be sure to go
vote for your favorite bush in 30 seconds ad for the category of funniest, youngest (ok, "youth" oriented), and best animated. a distinguished panel of lefty's will be selecting the grand prize winner on monday.
the bi30s contest is sponsored, of course, by moveon.org, which recently raised the repubbb hackles by, well, being successful in communicating. this prompted rnc chairman ed gillespie to go on the screeching heads cable news networks and spread the meme that moveon sponsored ads comparing awol to hitler. (as we ourselves have often said, this is a totally invalid comparison. hitler could speak in public).
moveon founder wes boyd released a statement explaining moveon's position:
during december the moveon.org voter fund invited members of the public to submit ads that purported to tell the truth about the president and his policies. more than 1,500 submissions from ordinary americans came in and were posted on a web site, bushin30seconds.org, for the public to review.
none of these was our ad, nor did their appearance constitute endorsement or sponsorship by moveon.org voter fund. they will not appear on tv. we do not support the sentiment expressed in the two hitler submissions. they were voted down by our members and the public, who reviewed the ads and submitted nearly 3 million critiques in the process of choosing the 15 finalist entries.
we agree that the two ads in question were in poor taste and deeply regret that they slipped through our screening process. in the future, if we publish or broadcast raw material, we will create a more effective filtering system.
so the repubbbs took 2 out of over 1500 contest entries, and touted them as being sponsored, if not actually created by, moveon.org. and we all know this to be false.
but we'd like to take issue with moveon, and with mr. boyd. in our humble opinion, while the hitler ads were in poor taste, and badly done, and rightly voted down, we don't think they were anything to apologize for.
mr. boyd himself points out that the rnc has done just as badly:
contrast this with the behavior of the rnc and its allies when supporters of president bush used tv ads morphing the face of sen. max cleland (d-ga) into that of osama bin laden during the 2002 senate race.
so, in our minds at least, it's a question of free speech, and the free market system. why sponsor a contest inviting people to express their views about awol, and then, when the going gets tough, decline to back up your entrant's right to their opinion?
an argument, albeit a bad one, can be made about unmitigated aggression in both leaders. just because you get your butt handed to you on a silver platter on national tv is no reason to back down from your original intent; ie, americans have the right to say what they want.
if you are going to fight for free speech, don't apologize for that speech when the corporate despots unleash their attack dogs on you for your stance.
and it's a bit disingenuous to chastize one side for morphing cleland into osama, but apologize when your side puts a funny mustache on awol.
we ourselves have not seen the ads. unless they showed awol butt f*cking little boys while calling for satan's guidance, we doubt if they would have offended us. these two entrants were not the first to make the hitler analogy, after all. the analogy may not hold up under scrutiny, but there's no reason to apologize for somebody making such a leap in logic.
isn't there a free market system of ideas as well? let the hitler ads die the death they deserve, and don't whine about getting caught with them on your website.
rather, stand up and say, when did america stop being free? when was speech patrolled by the thought police? when did we start to have to apologize for somebody making an unpopular statement?
was it in the year 2000?
cross-posted on our own esteemed blog.