Reich From the Beginning
Glenn Greenwald is doing some good work right now, following up on a post about the 2004 frenzy over MoveOn.org’s “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest — when a few anonymous people submitted videos comparing Bush to Hitler, and a media firestorm erupted — by asking some of the people who attacked MoveOn about Rush Limbaugh’s comparison of Democrats to Nazis. In 2004, the American Jewish Congress criticized MoveOn for letting something “morally outrageous” onto its Website. Today:
“„The Limbaugh comments comparing Obama (and Pelosi) to Hitler and the Nazis are grossly offensive and intolerable. They reflect a nasty and hyperbolic tendency on our political culture, one which makes reasoned discourse impossible, confuses disagreement with evil, and which makes it impossible to distinguish evil from ordinary politics.
Greenwald is still hounding the people who attacked MoveOn, and I’m especially interested to hear from the Anti-Defamation League. They’re one of the few such groups who can generate instant national headlines by accusing someone of trivializing the Holocaust. For Limbaugh to accuse the party that scored 77 percent of American Jews’ votes in 2008, a party of which every Jewish member of Congress except Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) is a member, of being modern Nazis, goes far, far beyond what a MoveOn contest loser did in 2004.
