Duck Soup

I was going to post about this yesterday, but ran out of time in my rush to work. I was reading response to the Gore speech yesterday across the blogosphere, and I noted a few expressing outrage at the Gore use of the phrase "Brown shirts" here:

The Administration works closely with a network of "rapid response" digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for "undermining support for our troops." Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, was one of the first journalists to regularly expose the President's consistent distortions of the facts. Krugman writes, "Let's not overlook the role of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative of the President, you had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation.

Response from Hugh Hewitt?

Al Gore's gone around the bend, and if the Democrats let him speak at the national convention, I'll be surprised. As I tried to convey to a 15-year old caller yesterday, when a party nominates and rallies behind a man who a scant three-plus years later is raving about "betrayal," and using Nazi analogies, you have to ask not about the qualities of that particular individual, but about the collective judgment of the party that nominated him. I fully expect John Kerry to be shouting out garbled conspiracy theories and Hitler analogies in 52 months, but some will be surprised.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit goes with it, too, grabbing this post from James Lileks:

JAMES LILEKS ON AL GORE:


Today Al Gore upped the ante. He coined a new term for the Internet critics of his positions: digital brownshirts. Yes, yes, it's over the top. But it's not the sentiment that raises eyebrows, it's the position of the person who’s saying it. We don't expect presidential candidates past or present to indulge in Usenet flame-war lingo. We don't expect serious party elders to call the other side Nazis, and for good reason: it's obscene. The brownshirts were evil. The brownshirts kicked the Jews in the streets and made the little kids put their hands on their heads as they stumbled off to the trains. The brownshirts were not interested in refuting arguments. They were interested in killing the people who dared argue at all.

At some point, I fear, the political discourse of 2004 is going to seem horribly irrelevant and misplaced in the face of some loud new wretched horror; it will seem as oddly disconnected from reality as the Condit / Killer-Shark news reports of August 2001. An indolent luxury.

And even Ann Althouse makes a back handed admonishment of him:

Quite aside from the general inadvisability of calling your political opponents fascists, you'd think that if Al Gore wanted to call someone a fascist, the last synonym he'd pick from the thesaurus would be "brownshirt," considering that he was famous for literally wearing a brown shirt.

Al Gore should parse words because of his fashion sense. That's what I get from the last part of that one.

All that aside, there is general disdain for Gore's remark. Notice that he doesn't call anyone a Nazi, or compare anyone to a Nazi by name. I guess you could imply that he calls Georgie Bush one as they would be his brown shirts, and I can even cede that point if I must.

But there is no outrage when those on the right get in on the Nazi name calling game. Michael Savage calling Clinton's new book Mien Kampf, Savage comparing George Soros to Joseph Goebbels, Christopher Hitchens and New York Post film critic Jonathan Foreman comparing Michael Moore to Nazi-propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, or Bill O'Reilly comparing Moore and radio host Al Franken to Goebbels.
All of these (well, with the exception of the Clinton one) can be taken to the same extreme the brown shirt argument could be taken to as likening a party's candidate with Hitler.

And Glenn Reynolds does Lileks a grave disservice by not posting the rest of his response:

Look. We don't have to agree on the big hard issues, but we can certainly agree that we share common values that set us apart, and that it profits no one to identify the opposition as something outside the American experience. Liberals are not Communists. Republicans are not fascists. We have a nice window of opportunity here where we can come together by choice, instead of being thrown together by events. I say we get a head start on national unity, and turn on anyone who floats the Nazi analogy. Shun 'em. No links, no reviews, no radio interviews, no newspaper pieces, nothing. From now on, the Nazi parallel buys you bupkis. This means that the right doesn't get to parade around the mutterings of high-profile wackjobs as illustrative of the heart of everyone who votes D, (my emphasis) and the left doesn't get to do the whole "he's wrong in his overheated critique, BUT" dodge. Enough. ENOUGH! For Christ's sake, enough!

Why the italics? What is Lileks referring to? Well, some would claim the outrage only applies because Al Gore was a former Vice-President. Well, Lileks is taking to task a sitting president! That's right, the official re-election site for Bush has a new ad posted with images of Hitler dispersed between Gore, Moore, Dick Gephardt, and even John Kerry himself. The ad is supposed to remind us of a briefly shown and quickly pulled contest entry at Move On.org which compared Bush to Hitler. The visual impression it leaves, however, is that Gore, Gephardt, Moore, and Kerry all yell and rant like Hitler himself did (go and see the ad here). The right's response? Shock and outrage that the Kerry camapign is shocked and outraged!

Josh Chafetz at OxBlog writes:

A friend forwards this mass email from the Kerry Campaign. The email comes with the subject line, "Disgusting":

Dear [Name Withheld],

Yesterday, the Bush-Cheney campaign, losing any last sense of decency, placed a disgusting ad called "The Faces of John Kerry's Democratic Party" as the main feature on its website. Bizarrely, and without explanation, the ad places Adolf Hitler among those faces.

The Bush-Cheney campaign must pull this ad off of its website. The use of Adolf Hitler by any campaign, politician or party is simply wrong.

Chafetz continues:

In response, the Kerry Campaign sends out this incredibly dishonest email suggesting that Bush has compared his opponents to Hitler and asking for money.

Both campaigns have their share of over-the-top supporters, and I don't think it's really fair to tar Kerry with Michael Moore and MoveOn.Org. That said, it's really unfair of the Kerry Campaign to suggest that Bush is comparing Kerry supporters to Hitler, when in fact all he's doing is pointing out that Kerry supporters have compared him to Hitler.

I'm not sure whether this is malice or incompetence on the part of the Kerry Campaign -- and I suspect the answer is incompetence -- but it doesn't bode well for them either way.

The problem here is that these arguments are made not in the world of reality, but the world of perceptions. If the Bush campaign intended to try and discredit Democrats by using the MoveOn.org ad, they need to make it a lot clearer. If the Kerry campaign is really upset at what they think is a comparison of Democrats to Hitler, they should make that clear. But the "h" word pops up again when you discredit one sides implications on an issue, but make your own implications to support your cause. No one should be naive enough to think that the Bush campaign or the Kerry campaign did not see the implications that many would draw.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit decides to continue the debate with updates:

UPDATE: A couple of readers think that the real unfairness is in the Bush campaign's use of a couple of fringe elements to suggest that the Democratic mainstream is comparing Bush to Hitler. The trouble with this argument, though, is that the Democratic mainstream is making such comparisons. Just ask Al Gore, or Guido Calabresi. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jared Walczak emails:

You wrote that some of your readers objected to the Bush campaign's association of liberal fringe elements with the Kerry campaign re the Hitler ads. However, as an email from the Bush campaign today notes, there is a connection: Zack Exley, the man behind MoveOn.org, is now employed by the Kerry campaign as the director of internet operations.

Good point.

Al Gore as the Democratic mainstream? Sure, I can see that, in the same light as Michael Savage, Bill O'Rielly and the like can be seen as representing the Republican mainstream. A judge that few people have heard about(that's Guido Calabresi)? That's a bit of a stretch.

The Zack Exley connection as a "good point?" Maybe. It would be if MoveOn.org had failed to apologize for the "ad." But they did.

None of these was our ad, nor did their appearance constitute endorsement or sponsorship by MoveOn.org Voter Fund. They will not appear on TV. We do not support the sentiment expressed in the two Hitler submissions. They were voted down by our members and the public, who reviewed the ads and submitted nearly 3 million critiques in the process of choosing the 15 finalist entries.

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.

I'm sorry this is such a long post featuring so many references to so many things. Here's the point. If one side's surrogates are using the Nazi image to fight for their candidate, they can't logically get upset when the other side does the same. I don't really support either side in this issue, but I find the references to be misplaced and out of line in general. However, for someone who is actually running for president to use Hitler's image for political gain is abhorrent. Regardless of the intended connotation, it has no place in this election, especially from a "compassionate conservative" like George Bush. MoveOn.Org apologized for their mistake, and I hope Bush can do the same.