Tea Party group depicts Karl Rove as a Nazi

Karl Rove recently ruffled some feathers in the GOP with the launch of a new super PAC called the Conservative Victory Project, whose mission is to sideline right-wing candidates in Republican primaries. And you know who else started a secretive organization designed to destroy their political enemies? You guessed it — the Nazis!

Or so goes the imagined storyline behind a new fundraising email from the Tea Party Patriots, which features Rove's face photoshopped onto the body of SS leader Heinrich Himmler. The image features the inscription: "Reichsfuhrer-SS" and "K. Rove." The email's subject line reads "Wipe the smirk off Karl Rove's face," and goes on to lambaste "Republicans like Rove" for calling "Tea Party members 'racists', 'bigots', 'paranoid', and even political 'underbrush.'"

The Tea Party Patriots say that it's all a huge mistake, and that they intended to use an image of Rove in which he is thumbing his nose at the camera. The next image in a Bing search is reportedly the Himmler-Rove mashup.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Still, the email raises a host of questions. Didn't anyone check the email before it was sent out? Do people really use Bing for image search? And most of all, isn't about time we stopped comparing every perceived slight to an ungodly reign of terror that has no relationship whatsoever to contemporary America? Because there must be way more creative ways to classify political positions than being anti-Nazi or pro-Nazi.

Update: The Tea Party Patriots have officially apologized to Rove, saying, "While we may have strong disagreements with Mr. Rove on the future of conservatism, we want to be clear this imagery is absolutely unacceptable and are working to ensure this type of mistake doesn't happen again."