Slate, John Kerry, MoveOn, & Hitler!

by John Hawkins | June 29, 2004 11:59 pm

Let me tell you how deep the partisan spin is getting: William Saletan and Jacob Weisberg[1] over at Slate, among others including the Kerry campaign, are complaining that the new Bush campaign ad, ‘The Coalition of the Wild Eyed’[2], is comparing Democrats to Hitler.

That just doesn’t wash.

As I told The Raw Story[3] last Friday when they asked me for a quote about this,

“The ad features clips of moveon.org ads comparing Bush to Hitler in an effort to show how far out of the mainstream John Kerry and his political allies are. To claim that the ad is some kind of attempt to compare Democrats to Hitler seems like a bizarre and tortured interpretation of the commercial to me. In fact, I’m not sure how anyone could even come to the conclusion that complaining about Democratic portrayals of Bush as another Hitler is the same thing as equating Democrats to Hitler. That sort of thinking defies all logic.”

As per usual, when you expose the left’s spin for what it is, they don’t miss a beat, they just move on to the next piece of spin.

In this case, I’ve heard lefties making the case, as William Saletan does, that MoveOn.org isn’t responsible for the content they post on their own website =D…

“Six months ago, MoveOn.org held a contest to find the best amateur ad against President Bush. The group invited people to make ads and submit them to its Web site. Some idiot spliced images of Bush together with images of Adolf Hitler, evidently trying to make Bush look like a warmonger. His submissions, which arrived with 1,500 others—too many to be screened quickly—were posted on the contest Web site. As soon as MoveOn.org leaders realized what was in the ad, they removed and denounced it.

That is quite a fascinating interpretation of events.

First of all, Saletan & MoveON (who originally peddled this story) expect us to believe that every video that was sent to them was simply put up on their website without being screened. So, theoretically, I could have sent in a video called “Democrats are poopyheads” that had nothing but photoshopped images making fun of Bill & Hillary Clinton on it, and MoveON would have actually posted it on their contest website. Hands up — who really believes that?

Furthermore, that’s not all of the story. You see, as I noted at the time[4], one of those Hitler ads was actually posted to MoveON’s front page! Given that, isn’t it kind of hard to argue that they didn’t realize “what was in the ad”? Moreover, MoveOn didn’t yank the ad out of the goodness of their hearts. The ad was “removed and denounced” shortly after the RNC publicly flayed them alive for comparing Bush to Hitler and not before.

The second piece of “spin within the spin” that I’m hearing is that John Kerry has nothing to do with MoveOn, so why should he be tarred with the ad? Well, as I expect the Democrats are going to discover with Michael Moore at some point, you can’t have it both ways.

MoveOn has spent more than $17 million dollars[5] on ads attacking Bush or promoting Kerry, John Kerry hired “Zach Exley, the director of special projects for the MoveOn PAC” to work for his campaign, Kerry sent letters[6] to MoveOn members, and Teresa Heinz Kerry wife was handing out ‘Asses of Evil”[7] buttons at a MoveOn campaign event.

After all of that, Kerry can’t simply say, “Whoa, those guys have absolutely nothing to do with me” when their radicalism becomes embarrassing. Whether Kerry likes it or not, he made his bed with MoveOn and now he’s gonna have to lie in it.