via and then, the official bush-cheney campaign site has an advertisement conflating images of al gore, howard dean, michael moore, richard gephardt, and john kerry with images of adolph hitler. the video claims that the hitler images are from a video "sponsored by" groups that support john kerry. after each hitler image, the video reads "sponsored by moveon.org" or "images from moveon.org ad"
the problem is the images were never "sponsored by" moveon.org. instead they come from two videos where were submitted to moveon.org's bush in 30 seconds contest which ran last year. the contest invited submissions of anti-bush political commercials to the organization and submissions were open to the general public. moveon.org members were then allowed to rate their favorites among the various entries. the entries with the highest ratings would become the finalists to be rated by a panel of judges. the judges then would pick the winner from among those finalists. (complete rules are posted here)
the above is all really old news--the contest ended some 6 months ago and made the news several times, most notably when cbs refused to run the winning ad during the superbowl.
in any case, during the contest over 1500 commercials were submitted to moveon.org, among them two with hitler imagery (the memory hole archived the ads here). after controversy erupted over the hitler ads, moveon.org took them off its site. neither of the hitler videos were among the 6 winning videos in the contest, nor were they among the 26 finalists voted by moveon.org members, nor was either video among the top 150 chosen by moveon.org. instead, they were simply among some 1350 losing entries submitted in a contest which was open to the general public.
for the bush site to allege that the hitler images were from an ad was "sponsored by" moveon.org or they came from a "moveon.org" ad is a rather shoddy lie. in fact, by using the hitler imagery, the bush-cheney campaign is doing exactly what moveon.org's critics accused it of doing 6 months ago. unlike moveon.org, however, the bush-cheney site is clearly sponsoring its own version of the hitler video.
to say "the other side is doing it too" is no defense. besides, the other side isn't and didn't.
