Time To Say Goodbye To Hitler and Ho

As we move further in to a political campaign it was only a matter of time before the ad makers went back to the same slime infested well they use every two years. Attack ads are of course part of any political campaign and on some level they probably do serve a purpose in bringing an issue before the voters.

But these ads inevitably go too far and we start to see the comparisons to Hitler, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh and so on creep to the surface. The most recent example of this has cropped up in a Democratic primary in the 9th District of Tennessee. This district is 60% African-American and is represented by Steve Cohen, a white Democrat.

While Mr. Cohen was serving on a city commission in Memphis there was a proposal relating to a park named for Civil War General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Because Forrest later helped to found the KKK, some felt that the park should not be named for him while others felt that this was only one part of a long life and therefore the park should retain the name while a display should acknowledge his wrongs. Cohen sided with the latter group and opposed the proposal.

Cohen is being opposed in the Democratic primary by an African-American, Nikki Tinker, and she has aired an ad linking Cohen with the KKK.  Given that Mr. Cohen is Jewish, it would seem to be a bit extreme to try and link him to a group like the Klan.

But of course, this is only one example of this kind of campaigning. Every year we see Democratic candidates airing ads which link their GOP opponent to the Klan or Adolf Hitler or simply to ‘Fascism’. By same token we see Republicans producing commercials that declare their opponent to be a member of the Communist International or tying them in with terrorists, etc.

I hate to break it to these people, but there is no truth to any of these ads. I don’t care how conservative a candidate is, nobody in American politics is anywhere close to Hitler or the Klan or any member of a true Fascist movement. I have not been a fan of many of the policies of the Bush Administration or the rightward lurch of the GOP but they are nowhere close to those criminals of the past.

By the same token there are no members of the Democratic party who are on par with the evils carried out by people like Ho Chi Minh, Stalin or Mao. I am no fan of the Obama campaign and think they may be quite naive on many issues but they are not in league with the terrorists. The do not support Bin Laden and they will not turn over our nation to the bad guys.

More importantly, to use these names in political campaigns we insult the memories of those who actually suffered under the evils of these leaders. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Franco and the Klan together killed hundreds of millions of people. They are not sound-bites to be used over and over in political campaigns.

You can make your point if you want to, you can raise issues about your opponent, you can suggest that his proposals are bad or dangerous or foolish. You can do all these things without raising the insult of using the names of these true criminals of history.

It is time for us to say goodbye to all of these evil men and toss them on the ash heap of history.