It’s impossible for most people to perform the mental gymnastics required to understand how Tea Party members can make any correlation between President Barack Obama and the murderous monstrosity that was Adolf Hitler.
Yet, despite any rationale to it or reasoned judgment behind their actions, Tea Party members are determined to make the comparison stick. I suppose the Tea Party ceased their efforts to try to portray Obama as an Arab disciple or Muslim puppet, so they moved on to something even more preposterous.
The Iowa Tea Party actually plastered an image of Obama next to photos of Hitler and Lenin on a billboard in Mason City. But they took it down because the heat got to be too great.
The American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors denounced the Tea Party’s actions as “grotesquely offensive.” “We ask that political groups do not trivialize our suffering in the future by making false analogies with Hitler’s horrendous crimes,” the group said in a statement.
The Mason City Chamber of Commerce also announced it received dozens of calls from people who changed their minds about visiting or doing business in the city after learning of the billboard.
Because of this, Tea Party members in Iowa finally took it down, but wrapped their reason for their retreat in some hollow rhetoric.
“The sign is now covered out of respect for other Tea Party people,” a rep tells the Globe Gazette. “The national Tea Party people are right, it is a distraction from the message the Tea Party is trying to get out.” He says the group plans to put up a “blander” ad in its place. –terry shropshire
