Pelosi Calls Opponents of Health Care Nazis/Rush Counterpoint Causes Furor

From the Rush monologue: "You have the Democrat Speaker of the House saying that people, citizens who are concerned about health care are now wearing swastikas. She's basically saying that we are Nazis. She is saying that the people who oppose this are Nazis, and I'm going to tell you what. I'm going to run down the list here later on in the program, but this party, the Democrat Party and where it's taken this country, the radical left leadership of this party bears much more resemblance to Nazi policies than anything we on the right believe in at all, and I'll go through that list in just a second." Rush does go down the list of similarities between liberalism and Nazism." You can read the whole monologue here.

I remember in the mid-nineties this became an issue. Rush had one of his producers check the congressional record, and there were many (I forget the number) references to Republicans, on the floor of the House, as being Nazis. I remember lots of references, when I watched a lot of C-Span, of lock step jack booted Republicans. Now that the Dems are 100% in agreement about imposing socialist programs, I'm not hearing anything similar being said by Republicans during sessions in Congress now.

Here's some more Leftist protests from the Bush years:






When I posted about the Joker issue, I left out this gem. The president's wife. I mean, really...



PELOSI: I think they are Astroturf -- you be the judge -- of carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town hall meeting on health care.

Rush: "You have the Democrat Speaker of the House saying that people, citizens who are concerned about health care are now wearing swastikas. She's basically saying that we are Nazis. She is saying that the people who oppose this are Nazis..."

Astroturfing and Sockpuppets

"Astroturfing" is the attempt to create the feeling of a grassroots movement by planting stories around the web through the use of paid or volunteer spammers, when what is really happening is that a campaign or supporters of a campaign is putting out misinformation or just out and out lies. The online characters that put their names to these are called "sockpuppets".
Two smears against Governor Palin, one on YouTube, is a proven false rumor about Palin that she belonged to an Alaskan separatist movement was professionally prepared by a PR firm linked to the Obama campaign. When several blog watchdog groups found this out the video was pulled from YouTube. The voice-over artist on this video has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign (his name hasn't been revealed yet). The PR firm being linked to this is headed by David Axelrod. The firm is named AKP&D Message & Media and has a write up in the March '08 issue of Business Week. His Chicago-based political consultancy business, ASK Public Strategies, is in the same building as AKP&D, but it's unclear if ASK is owned and run by them; they've refused to release their business information. Axelrod is Obama's chief campaign adviser. Another story to have surfaced is that Palin supports gay rights, which was allegedly from an anti-gay right wing group. Sarah Palin Supports Gay Rights is the web site that carried this news. A reporter by the name Jim Treacher followed the links to the source of the page and ended up at FightTheSmears.com, the official Barack Obama website that's supposed to be defending him against smears. The "Jesus was a community organizer" "Pilate was a governor" statement that got spread all over has been linked to "a reader" on the Daily Kos, an extreme left wing blogsite, and was astroturfed.