“They lie and they don’t care if people think they lie,” California Democratic Party chairman John Burton said Monday in an apparent reference to Paul Ryan’s statements about Obama raiding Medicare and requests for stimulus funds, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “As long as you lie, Joseph Goebbels, the big lie, you keep repeating it, you know.” Goebbels was a Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany and a close Adolf Hitler associate.
Journalists and fact-checkers and even Runner’s World have highlighted Ryan’s penchant for telling mistruths, lies, and bold-faced lies. But they haven’t invoked Nazism. Burton has since given the following statement: “To correct press reports of my recent comments about Republican lies, 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.”
You can listen to Burton’s interview with CBS here, in which he merely compares Republicans to one of the most notorious Nazis.
