A friend of mine e-mailed me a copy of an official press release from MoveOn.Org, stating that the Republican National Committee (RNC) misrepresented the organization by claiming it sponsored a political ad comparing George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler.

According to Wes Boyd:

During December the MoveOn.org Voter Fund invited members of the public to submit ads that purported to tell the truth about the President and his policies. More than 1,500 submissions from ordinary Americans came in and were posted on a web site, bushin30seconds.org, for the public to review.

None of these was our ad, nor did their appearance constitute endorsement or sponsorship by MoveOn.org Voter Fund. They will not appear on TV. We do not support the sentiment expressed in the two Hitler submissions. They were voted down by our members and the public, who reviewed the ads and submitted nearly 3 million critiques in the process of choosing the 15 finalist entries.

We agree that the two ads in question were in poor taste and deeply regret that they slipped through our screening process. In the future, if we publish or broadcast raw material, we will create a more effective filtering system.

You gotta love their filtration system. About as effective as cleaning up an inevitable spill in the artic wildlife refuge?

My own blog of January 5th concerning this sordid debacle inaccurately claimed that the "ad [was] posted by MoveOn.Org." as if to imply that it created and uploaded the ad. It did not. It did, however, "post" the ad in that it was allowed to be entered into the contest.

I also wrote "I'd like to call this comparison by Move.On.Org the 'Bush/Hitler Pact.'" I also had, and gave, the impression that George Soros created the ad. To my knowledge, this is not true. I was quite careless and apologize for these hasty and unclear representations.

While we're at it, I wrote in my blog today that "Assad is so smarmy and spoiled you want to slap him into complacency." What a peculiar slip of the keys. How does one slap another into complacency? The word, of course, is compliance. I didn't do a very good job conveying my imperialist leanings by seeking to instill in a monster the very same attitude the anti-war Left feels towards the likes of him.

Now that I'm batting a thousand, can we, in a word, move on now?

Not yet. Do we like the RNC misrepresenting MoveOn.Org when it does such a beautiful job of misrepresenting the war in Iraq? Of course not. Do we also condone this?

. . . the RNC and its allies [and] supporters of President Bush used TV ads morphing the face of Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA) into that of Osama Bin Laden during the 2002 Senate race.

Nay. We condemn such slander. Nor is it fair to characterize "supporters of President Bush" as ones who wholesale used an ad that morphs someone into the face of Osama. I support Bush but I don't support this ad. Slander!

No one can argue that politicking has reached greater depths of depravity. It reveals the intense heat of the culture war raging in the U.S. today. No excuses for anyone debating at the table. That is why MoveOn.Org is not off the hook for not sponsoring the ad (i.e. creating the ad). One can argue that it did indeed sponsor the ad by making it available to the public to choose from among other contest entries, but that would be a pedantic concern. To have removed the ad would have been an instance of decency, which fortunately the voters showed by not selecting it as a finalist. We're not disputing the sacred First Amendment. Only the public consequences for practicing it unwisely.

Here is an instructive parallel. netWMD used to link to Free Republic. No longer. Racist and anti-Muslim comments have been posted by some visitors to the Free Republic website. The website has users post articles written elsewhere to be followed by commentary. Recently, an article by my colleague, Andrew L. Jaffee, was posted on Free Republic (after we discontinued the link). The article concerned the Serbian penchant for nationalism and anti-Muslim fervor. Someone commented on Free Republic that a Muslim should slash his throat as if to teach him a lesson for "supporting" Muslims. Charming. Indeed, some anti-Muslims are as bad as Mohammed Atta.

Did Free Republic itself post such commentary? No. Should there be guilt by association? Absolutely. To the degree it did not filter the commentary it sponsored it. There is no reason why Free Republic couldn't filter such filth. Ditto MoveOn.Org. Their filtering didn't quite work in time? The ad remained on the website until the close of the contest on December 31st. Wes Boyd's disclaimer is disingenuous.