MSNBC's Martin Bashir bashed the Tea Party Patriots for creating a picture of Karl Rove dressed in a Nazi uniform as part of a fund-raising email.
While he ridiculed "Conservative hypocrisy on Hitler at its blatant best," Bashir conveniently ignored his own Nazi references to conservatives (video follows with transcript and commentary):
MARTIN BASHIR, HOST: It's time now to clear the air. And in the current Republican civil war, it seems that there's very little love lost for a one-time behemoth of the party. And that may be because Karl Rove has made it clear that he's sick and tired of Republicans putting forward candidates who are incapable of winning.
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KARL ROVE: The more we examine the quality of these candidates from top to bottom, the more likely we end up with fewer Christine O’Donnell’s and more Rand Pauls.
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BASHIR: Unfortunately, Mr. Rove, a man once garlanded with praise by Republicans, has angered and annoyed Tea Party activists who really rather like people like Christine O’Donnell, Todd Aiken, Sarah Palin, and Richard Mourdoch. And so yesterday, the Tea Party Patriots, a well-established group within that amorphous movement, sent out a message with this photo-shopped image featuring Karl Rove in a Nazi uniform. The e-mail subject line read "Wipe the smirk off Karl Rove's face.” The Tea Party Patriots now say that this was a mistake perpetrated by a vendor, and have since apologized to Mr. Rove.
But it’s much more serious than a mistake. It is reprehensible that anyone in full possession of their faculties would ever think of deploying the imagery of Nazism for political purposes, except, that is, this is something that the Tea Party and a number of other conservatives have been doing for ages. You may recall this billboard which was designed and paid for by the North Iowa Tea Party and featured the president alongside Hitler just over two years ago. And this was Rush Limbaugh during the presidential campaign last year.
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RUSH LIMBAUGH: What was Hitler more concerned with? Propaganda. Did Hitler succeed for a time? Yeah. He did. What was Clinton more concerned with, truth or propaganda? What's Obama more concerned with, truth or propaganda?
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BASHIR: So, it would appear that invoking Hitler and the philosophy that led directly to the holocaust is perfectly fine when it's applied to the president but not when it comes to Karl Rove. Conservative hypocrisy on Hitler at its blatant best.
"It is reprehensible that anyone in full possession of their faculties would ever think of deploying the imagery of Nazism for political purposes."
Frankly, I agree, and by no means support what the Tea Party Patriots did invoking this image.
However, the real hypocrisy here is that Bashir has done this in the past.
Just last month, he compared the National Rifle Association to Hitler.
Although not Hitler, Bashir almost exactly a year ago compared Rick Santorum to Joseph Stalin.
And, in December 2011, Bashir lumped Neo-Nazi murders of Turkish immigrants to Republican views on immigration.
What was that you were saying about hypocrisy on Hitler, Mr. Bashir?
