I'm Adolf Hitler and I Approve of This Ad

Remember back when politics, no matter how partisan, was still done with taste and decorum? You know, like when MoveOn.org sponsored its amateur anti-Bush ad hour and generated a couple of spots that compared Bush to Adolf Hitler.

Now the Bush braintrust has returned the favor to the Dems, sending out a "Coalition of the Wild-Eyed" ad via the Internet that links John Kerry, Michael Moore, Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, and Gov. Hoo-aah Dean with the genocidal corporal whom Mad magazine once dubbed "a professional mischief maker" in a poorly done All In the Family parody (titled "Gall in the Family Fare," the bit included a record insert in the mag and a plot line in which "Dolf Baby" turned out to be Archie's long-lost WW2 buddy; ah, what was possible in the U.S. before Greatest Generation political correctness took root).

Reports USA Today:

"The use of Adolf Hitler by any campaign, politician or party is simply wrong," said Kerry's campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, who called on the GOP campaign to remove the Web video from its site.

"We're using the video from MoveOn.org to show our supporters the type of vitriolic rhetoric being used by the president's opponents and John Kerry's surrogates," said Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.

Whole story here.

View the spot, which is a little too unironically reminiscent of the famous montage sequence in The Parallax View for my tastes, by going here and clicking on "Pessimism." The uplift music that comes on toward the end is pretty creepy, in a fun sort of way.

Who's covering the action on when Ralph Nader or Michael Badnarik drops the H-bomb?

Update: Apparently just to keep the whole Hitlerian subtext going, columnist John Leo has written a piece titled "Comparing Bush to Hitler no longer confined to loonies." Or even Hitler, as Bush has been compared to Mussolini as well. It's a pretty fun catalog of the Nazis and junior varsity Nazis to which Bush has been compared. Wake me when one of the candidates accuses the other of being worse than DeGaulle. Now that's hitting below the belt.