The chairman of the Democratic Party in California compared Republicans, and Rep. Paul Ryan specifically, to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels for “telling the big lie.” He later offered a qualified apology for the remarks.
Just before a breakfast of the California delegation in Charlotte, N.C., The San Francisco Chronicle caught up with party Chairman John Burton, who told the newspaper, “They lie and they don’t care if people think they lie … Joseph Goebbels, it’s the big lie, you keep repeating it.” Burton first used the line in an interview with radio station KCBS, which posted the interview on its website.
Burton said that Ryan in his convention speech last week told “a bold-faced lie and he doesn’t care that it was a lie. That was Goebbels, the big lie.”
He went on to describe Ryan as a “horse’s ass.”
Following an uproar over the comments, Burton later issued a statement, according to The Chronicle: "I did not call Republicans Nazis nor would I ever. In fact, I didn’t even use the word. If Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, or the Republicans are insulted by my describing their campaign tactic as the big lie – I most humbly apologize to them or anyone who might have been offended by that comment.”
Former Sen. Norm Coleman, national co-chairman of the Romney Jewish Coalition, said in a statement that President Obama "promised to lift up American politics. Unfortunately, some of his supporters, by employing rhetoric that has no place in our political system, are bringing it down to the gutter." He said "all people of good will should repudiate such disgraceful words."
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