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>>> The liberal activist site MoveOn ran a contest, Bush in 30 Seconds, in which people were invited to create and submit political TV ads critical of the Bush Administration, with the winning entry to air in swing states and on national television. (CBS has refused to air the winning ad during the Super Bowl, however.)

Over 1,500 ads were submitted. Out of them, two compared Bush to Hitler. After years of talking about "feminazis" and "Hitlery" Clinton, the right wing suddenly felt that Third Reich references were absolutely indefensible. Republicans expressed new-found outrage, and the corporate media dutifully tsk-tsked. MoveOn pulled the ads from their contest Website.

Those two ads are presented above.

(According to the rules of the contest, all ads are under the Creative Commons license.)

RNC complains | MoveOn responds

From "In the Loop" column by Al Kamen, Washington Post, 28 June 2000 [link]:

Trivializing Evil

There's something about Bill. President Clinton has always had an extraordinary knack for driving Republicans--and often Democrats--absolutely 'round the bend. How else to explain the recurrent comparisons to Adolf Hitler that keep surfacing when folks talk about Clinton and his administration?

For example, retiring Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage (R-Idaho), commenting on one of Clinton's national monument designations, said, "This president is engaging in the largest land grab since the invasion of Poland."

Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) went a bit further a couple of weeks ago when Clinton designated Arizona's Ironwood Forest a national monument. "I would draw a parallel to Hitler," Shadegg said. "He eroded the will of the German people to resist evil."

Our favorite is Arkansas Republican Rep. Jay Dickey's recent fundraising letter reminding supporters they can give him $1,000 for the primary and another $1,000 in the general election campaign. He doesn't want anyone to "later . . . say to me that I should have reminded you of the threats," he said.

"Just as people who read Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' and then later were surprised at the evils of the 3rd Reich [sic]," Dickey said, "we have the blueprint for what the White House plans to do: defeat me! This is because I not only dared to vote my conscience on the impeachment issue, but dared to do it after a publicly expressed threat that I would lose the election if I did. Are we going to let an astounding abuse of power go unanswered?"

Election defeat and gas chambers? Folks who survived or lost close family in the Holocaust might be offended at this trivialization of evil.

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