Liberals Shocked, SHOCKED to See an American President Compared to Hitler

Robert Gibbs has all of the intelligence of a potted plant.

From a briefing last week:

I will continue to say what I've said before. You hear in this debate, you hear analogies, you hear references to, you see pictures about and depictions of individuals that are truly stunning, and you hear it all the time. People -- imagine five years ago somebody comparing health care reform to 9/11. Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.

Mary Katherine Hamm has a nice breakdown of the utter stupidity of this:

Let's see if we can imagine that, Bob. Click here, and just keep scrolling.

Or, here. You will be scrolling for a solid five minutes to exhaust the Hitler images employed by the left for eight solid years against Bush, and that's in just two blog posts. They were ubiquitous; far more prevalent that Nazi imagery in the Tea Party movement. Saying what Gibbs said, or repeating it credulously, requires an incredible amount of dishonesty.

Hmm, let's try a search on Flickr, just so we're sure I'm not cherry-picking.

Looking for something more recent? How about Alan Grayson's health-care Holocaust in America crusade, by which Gibbs was markedly less "stunned" despite the fact that Grayson's an elected official making Holocaust comparisons on the floor of the House. Imagine.

Before Gibbs took leave of his senses and all sense of history today, the White House had a more petulant response to the gathering, at which actor Jon Voight spoke. Yesterday, Gibbs very kindly stopped himself from making a "Deliverance" joke about the attendees. Considerate.

I would argue that the White House Press Secretary implying a joke about how protesters are rednecks prone to anal rape would fall into the category of "stunning" and "personally disagreeable," but I digress.

I guess this is what they meant by "audacity."

Tea parties aren't closed events like, say, health care "forums" held by Baron Hill.

They're open events that anyone can attend, and some of them bring signs that the organizers and speakers probably wouldn't agree with. In that sense, they're very much an expression of the First Amendment and the freedom of speech.

It isn't always pretty and you don't always like everything you see or hear. The events also tend to not be partisan, and represent a broad spectrum of America. You find conservative Democrats, independents, and Republicans at these events. Young and old. People that are partisan, and people that aren't. You also find people that are very mainstream, and a few that are a little off the beaten path.

At Saturday's Corydon Tea Party, for example, people brought their own signs. A couple made me wince. Those signs probably wouldn't have been at a more controlled event. But the tea parties aren't controlled events. The reason they have been so successful is because they are generally very open. They even try to be relatively nonpartisan.

In Corydon, organizers hoped to maintain a relatively nonpartisan and uncontrolled event. There were no campaign speeches and they had asked candidates not to hand out literature at the event (in particular because such literature tends to just get left behind as litter, and the organizers wanted to leave the Square cleaner than they found it). Those were the extent of their controls over the event and the crowd.

Some candidates respected their requests. Others didn't. And, unsurprisingly, most of the literature that got handed out got left behind in trash cans (not as litter, surprisingly, but the trash cans were full of discarded campaign flyers after the tea party was over).

But the rules about the speakers and the handing out of literature (the former was closely followed, the latter was broken by several campaigns) were about the extent of any limitations that the organizers put on the event, and I'm not sure that they could have controlled things more if they wanted to.