It is safe to say that Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie never met a truth he did not seek to distort. So it should come as no surprise that the lobbyist-turned-party leader has been busy this week peddling his own twisted take on the work of the activist group MoveOn.org.
What is surprising is that Gillespie, who is supposedly trying to reelect President Bush, has been working overtime to publicize comparisons of of the Republican chief executive to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Gillespie got all excited when he discovered that MoveOn.org, the highly successful internet activist group, was running a “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest that asked critics of the president to submit television advertisements designed to “engage and enlighten viewers and help them understand the truth about George Bush.” MoveOn.org promised to buy airtime for the winning ad during the week of the 2004 President’s State Of The Union Address.
Among the hundreds of creative commercials submitted by people from across the US were two that compared Bush to the Nazi dictator. MoveOn.org did not choose those advertisements for airing on television; indeed, the group went so far as to strike the videos of the offending commercials from its website.
But the controversial commercials still went into wide circulation nationally. Why? Because Gillespie and his minions chose to highlight them on the Republican National Committee website. For a time this week, the only place to view the comparisons of Bush with Hitler was on the RNC site. Adding insult to injury, Gillespie made the rounds of cable television talk shows in order to draw more attention to the Hitler-Bush ads. Thus, the commercials got their airing on national television not because MoveOn.org paid to put them up but because the cable networks used them to illustrate Gillespie’s rants.
The RNC chief’s folly eventually became so evident that the video was scrubbed from the Republican site. But you can still read the texts of the commercials on the RNC site at http://www.rnc.org/moveonvideo.htm. That text is accompanied by a rant from Gillespie, calling for MoveOn.org to apologize for initially allowing the ads to appear on its website, and demanding that the nine Democrat presidential candidates repudiate the ad comparing Bush to Hitler.
In as much as the overwhelming majority of Americans did not know about the Bush-Hitler comparison until Gillespie publicized it, it would seem that the RNC chair is the one who should be apologizing. As for public repudiation, that’s not really necessary. The president should just take Gillespie aside and quietly ask the party chair to stop going on national television to highlight comparisons between Bush and a certain dictator.
