O oh oh, what a jolly party the Republican Party is

Can't I just thank Godwin?

dlowan wrote:

Can't I just thank Godwin?

Same guy. 'God' is actually Godwin's nickname.

I wonder who was thrown up before Hitler?

Death Penalty, Bush Loom in Va. Race

[..] DEATH PENALTY:

Kaine is a Roman Catholic who opposes the death penalty. That puts him at odds with most Americans (two-thirds support capital punishment for murderers), and poses even greater peril in a conservative Southern state that favored Bush by 9 percentage points last year.

Kilgore, a former state attorney general, tried to take advantage of the issue by airing ads featuring the families of murder victims.

"Tim Kaine says that Adolf Hitler doesn't qualify for the death penalty," says a relative of one victim.

Kaine responded with an ad calling Kilgore's spot "a vile attempt" to make political gains from an emotional issue. Kaine pledged to enforce the death penalty "because that's the law."

In a telephone interview, Kilgore said voters won't believe that Kaine has changed his stripes after representing death row inmates. "It goes to the issue of trust," he said.

Kaine said it's a matter of values. In a separate telephone interview, the Democrat said voters tell him they disagree with his position but respect him for sticking to his principles.

"I'm not going to change my religious beliefs for one vote," Kaine said.

Dialing the Republicans

November 29, 2007 5:28
Time
Joe Klein

I attended Frank Luntz's dial group of 30 undecided--or sort of undecided--Republicans in St. Petersburg, Florida, last night...and it was a fairly astonishing evening.

Now, for the uninitiated: dials are little hand-held machines that enable a focus group member to register instantaneous approval or disapproval as the watch a candidate on TV. There are limitations to the technology: all a candidate has to do is mention, say, Abraham Lincoln and the dials go off into the stratosphere. Film of soaring eagles will have the same effect. But the technology does have its uses.

Last night, for example, it was apparent from the get-go that Rudy Giuliani was having a very bad night. Mitt Romney clearly got the better of him in the opening debate about illegal immigration. Romney's dial numbers hovered in the 60s (on a scale of 100) while Giuliani (40s) seemed defensive, members of the focus group later said... [..]

In the next segment--the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee's college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants--I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, "After all, these are children of God," the dials plummeted. And that happened time and again through the evening: Any time any candidate proposed doing anything nice for anyone poor, the dials plummeted (30s). These Republicans were hard.

But there was worse to come: When John McCain started talking about torture--specifically, about waterboarding--the dials plummeted again. Lower even than for the illegal Children of God. Down to the low 20s, which, given the natural averaging of a focus group, is about as low as you can go. Afterwards, Luntz asked the group why they seemed to be in favor of torture. "I don't have any problem pouring water on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11," said John Shevlin, a retired federal law enforcement officer. The group applauded, appallingly. [..]

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n24_v12/ai_18400878

Harry Truman compared the 1948 Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey to Hitler.

http://www.illinoisfamily.org/informed/default.asp?s=751

The Gay Liberation Network has compared Illinois Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Oberweiss with Hitler.

http://www.newsbusters.org/node/14185

Sometime last July Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison compared the Bush Administration's reaction to 9-11 to the Nazis' reaction to the Reichstag fire in 1933.

Comparing a politician to Hitler is distasteful. But should drawing any parallel or comparison to anything that happened in the Nazi era be taboo?

Should such comparisons be used merely for political purposes- when the comparisons have no real basis in fact?

Well, thats a judgement call though, isnt it. Whether the comparison in question did or did not have a basis in fact.