07Jan04-CK RAirden-MoveOn.org's Nazi Nightmare
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Exclusive commentary by CK Rairden
Jan 7, 2004
Last November George Soros pledged a reported $5 million to help the radical anti-Bush web based activist group MoveOn.org defeat the president in the upcoming November elections. Soros claimed he was waking up at 3:00am with “his thoughts shaking him like an alarm clock” thinking about President George W. Bush and his policies. He told the Washington Post that Bush’s statement, “your either with us or against us” conjured up memories of Nazi slogans he read in Hungary as a child.
Soros’ Nazi nightmare showed up in duplicate on MoveOn.org in the form of two submissions to the “Bush in 30 seconds” contest in which MoveOn.org asked anyone over 15 years of age to send in a Bush-bashing ad that would then have a chance to run on TV sponsored by MoveOn.org’s money sometime around the President’s State of the Union address. The two ads show President George W Bush compared to Nazi mass murderer Adolph Hitler.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) exposed the ads to the light of day and released the streaming video for a time on their site for all to see. That caused more Nazi nightmares for MoveOn.org, but this time it was in the form of backpedaling and spin. Heavy pressure came from Jewish groups and the RNC to renounce the distasteful ads. MoveOn.org released a statement through one of its co-founders Wes Boyd blaming the RNC for pointing the fact out that the ads did appear on their Website calling it malicious and misleading. Boyd’s spin, “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.”
So--this convoluted reasoning would lead one to believe that MoveOn.org does not endorse material on its own Website. The quasi apology continued, “We agree that the two ads in question were in poor taste and deeply regret that they slipped through our screening process. In the future, if we publish or broadcast raw material, we will create a more effective filtering system.” Now Boyd would have you believe that he didn’t endorse or sponsor the ads, but they were published on the Website and under the heavy pressure he was receiving had better offer up some form of an apology for something his group never “endorsed.”
Boyd may want to invest some of the Soros’ bucks to hire a professional spin-doctor, as his excuse quickly turned emotional and would sound silly if this weren’t such a serious mistake. Boyd then attacked the RNC claiming “MoveOn.org and the MoveOn.org Voter Fund exist to bring the public into the political process and produce a more fact-based election process.”
Fact based? Boyd’s confusing ‘attack apology’ would seem to declare it a fact that George W. Bush is comparable to Adolf Hitler---one of the two worst mass murderers in human history.
Oh--and by the way, he’s sorry the ads appeared.
And this is the reason why MoveOn.org raises money and loses issues. This is why their web-based group is where liberal activism goes to die. Sure there are enough Bush hating people willing to finance this stuff, and that gives them the money to stage contests like these and publish this type of political hate speech but when the light of truth shines on it for America to see, it is rejected. Jack Rosen, the American Jewish Congress President said it best in Monday’s Wall Street Journal as he referred to the Holocaust that cost over six million lives, [MoveOn.org is] “using the memory of that genocide as a political prop.”
All in the name of “a more fact-based election process.”
The groups like MoveOn.org that are setting up shop as Democrat shadow organizations are determined to spend millions of dollars of unregulated soft money to defeat President Bush. They will continue to pass along this type of hate speech in the form of advertisements on TV, radio and the Internet in an attempt to appeal to the angry left. But George Soros and others who are plunging money into these organizations are likely pouring that cash down a black hole. This type of negative political hate speech will rally the angry left but as recent polls have shown they are a small, finite minority. These groups have done nothing more than set up a battle for the upcoming election that will be a tough sell no matter how much cash they throw at it, and it smells like another losing cause for MoveOn.org.
Their bitter anger versus American optimism.
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CK Rairden is a political columnist and commentator. He can be reached by clicking here. Additional columns can be read by clicking here.
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