Driving through the Chicago area today, I flipped off of PBS for a few minutes to search the AM dial, and ran across a clip of Dennis Kucinich's "Wake Up America" speech on AM 560. It was a long clip, and I didn't recognize the talk show host's voice from the few seconds when he interjected himself between parts of Kucinich's speech, so I hung around to hear the rest of it. What I heard was shocking, especially coming from a Jewish person.
As I found out, the host was Michael Medved, film critic who has found a niche among far-right fundamentalist Christians as a political pundit.
After Medved played what must have been 3 minutes of Kucinich's speech, he said (paraphrasing, since the audio of the show is only available to "premium" subscribers), "The TV cameras didn't pick up the sounds from the audience while Kucinich was speaking. Here's the sound from the audience..."
He then played a doctored clip of Kucinich repeating "Wake up America" interspersed with audio of crowd noise from a speech by Adolf Hitler.
"Wake up America!" followed by a loud "Sieg Heil" and cheering.
Medved then made the comment that the congressman, who is short, had a rhetorical style that owed a lot to another short politician (meaning Hitler). "Is the 'Big Tent' of the Democratic Party big enough for someone like Kucinich?" Medved asked.
Here's the description of the first hour of the show:
Hour 1: Dennis Kucinich sounds like another short guy
Say what you want about Kucinich's quirky habits (I've grown to like the guy over the course of the campaign while he was in it), but comparing him to Hitler steps over a line. Especially given the security state tactics of the current administration.
Medved is an observant Jew. According to his biography:
Long active in the Jewish community, Michael has served as president of an Orthodox congregation, and co-founder of a Jewish Day School. Since 1996, the Medveds have lived in the Seattle area with their three children.
For Medved to compare Kucinich's speech, which talks about progressive help for the bottom two-thirds of the nation's population with one of the most evil people in the world who was responsible for the annihilation of 6 million of his brothers and sisters in faith is disgusting.
I just searched MediaMatters, and they apparently don't follow Medved's program as closely as other right-wing hate talkers. Perhaps they can locate the audio and write something about this.
If you live in an area where there is a station that carries the Medved show, I'd suggest you write a letter to the station management expressing outrage at this type of gutter hate.
Here's Kucinich's speech: