Tea party slip-up

opinions

July 14, 2010 - 12:00 AM

A full-size billboard created by an Iowa tea party group and erected in Mason City compares President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Under pictures of the three are the labels: “Democrat Socialism,” “National Socialism,” and “Marxist Socialism.”
Beneath the pictures is the sentence: “Radical leaders prey on the fearful & naive.”
When challenged, Bob Johnson, the co-founder of the particular tea party group involved, said the “message is anti-socialism.” They were not, he said, comparing the president to Hitler, who murdered 6 million Jews and engulfed the world in war, or to the brutal Lenin and Stalin.
The message, Johnson said, got “lost in the visuals.”
Let’s take his word for it. Let us also agree with the main message on the billboard: radicals do, indeed, prey on the fearful and the naive. How could the target audience of that billboard be better characterized?
Mr. Johnson should also be told that the fact that the billboard is still up and he is not in jail — or  dead — should be all the proof he needs that our America is not Hitler’s Germany or Lenin’s Russia.

— Emerson Lynn, jr.

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