Both Democrats and Republicans were outraged at the head of California's Democratic Party Monday for comparing Republicans with the notorious Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
As the Democratic party’s national convention gets into high gear in Charlotte, North Carolina, California’s John Burton told a California newspaper that Republicans are lying in order to defeat President Barack Obama.
"They lie and they don't care if people think they lie... Joseph Goebbels - it's the big lie, you keep repeating it," he told CBS News and a San Francisco Chronicle reporter.
A spokesman from President Barack Obama's re-election team, Ben LaBolt, said Burton’s remark “obviously doesn't represent the views of the campaign.” He was quoted by Politico as saying, "There's no place for that in the political discourse."
Burton also referred to Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan as a "horse's ass” who told “a bold-faced lie and he doesn’t care that it was a lie. That was Goebbels, the big lie.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition’s co-chairman and former Senator Norm Coleman quickly replied, "John Burton ought to know better than to bring the Nazis and their victims into our current political debates, but apparently the offense such remarks cause to Holocaust survivors and their families are of less concern to him than the prospect of partisan gain,” AFP reported.
"President Obama promised to lift up American politics,” Coleman added. “Unfortunately, some of his supporters, by employing rhetoric that has no place in our political system, are bringing it down to the gutter."