And unlike 2004, this time they were actually dumb enough to do dirty work that leaves footprints leading directly back to the campaign.
It appears the Axelrod people have seceretly been running a very dirty astroturfing campaign against Sarah Palin, and are now desperately deleting YouTube accounts to cover their tracks.
The only question now is how long the MSM can ignore this blatantly dishonest scheme. It took weeks for Dan Rather to be discredited.
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How long? 43, 44 days should just about do it.Â
Texas sharpshooter.
This will get about as much media attention as the ongoing investigation into the Palin email hack job, John Edward’s mistress and love child, and Obama’s connection to acknowledged and unrepentant terrorists.
Which is to say, none.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..More record cold?
People (some of them) still insist that Rather is perfectly credible and the memos "represented reality" in some sense.
No amount of "discrediting" will affect pre-existing beliefs.
The interesting thing is why do people think this ad is dirty?
The ad does say that Sarah Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP), which is not technically true. Her husband was a registered member of the AIP, and the chairman of the AIP initially told reporters that Palin had been a member too, but later retracted that. I believe that some AIP members have told reporters that Sarah Palin attended some AIP events with her husband, which is probably why the AIP chairman was initiallly confused.
The tape of Sarah Palin welcoming the AIP members to their convention is real too. She did record those welcoming remarks.
So exactly why is this ad so much worse than the McCain Sex Ed Ad? It stretches the truth and presents it in a way designed to scare the listner, but the McCain Sex Ed Ad didn’t do that even more?
mikeca:
In your world I suppose that’s all true.
In THIS world, the difference between the two ads is that the McCain ad tells the LITERAL TRUTH and this ad tells a LITERAL LIE.
That’s the difference. Objectively. For people who can actually perceive reality.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..The velociraptor and you
It seems to me that Barack Obama was saying that families were off limits at the same time his campaign was producing this ad.
Barack Obama speaks from boths sides of his mouth.
Dishman:
Yes, he does, and one side says "black" and the other says "white" at the exact same moment.
But to Obamites, BOTH are true simultaneously because they MUST be true.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..The velociraptor and you
It seems to me that Barack Obama was saying that families were off limits at the same time his campaign was producing this ad. Barack Obama speaks from boths sides of his mouth.
Did you actually watch the ad? The ad is not attacking Sarah Palin’s family. It is attacking Sarah Palin’s links to the Alaska Independence Party, which certainly seems like a fair subject. The ad exaggerates her links and tries to make the AIP sound scarier than what is really is, but so what?
mike:
So it’s a fair thing for the ad to attack Palin’s alleged links to the AIP?
Hmmm how do you feel about ads linking Obama to the Weather Underground?
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..The velociraptor and you
In THIS world, the difference between the two ads is that the McCain ad tells the LITERAL TRUTH and this ad tells a LITERAL LIE.
Wrong. I read the bill. The ad is deliberately misinterpreting the bill, and I guess you are deliberately misinterpreting the bill too.
mike:
We’ve covered that in detail. Your inability to comprehend plain English when it conflicts with your preconceived biases is not my problem.
So, back to THIS issue, so I can rub your nose in THIS one too.
About that Obama – Weather Underground link. Fair game, right?
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..The velociraptor and you
Let me make clear, I do not think this is a "fair ad", but I find it ironic that all these people that claim the McCain Sex Ed Ad is fair or the Ayers independent ad was fair are now complaining about this ad.
Let’s review the facts. The Sex Ed ad described the legislation as "Obama’s one education accomplishment", when the bill was never passed, never even came to a vote in the Ill Senate, and Obama was not a sponsor of the bill. One could argue that the bill was badly worded, but it did not require comprehensive sex ed classes in kindergarten. That is just a deliberate miss reading of the bill. The text appears to allow local school boards to teach sex ed in kindergarten, if they can justify it as age appropriate, but only an idiot would think that a school board might do that.
The Ayer’s ad also distorts the facts. Obama did have a campaign event at Ayer’s house in 1995, but it was not a fundraiser. There is no record of Ayer’s donating money to Obama’s campaign. Ayer’s was less significant figure in the Weather Underground than his wife, Bernadette Dohrn. Dohrn was the actual leader of the Weather Underground at one point, to the extent that the Weather Underground actually had a leader (don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters). Dohrn also went to jail for her role in the Weather Underground. Ayer’s never did. I guess female ex-terrorist just aren’t scary enough for campaing ads.
I apparently have a higher tolerance for campaign lies/exaggerations/half- truths than most people, and I really don’t see too much negative with the content of this ad. Yes it’s a stretch, and it’s been debunked in the past.  But that never stops some folks from trying to push a point again.Â
But I AM concerned with the way it was developed and distributed.  It appears to be  possibly illegal at worst, and sleazy at best. And a bit stupidly attempted at that.  Â
It’s pretty obvious it was created by a professional PR firm that has also done “legitimate†ads for Obama.  And for reasons unknown, they made a ham fisted attempt to push it off as a grass roots, concerned citizen kind of effort.   And when they got called on that, they tried to cover their tracks in a hurry.Â
Some looming questions are: were they paid to create and promote the ad, and if so by whom?  And did anyone in the Obama campaign know about this effort?  Â
Or in a nutshell, was this a boneheaded move by ignorant Obama supporters, or a boneheaded move by the Obama campaign itself? Â Â Â
I doubt if we’ll ever get the answers to those questions.  But in the mean time, it’s open to the worst case interpretation by Obama’s opponents, and I don’t have a problem with that either.
Yes, there are very much more serious questions here than whether the "ad" in question is "fair" or not. If this ad was produced by the Obama campaign, even if through an "invisible" intermediary, that would seem to violate federal election laws. At the very least it would violate campaign disclosure laws, if not finance laws.
But even with the potential CRIMINAL wrongdoing here, it is STILL fair and reasonable to point out that if there IS a connection to the Obama campaign (and right out of the box, it sure looks like there is) then this sure doesn’t seem to conform to Obama’s pledge to bring a "new tone" to the campaign, much less to politics itself. In fact this appears to be completely consistent with a "dirty tricks" campaign of precisely the sort that Democrats are always so quick to CLAIM to be the victims of.
Couple this with Howard Dean’s brother producing and a Howard Dean Foundation funding the McCain "swift boat" ad and you get a pretty good picture of the "inner circle" efforts going on in the Obama campaign.
So now the question has to be asked, "Does Obama KNOW about these dirty tricks or is he not in control of his own campaign and message?"
Not a good picture either way. Either he’s an old-style politician running a Chicago-style smear campaign, or he’s not in control of his campaign.
I guess you can take your pick.
And back to Obama’s plea for Americans to judge him based on how his campaign is run. I’m certainly willing to do that, and right now it doesn’t look like I’d want him on office based on even THAT low standard.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..The velociraptor and you
mike:
Whether Ayers "went to jail" or not, he has PUBLICLY ADMITTED to his involvement and has PUBLICLY REGRETTED that they did not DO MORE than just bomb the Pentagon.
You may think such comments are excusable and do not reveal a deep-rooted hatred of America.
Others of us take him at his literal (there’s that word again) WORD.
The IDEA that a candidate for President could POSSIBLY be a friend of such a man is reprehensible to the core.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..The velociraptor and you
mikeca,
The ad does say that Sarah Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP), which is not technically true.
It’s not even figuratively true. If it is supposed to be figuratively true that one spouse has the same basic politics as the other, what the heck are we supposed to take from Mary Matalin and James Carville?
If spouses (especially spouses who have not injected themselves into the campaign) are off-limits, then they are off-limits. Period. End of Sentence.
The tape of Sarah Palin welcoming the AIP members to their convention is real too. She did record those welcoming remarks.
So what? If the Democrats had held their convention in Wasilla, she very well might have recorded a welcome for them too. Conventions bring in money to a city, it’s usually a good idea to be nice to them.
But regardless of the content, the problem is that you have a paid arm of the candidate’s campaign actively posing as unaffiliated private citizens. If it is true, then this is fraud. This is one of the few cases where I think you could easily pass the "Esmay Doctrine" E.I: To prove a lie you have to show that the person(s): 1)Knowingly disseminated 2) false information with 3)intent to deceive. 1) You can’t really claim you don’t know who you are (sans amnesia) 2) David Axelrod’s Pretending to be unaffiliated private citizen is pretty clearly false. 3) I think it would be damned hard to claim they never intended for us to think it was real.
We, allegedly, have an arm of a political candidate attempting to clearly and intentionally defraud the electorate. I think that’s a pretty major story and the press ought to be looking into it. But, like, Shuler said, probably won’t until after November 5th.
The only way the press will ever look into this is if Obama loses and enough of the press is bitter enough to decide to punish Obama for it.
If he wins, the press will be in a four-year orgy of self-congratulations for having put Obama in the White House, and they will be ACTIVELY pushing anything that threatens Obama’s administration as deep under the darkest, dirtiest rug as they can push it.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..The velociraptor and you
The 2)Â proof was supposed to say:
David Axelrod’s PR Firm pretending to be an unaffiliated private citizen is pretty clearly false.
I seem to recall a post from DailyKos saying "We need to throw slime because our candidate won’t".
Sorry, people, Barack Obama is not the person you thought you knew.
But regardless of the content, the problem is that you have a paid arm of the candidate’s campaign actively posing as unaffiliated private citizens. If it is true, then this is fraud.
But this is no proof of that accusation. It is just pure speculation.
mike:
"But this is no proof of that accusation. It is just pure speculation."
I think that’s what the "if it is true" part of the quote you posted means.
The problem is that for it to be proven true or not, someone is going to have to investigate, and we can be damn sure that the press will not. They are too busy probing piles of moose droppings in Alaska for any dirt they can throw at Sarah Palin.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..I could have written this?
Mikeca,
This ad is trying to claim that Palin wants to re-establish slavery, recind women’s right to vote, and everything else that was the case back during the civil war. It’s trying to paint her as siding with the south in the civil war. The clear implication is that Palin is EVIL and will destroy all that’s beautiful and good for fun. It makes the implicit claim that Palin likes to murder babies and drink their blood. That’s why this ad is so bad.
(I figure that if you get to just make shit up, so do I.)
An additional facts that has probably not penetrated your information bubble:
The Ayer’s ad was run by the American Issues Project. The head of the American Issues Project is former McCain aide. This ad may be illegal coordination between "independent" groups and the McCain campaign. The ad may also be illegal because it expressly advocates against Obama’s election and the American Issues Project has not disclosed its donors. It would be illegal to run this ad with corporate donations.
But this is no proof of that accusation. It is just pure speculation.
mikeca,
I thought Barack Obama was supposed to be a "different kind of politician" who was "above this".
You’ve been played.
You can only imagine my laughter.
The Ayer’s ad was run by the American Issues Project.Â
So we know who ran it *and* we know it wasn’t just some Joe Blow producing it in his basement with his friends as actors.
Things we *don’t* know about the "eswinner" ads.
Cosmic,
Thank you. The answer to speculation of wrong doing is an investigation of the facts. Not sticking your head in the ground. This is what the MSM is *supposed* to be doing. And make no mistake, if it was McCain’s camp doing this kind of thing they’d be all over it.
The McCain camp just today boiled over with frustration and resentment about the overwhelmingly obvious bias against McCain in the NY Times. I could not agree more with them. The press in general is in the tank for Obama, but the NY Times may as well be on Obama’s payroll.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Lunch in Mongolia?
Yu-ain:
Obama has played this so perfectly that people like mikeca will not allow themselves to see that they’ve been played. The Left has invested so much into Obama that they now have to willfully ignore facts in order to maintain their illusion of Obama’s "changey-hopey" mantra.
And they are perfectly willing to do so.
This allows Obama and his surrogates to do or say ANYTHING they want and still blame the "evil" Republicans.
This is why, day after day after tiresome day, we get stories from the Obama camp about how McCain is exploiting Obama’s race when the ONLY one talking about race on this campaign is Barack Obama and his crew. Forget that McCain has never even mentioned Obama’s race except to congratulate the country for having nominated a black man for President.
Obama will say it, and people like mikeca will FIND it, somehow, somewhere, some way. Because if Obama SAID it it MUST be true, and besides, EVERYONE knows that Rethuglicans are racist, homophobic, sexist bigots anyway. So it’s there, even if it is in some obscure indecipherable WASP code that only THEY can see or smell.
"Reality based community" has always been a hilarious unintended irony, but it has now become pure farce.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Lunch in Mongolia?
Cosmic:Â I believe you forgot "Christofascistic" in your description of the Rethuglicans.
Elisha Feger’s last blog post..Sugar to gasoline
Cosmic Conservative,
I am furious. The absolutely Wizard of Oz, is behind this. There is no doubt in my mind the lunatic Hollywood crowd, where he received, $28,500.00 per plate, netting him, $9 mil., has been giving this puppet behind the land of OZ, acting lessons, speaking lessons and he is on his way home to be with his ACORN crowd and the Chicago thug political gang to get ready for Friday night.
We will see Oz himself slicker than ever. I hope he fails only because he has fooled so many good people here in America, Oh…and Europe.
I had to turn off news today because I am getting to involved.
I really appreciate you, Cosmic Conserative. This Wizard (ha) was going to bring hope and change to millions, it is so sad. I actually thought it would be good for him to come back in four years when he had more honestly real experience.
Oz…bama did not even come out and condemn the Democrat’s son that broke into Palin’s e-mail. I guess he will be arrested and the most the hijacker hack will receive is two years. Sick….
I think this is bigger than people realize. The Democrats just a few minutes ago are claiming THEY just passed the bailout.
Idiots….it was and is a SERIOUS THREAT to those that want to do us wrong. It took Republican’s and George Bush to get them to act immediately…
Dean, I could actually scream a four letter word here….HELLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!
Ahhhhh……..
P.S.
Hell was NOT THE WORD.
I haven’t really commented on this whole bailout thing yet. And I can’t claim to have done an exhaustive analysis of it. And whether the Bush Bailout scheme as is, or as modified by Congress is a good or a bad thing is significantly "above my pay grade." But for whatever it’s worth, here is my take on it.
I am a big believer in Occam’s razor. In daily life that really boils down to me generally accepting the simplest explanation possible. That’s a major reason I don’t go for conspiracy theories, they are usually complex, contrived things that hit too many people’s hot buttons for them to be likely to be true. Also I think that even when there are complex DETAILS in a situation, the fundamental forces that pushed things forward were usually pretty simple.
So how did we get into a situation where the government is having to pony up a trillion dollars worth of taxpayer cash to bail out entire financial industries?
Well, a lot of it boils down to good intentions and bad assumptions. In this case the good intentions were that government and private institutions should do everything possible to encourage home ownership. On the surface that seems a laudable goal. Just about any study will tell you that people who own their own homes tend to be more stable, more responsible and more likely to move UP the economic scale. So both the federal government and private financial companies went out of their way to create incentives such as adjustable rate mortgages to facilitate just that sort of entry into the home ownership lifestyle.
Couple that with a financial crisis, in part fueled by the 9/11 attack, which led the Federal Reserve Board to embark on an historic interest rate decline, where interest rates dropped to levels that made it virtually impossible to build any sort of savings based on traditional CDs or savings accounts, but where trading in financial paper, such as individual mortgages, was providing not only higher interest rates, but with adjustable rate mortgages, the potential for tremendous growth in investment returns, and the end result seems to me to be pretty predictable… in retrospect anyway…
The end result was a flood of new home purchases by people who traditionally could not afford to buy a home, and a rush of people who COULD afford to own homes into more and more expensive homes to cash in on the only game in town, which was real estate appreciation.
As long as home values went up, this created a self-perpetuating dynamic of money flowing into the bubble, which is the classic definition of a bubble I guess.
All it took was for interest rates to start going up, or for home values to start to decline (or both) and those people who bought first homes or status homes suddenly found themselves with monthly payments that they could no longer afford. This created tremendous downward pressure on home values since people began to desperately try to either refinance or sell their houses. Many people ended up PAYING additional money to get out from under their crushing ARMs. This negative equity meant that even those who had leveraged UP to get higher status homes found themselves unable to maintain enough cash to even purchase the sort of home they had moved out of originally.
This sort of thing has a sort of inertia of its own. It would not surprise me to learn that the financial wizards of the world looked at this situation and projected the eventual bankruptcy of enough of the financial institutions that provide capital and fluidity in world markets, that the very real specter of a DEPRESSION, not merely RECESSION, began to solidify in their models. Which leads us to the trillion dollar bailout to avoid just that sort of scenario.
So, if that is a remotely reasonable description of how we got to where we are, the question of "who is to blame" is a bit more difficult to identify.
Clearly there are the seeds of this fiasco in the 90s when the real estate bubble began to manifest itself. No doubt there were alarm bells going off all over the place when the prime interest rate dropped to almost zero. Undoubtedly there were signs within the financial institutions themselves that they had committed far too much of their capital on these mortgages, bought and sold as commodities like pork bellies.
So I can’t help but blame everybody. Democrats, Republicans, auditors, CEOs, Investment houses, regulatory bodies, yes, even individual borrowers themselves.
Basically it reminds me of the "irrational exuberance" that was so famously behind the .com bubble.
So I can’t blame Clinton any more than I can blame Bush and vice versa. I can’t blame the White House any more than I can blame Congress and vice versa.
Right now I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping that we can ride this tiger until we can get away from its fangs.
Hopefully we’ll learn something from it, but based on the history of the free market, I’m pretty sure we won’t.
But in spite of that, the alternative to the free market is still, in my mind, clearly worse.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Lunch in Mongolia?
Heh, I think I posted that comment in the wrong thread. Sigh…
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Lunch in Mongolia?
Cosmic Conservative,
Yes, you are right. It was both Democrats and Republicans, and the things you said above. I was just upset because the news I read said what the Republicans were the reason we had this mess and in the picture of the Democrats signing, they took it as "They" had done it.
It was Republicans and Democrats and President Bush had to get them to hurry because of our security. People don’t realize those wanting to do us harm are lurking. It was in the interest of our National Security too.
Rethuglicans are racist, homophobic, sexist bigots anyway
That’s simply not true I have run into few if any Racist Rethuglicans.
Obama has played this so perfectly that people like mikeca will not allow themselves to see that they’ve been played. The Left has invested so much into Obama that they now have to willfully ignore facts in order to maintain their illusion of Obama’s "changey-hopey" mantra.
You know a lot of people feel just like you when McCain calls himself a "Maverick".
McCain’s claim to "Maverick" is far more credible than Obama’s claim to ANYTHING. McCain’s Gang of 16 activities, and his work on McCain-Feingold alone demonstrate that he is willing to take on the Republican establishment and work with Democrats or independently SUCCESSFULLY on a regular basis. Calling that "maverick" seems to be a fairly accurate description to me.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Insanity on the march?
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