DFL BLAIMS VOLUNTEER FOR DISTRIBUTING BUMPER STICKERS COMPARING PRESIDENT BUSH TO HITLER #3

Charges, denials over Hitler stickers
Star Tribune
Published September 9, 2004

Minnesota Republicans have accused DFLers of handing out a bumper sticker from DFL Party headquarters on Tuesday that compares President Bush to Adolf Hitler -- a charge DFLers are denying.

Randy Wanke, communications director for the state Republican Party, said Wednesday that a Republican volunteer walked into DFL Party headquarters on Tuesday afternoon and spied a small stack of bumper stickers that said, "Bush/Cheney -- Most hated world leaders since Hitler." A short time later, he said, the volunteer returned and didn't see the stickers anymore, but requested and was given a single sticker.

Tonya Tennessen, the DFL Party's managing communications director, said Wednesday that about 10 such stickers arrived in the mail from "an organization I've never heard of," called changetheregime.us. The stickers sat on a receptionist's desk "for about two hours until I removed them," Tennessen said. "These are not something we were or are distributing."

Tennessen called the GOP accusations "a deliberate distraction on the day John Kerry is here to talk about the number one issue facing Minnesotans -- the soaring cost of health care. There are 44 million Americans without health care, and Republicans are resorting to cheap tricks and attempts to distort and distract Minnesotans from the real issues."

In a news release Wednesday, state Republican Party Chairman Ron Eibensteiner said that "John Kerry's Democratic Party has sunk to a new low." That was followed by statements from U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and former U.S. Sen. Rudy Boschwitz, both of whom are Jewish, condemning the sticker and asking that Democratic nominee Kerry renounce the message on the sticker.

It's not the first time Hitler's name has been invoked in this race. In fact, Hitler has become something of a minor leitmotif in a tight race fraught with tension.In June, it was Kerry asking Bush to apologize for using images of Hitler in an Internet ad that appeared on the Bush/Cheney Web site. The ad, titled "The Many Faces of the John Kerry Campaign, the Coalition of the Wild-Eyed," interspersed images of Hitler with those of Kerry, former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean and other high-profile Democrats.

Bush folks, in turn, said they had taken the Hitler footage from earlier ads posted on the Web by the anti-Bush group Moveon.org, as part of its television ad contest. Those ads, which become hugely controversial and were pulled, superimposed images of Hitler over those of Bush, with both striking similar poses.

The Hitler theme dates even further. In September 2002, Germany's Justice Minister nearly lost her job after a newspaper quoted her as saying Bush was using Iraq to divert attention from domestic problems. "That's a popular method," Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin was quoted as saying. "Even Hitler did that." She later denied making the remarks, saying they'd been taken out of context.

The latest group to latch onto the Hitler image, apparently, is changetheregime.us, a Web site about which little is known. Officials in both the DFL and Republican parties say they are unfamiliar with it, and the site offers little information beyond a way to purchase its stickers, which include "Lincoln Would be a Libertarian" and "America, Gun Supplier to the World."