Phony Outrage
By A particularly silly post by Josh Chafetz getting into a lather over an accurate letter sent out by the Kerry campaign about an idiotic Hair Club For Growth ad being featured on George Bush’s website.
1)The Kerry campaign’s email is, in fact, accurate. Pictures of Adolf Hitler are included in an ad called “The Many Faces of the Democratic Party.” The source of these images is beside the point–it takes on a different meaning in this context.
2)Chafetz, on the other hand, is lying when he says that the Hitler images come from a moveon.org ad. In fact, they were taken from ads submitted to moveon.org, which the organization rejected. The ads speak for nobody but the crackpots who submitted them.
3)Needless to say, Chafetz ignores the strategy of the reprehensible Hair Club For Growth ad, which is to equate perfectly legitimate and defensible criticism of the President–all of which would be mild compared to what Tom DeLay says about the Democrats routinely–with marginal crackpots comparing Bush to Hitler. You can see why the right blogosphere is so anxious to defend this dishonest and demogogic ad: without the ability to generalize based on unrepresentative individuals to “the left” or “the Democratic Party” they’d be lost, as they’d actually have to engage substantive arguments.
UPDATE: Jesse Taylor has more. Needless to say, Glenn Reynolds–master of the intellectually dishonest smear-by-imaginary-association–is making similar arguments.