because it does far more than "lean" left, and because referring to it as an "Internet group" belies the fact that the group is made up of some of the most prominent members of the Democratic party (Gore, Carville, etc.).

Finally, I've been waiting for any prominent Democrat to publicly denounce those ads since they came to light, but I've heard nothing.

Well, here is a better analysis of what went on on MoveOn.

It's easy to make strawmen if you just jump on something without looking at what's going on behind it. It's fine to disagree with them, but they're not lunatics.

Well, the analogy at the beginning of that article is flawed. It would be much more akin to having moderated comments, where the site owner approved of all content before it went on the site, and even gave the content a moderate mark of approval by promising that all allowed comments are "appropriate for my weblog".

But the article's right about at least one thing... anybody saying anything about the "Sponsored by MoveOn.org" tag at the end of the second ad is off base. I even heard Fox News point out in a snide comment: "Even though MoveOn.org says it regrets the ads and says they were just individual submissions, it does say "Sponsored by MoveOn.org" at the end of one". I was like "Come on". Of course, because if it was actually selected to be the ad, it then would have been sponsored by MoveOn.org.

But you are right... as I pointed out above, I hadn't known the scope of the contest when I first made this weblog post. Also, MoveOn.org has said it made a mistake. In any case, something I'd be interested to find out is how many submissions, in addition to the 1500 that were accepted, were rejected out of hand, as certainly there were some. Because some people at MoveOn.org certainly did consider these two ads legitimate. However, overall it seems all of this probably isn't as big of a deal as it appeared at first glance. Though, I still expected to hear at least some Democrats denounce the ads.

And again