One ad begins with Adolf Hitler making speeches, until a picture of President Bush appears. Another also uses Nazi and Bush images, with the tag line: "What were war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003."
The videos appeared on the Web site of MoveOn.org's Voter Fund as part of a nationwide contest for an anti-Bush television ad on which the liberal group plans to spend a considerable sum. The Hitler spots were among more than 1,500 submissions; MoveOn members have selected 15 finalists. The Hitler ads "lost miserably," said Eli Pariser, the fund's campaign director.
Pariser said: "Anyone in the public could submit an ad. We didn't want to censor. If it didn't have big legal problems, we were going to let it through and let our members vote on it." Later, however, Voter Fund President Wes Boyd said the group's officials "deeply regret" that the ads "slipped through our screening process."
The group's guidelines call for "really creative ads" to help viewers "understand the truth about George Bush," he said. "We're not going to post anything that would be inappropriate for television."
The Republican National Committee pounced on the Hitler ads yesterday, posting them online. "This is the worst and most vile form of political hate speech," Chairman Ed Gillespie said, demanding that MoveOn "apologize for posting the ads." Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that "to compare Hitler to an American president is not only ludicrous, but defames the Holocaust."
Pariser said, "Except for a few hundred people, no one would have seen it if the GOP hadn't picked it up and put it on their Web site."
-- Howard Kurtz
