The hate that sometimes speaks its name

In yesterday’s blog regarding Richard Cohen’s selective outrage over Grover Norquist’s reference to the holocaust, Rocket Man pointed out that Hitler/Third Reich/Holocaust analogies are “a staple of liberal rhetoric about the Bush administration.” He cited, for example, MoveOn.org’s television ad competition in which two of the entries showed President Bush morphing into Adolf Hitler.
MoveOn.org has claimed that the two offending ads appeared by mistake and are not representative of MoveOn or its members. It states, “We do not support the sentiment expressed in the two Hitler submissions.” Once again, true to its name and original Clintonian purpose, the group’s position is “mistakes were made, it’s time move on.”
But Byron York, for National Review Online, contends that this disclaimer is disingenuous. York notes that “referring to President Bush as a Nazi, [and] comparing the president to Hitler, are nothing new in the world of MoveOn. They are, in fact, a common mode of expression of some of the people associated with the website and its brand of political activism.” For example, York notes that Michael Moore and Janeane Garofalo, selected by MoveOn.org to judge the ad competition, both have publicly compared Bush to Hitler. So has George Soros, MoveOn.org’s biggest financial backer. Thus, it is easy to see why contestants who share this view would submit ads making the same point, and easy to see why MoveOn.org posted them on its web site. By the same token, it is difficult to take seriously the claim that this was just a mistake, and that the ads are not representative of MoveOn.

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