AL GORE IS HITLER!!!?!!1

So says the Republicans' Henchmen, according to a DNC email found on justiceblog:

Hurricane season has arrived -- and two fresh studies point to a link between global warming and an increase in the number and power of storms like Hurricane Katrina.

What are Republicans doing about it? They're smearing former Vice President Al Gore.

One right-wing pundit compared Gore to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist. Another right-winger, who's been on the payroll of corporate special interests, likened Gore's pursuit of solutions to global warming to Adolf Hitler's pursuit of genocide.

I'm sending Al a note this week telling him to keep fighting, to keep standing up for the truth no matter how vicious the attacks. I thought he might like to hear from you, too. Sign on to this note of thanks, and add your own note of encouragement here:

http://www.democrats.org/keepfighting

Ok, let's stop and consider for a moment. I'm not making the claim, but if there were fascists out there nowadays and they wanted to avoid being called such, wouldn't the best tool be to call other people "fascists" on such incredibly thin grounds? After all, when you're called on being corporatist (another term for fascist) as hell, you can say "well, the other guys are fascists too", and other people can say "can we avoid calling anybody fascist?" and you're pretty much insulated from the charge.

Is Al Gore "Hitler" for creating "An Inconvenient Truth" and not providing a soapbox for the purile apologists and ideologues that make up the "global warming skeptic"? Not even close. He's being called "Hitler" because the movie is effective, powerful, and judging by the per-screen grosses would be a logical candidate for wider distribution. They're trying to make sure that their fiction of a "debate" is maintained, and they'll smear however they can to do it.

Oh, and speaking of smears, Juan Cole lose the opportunity to teach at Yale due to another well-orchestrated smear campaign. Why? Well, when you're part of a conservative movement that enjoys control or domination of most sources of scholarship and information, it makes sense that you'd go after academe too. Mearshiemer and Walt were the canaries in the coal mine; it looks like Cole is the first asphixiated miner.