The North Iowa Tea Party has removed a billboard comparing President Obama’s socialism to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin after holocaust survivor groups and many on the organized Left objected, according to an Associated Press story for July 14.
The billboard claimed that "Radical leaders prey on the fearful & naive," and had Obama’s "Democrat Socialism" between Hitler’s "National Socialism" and Lenin’s "Marxist Socialism."
“The message they intended was to point out the similarities between Obama’s policies and the socialist policies of Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin,” communications specialist Michael Fiala of Mason City, Iowa, explained in his blog, “like nationalized health care, the collusion of government and business to interfere with free markets, and government collaboration with labor unions aimed at control to name a few.” Indeed, Hitler’s National Socialism bailed out the automobile industry in the depths of the depression, creating Volkswagen as a state socialist enterprise, similar to how the Bush-Obama policy utilized bailout funds to rescue General Motors and Chrysler.
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
But the image of Obama sandwiched on the billboard by Hitler and Lenin overshadowed the project. "The purpose of the billboard was to draw attention to the socialism. It seems to have been lost in the visuals," North Iowa Tea Party leader Bob Johnson told the Associated Press for July 13. "The pictures overwhelmed the message.”
Fiala, who had nothing to do with the billboard construction, notes of the Left that “there’s no limit to the lies they’ll tell … the mischaracterizations they indulge themselves in … the cherry-picked historical revisionisms they accept as fact … and no limit to the amount of fake indignation they serve up under the guise of moral outrage.” Fiala had simply done some website work for the North Iowa Tea Party, but that didn’t stop him from receiving an inbox full of what he characterized as a bevvy of “I hate you teabaggers” e-mails rife with four-letter words. “They rant on and on, calling Tea Party movement people ‘hate mongers,’ mischaracterizing the Tea Party message as ‘hate speech,’ and accusing Tea People of being racists (the default position of liberals that don’t have their facts straight).”
Johnson explained that the “Tea Party People stand for fiscal responsibility, Constitutionally limited government, and free markets. We believe that’s the best way to enable the most people to prosper in a free society. We know nothing’s perfect but we know from history Socialism doesn’t work. We’re disappointed Americans aren’t taught history accurately so voted to try Socialism anyway. They’re about to learn free stuff isn’t really free in a hurry.”
The North Iowa Tea Party was hardly the first to draw the comparison between the political and economic policies of Obama and Hitler. After Obama was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize last year, the Russian Internet magazine Pravda made the following comparison:
Both leaders had been surrounded by many controversies concerning birth certificate, citizenship and religion.
Both had the father figure issues. Obama’s parents separated when he was two years old and they divorced in 1964. His father returned to Kenya and saw him only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982. Hitler had a troubled relationship with his tradition-minded authoritarian father, who frequently beat him.
During their teenage years both leaders had problems with alcohol. Obama called the alcohol phase [his] "greatest moral failure," Hitler called it [his] “most humiliated experience in life."
Both are unloved by the Jewish, for Hitler is well known why, for Obama, well, his victory in Presidential elections was not received with welcome in Israel.
Time magazine named Obama person of the year in 2008, Hitler in 1938.
But the difference between Pravda and the North Iowa Tea Party is that Pravda has little potential to damage the political fortunes of Obama and his agenda. So the Pravda comparison provoked little outrage.
Photo of Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics in Germany: AP Images
