Well, this ad ("The Faces of John Kerry's Democratic Party") is just stupid as well as amazingly offensive.
It's stupid because, in order to show emotional clips, they also have to include substantive rhetoric, such as Al Gore shouting "How dare they drag the good name of the US through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prisons", Michael Moore stating, very firmly, "We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for ficticious reasons", and Dick Gephardt saying "This president is a miserable failure." As far as I can tell, this ad will only resonate with the 35% of the people who think this country's on the right track. And they're certainly already commited. So what's really going on? My first thought is that they're seriously misjudging the average person's ability to take in the words as well as the pictures. My second thought is that perhaps I am seriously underestimating the average person's capacity to choose comfort over facing facts.
The Hitler images are just offensive (a word I rarely use), because there is no context in which to understand why they're there. The viewer would have to remember a minor flap back in February over two ads submitted to a moveon.org contest to figure out the ostensible point--that Dems are comparing Bush to Hitler. There is one brief clip that says "sponsored by moveon.org" but again there's no frame of reference at all. To all intents and purposes, the ad appears to be trying to say that Hitler is one of the "faces" of the current Democratic Party. Disgusting.
