Nazism was more than a joke to George Bush when he was running for President though.
In the fall of 1988, Vice President Bush had to fire several neo-Nazis and anti-Semites from his Presidential campaign. The scandal erupted when Washington Jewish Week and other media outlets discovered that the Bush campaign harbored well known neo-Nazis, including Jerome Brentar, a holocaust revisionist who claims that the Nazis never deliberately gassed victims of the Holocaust, and Akselis Mangulis, who was involved in the SS-influenced Latvian Legion during World War II.8 George W. Bush, the campaign's hatchet man, fired the Nazis slowly, so as to hide "under the radar" of the media. After the election, four of these came back to work for the Republican Party according to USA Today.9
Once the story was made public, the Bushes quickly dissociated themselves from these Nazi allies. In September of 1999, when many Republicans were calling for Pat Buchanan to resign from the Party for his seeming affection for Hitler and criticism of the US actions during World War II, the presidential front-runner remained silent, hopeful to pick up the votes of the far right. |
