Right-Wing Group Goes off the Deep End, Plans to Air Obama/ Hitler Ads

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 2:31 PM on July 7, 2009.

The San Francisco Examiner:

The anti-Obama group, Our Country Deserves Better PAC, has announced that it will launch an advertising campaign featuring a video claiming that Obama is using tactics common to Hitler’s Germany. An audio teaser video (below) has been released as a fundraising tool to buy time to air the ad. 

The ad lists a series of actions including the report ordered by the Bush administration on right wing extremists released by the Department of Homeland Security after Bush left office. They quote an un-named Congressman saying, “They proposed a civilian security force and an American congressman warned it was exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany."

Yeah, sure, Hitler made the trains run on time so investing in mass transit is pretty much the moral equivalent of gassing millions. Sigh.

Our Country Deserves Better PAC is an operation headed by Howard Kaloogian, a whack-job right-wing billionaire behind a plethora of similar "grass roots" groups, and Russo Marsh and Rogers -- the GOP PR firm that campaigned to get theaters to boycott Fahrenheit 911, ran those Iraq "Truth tours," etc. You may remember Kaloogian's Congressional campaign -- he was caught running a photo of a peaceful suburb of Istanbul, Turkey, on a sunny day over a caption that read, "Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But each day, the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it — in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism."

Anyway, while this kind of rhetoric is equal parts annoying and entertaining, I sort of feel for the folks behind them in one sense.

Ultimately, while Obama's cautious, centrist approach can be irksome to those on this side of the ideological spectrum, it is clearly driving those on the right mad. And I feel like we had it easy with George W. -- he promised to govern from the middle, and once in office, he ran far and straight to the right.

So these overheated attacks result, to some degree, from the fact that conservatives tried to paint Obama as a MuslimoNaziCommieFascist during the campaign and it didn't stick. But I think that just as frustrating is that he sold himself as an ideological progressive whose cautious approach wouldn't rock the boat and he's governed exactly that way so far. That bothers folks on both sides of the political divide, but, with few exceptions, it doesn't make liberals insane.

Anyway, these campaigns may be satisfying to those who mount them -- and create a sense of cognitive consonance in Fox News devotees -- but ultimately I don't see how these kind of hyperbolic attacks help the right struggle back from the political wilderness. Joe and Jane Six-Pack may have issues with the administration, obviously, but most know that what they're seeing isn't exactly a replay of KristallNacht.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.