CONCORD – New Hampshire House Representative Robert Kingsbury of Laconia today released the following statement in reaction to a cartoon that ran in the Concord Monitor that depicted Speaker O’Brien with a Hitler mustache and included the words, “if the mustache fits.”
Rep. Robert Kingsbury
“When I was 18 years old I was a rifle man for Gen. Patton. I was the first scout of the rifle squad; there were no American soldiers in front of me. In my division there were 3,000 rifle men and among those 3,000 rifle men and their replacements, we had 15,000 causalities at the hand of men who commonly said ‘sieg heil.’ The cartoon that ran today in the Concord Monitor is inflammable—for me it is a deeply cutting, personal, inflammatory insult and I’m appalled any American would say or depict such a thing. Any comparison of any American political figure to Adolf Hitler is abhorrent to all who suffered the horrors of the Holocaust—the six million murdered by the Nazis and the American soldiers who fought, those who gave the ultimate sacrifice to defend good in this world, and the families of all those affected. While my expectations for the Concord Monitor are low as they have time and again demonstrated a liberal bias, yellow journalism and ‘gotchya reporting’—I would not have expected this even from them. The lack of even a semblance of decency and respect from the Monitor for the 15,000 men in my division—most of whom were just 18 when they gave their lives—is a sad and shameful indication of how far public discourse has strayed and I never thought I’d see this day.”