Socialist Group MoveOn Promotes Ad That Equates Bush with Hitler

According to Matt Drudge the “advocacy” group Moveon.org  recently posted a second video (now pulled) on their website that called George W. Bush the Hitler of the 21st century. Writes Drudge in his report:

The 30-second video is the second ad comparing Bush to Hitler to be streamed on moveon.org. The clip is part of a contest to find the best bush-bashing ad. A panel of judges, including actor-director Michael Moore, and Dem campaign strategists Donna Brazile and James Carville, will select the winner.

Perhaps Moveon.org is taking a page from the book written by their modern socialist brethren of the former National Socialist Germany:

Relations between Germany and the United States, frayed over Iraq, took a turn for the worse when German Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin compared George W Bush to Adolf Hitler.With her Social Democrats fighting out the tough final days of a campaign for Sunday’s election, Daeubler-Gmelin made the remark while talking to metalworkers about US plans for a possible attack on Baghdad. “Bush wants to divert attention from domestic political problems. It’s a method that is sometimes favoured. Hitler also did that,” she said, according to a report by the Schwaebisches Tagblatt newspaper. [“Bush accused of ‘Hitler’ move”, The Age, September 20, 2003]

A method favored not only by Herta Daeubler-Gmelinbutbut, but by Vanity Fair who seeks to pose the question their readers are apparently dying to know: if Richard Perle and Hitler’s propaganda man, Joseph Goebbels, were “separated at birth.”


MoveOn responds in a statement by Wes Boyd, Founder of MoveOn.org Voter Fund:

…During December the MoveOn.org Voter Fund invited members of the public to submit ads that purported to tell the truth about the President and his policies. More than 1,500 submissions from ordinary Americans came in and were posted on a web site, bushin30seconds.org, for the public to review.

None of these was our ad, nor did their appearance constitute endorsement or sponsorship by MoveOn.org Voter Fund. They will not appear on TV. We do not support the sentiment expressed in the two Hitler submissions. They were voted down by our members and the public, who reviewed the ads and submitted nearly 3 million critiques in the process of choosing the 15 finalist entries…

Reports Daniel Drezner on the ad that was according to MoveOn.org “voted down by our members and the public”:

This was one of MoveOn.org’s fifteen finalists for the ad competition. Or was it? If you now go to MoveOn’s page of commercial finalists, you will note that the ad in question appears to have been yanked. It should have the url: http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view.html?id=02&size=small But the sequence of ads skips from id=01 to id=03

(For the record, at the time I write this, the ad with a database id=16 is also missing as the 15th finalist has a database id=17.)

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress Rosen comments on MoveOn’s ad:

…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…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.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Soros in November of 2003 stated that “America, under Bush, is a danger to the world … When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans …My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me.” Far from condemning such an ad one could conclude that the premier Moveon.org sponsor–anti-capitalist, billionaire George Soros–advocates its message.

As readers of Capitalism Magazine all know there are many reasons to criticize President Bush. He is an inconsistent, pragmatic, sometimes defender of freedom (case in point is his refusal to stand up for Republic of Taiwan against the Communist dictatorship of China as reported in Allen Forkum’s excellent article on George W. Bush’s Unprincipled Foreign Policy Against Taiwan). Yet this is not what MoveOn is attacking President Bush for.

What they are attacking Bush for is setting a precedent that a group of free countries — primarily the United States of America, along with the U.K., and fifty plus other countries — can dispose of a “sovereign” totalitarian dictatorship that was like Hitler’s Germany in fact. Whatever MoveOn is advocating it is not freedom.