Friday, June 25, 2004

Achtung Baby!

As many of you know the Bush Campaign has put together a internet commercial. It's not the sort of thing they could get on TV, but they can show it on the internet. Starts out with a black screen and white letters "The Faces of John Kerry's Democratic Party: The Coalition of the Wild Eyed." It then shows clips from speeches by Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, Howard Dean, Michael Moore and John Kerry. It also uses those two Nazi ads from MoveOn.Org.

For those of you who don't remember, MoveOn ran a contest called Bush in 30 Seconds which gave people the chance to do ads critical of President Bush. So far so good, but two ads used Nazi Imagery to equate Bush with Hitler. This created a controversy and MoveOn polled the videos from the site and disowned them, saying they were in bad taste (they were).

But there they are right in the middle of all these images of Democrats speaking. I wonder why they are there? I suppose the official reason is that they are another form of Democratic Wild-Eyed-ness. But the real reason might be closer to Salon's analysis.

". . . why resuscitate the Hitler/Nazi imagery if it's so harmful to the national discourse? One can only wonder, and a cynic is left to think that splicing the face of Adolf Hitler between images of leading Democrats was too irresistible for the creators of this web video, no matter how misleading and offensive the end result may be."

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