Thursday, October 23, 2008

You stay classy, Republican Party

A friend of mine--a dyed-in-the-wool liberal--has somehow managed to land himself on the Republican Party of Wisconsin's mailing list, and as such, has been receiving some rather lovely pieces of political propaganda.

The most recent one is, simply put, pretty despicable, and I'm having a hard time figuring out why exactly the GOP seems to think that the "Obama makes love to Bill Ayers' TERRORIST body on a nightly basis" narrative is 1) beneficial to McCain's campaign, and 2) at all true.

Opinion polls and facts aside, however, they march on with this nonsense and send out garbage like this:

(click to embiggen)

Oh yeah, the Republican Party: one classy operation.

UPDATE TO ADD: madison.com is running an AP article that talks about this mailer and the other shady activities the GOP/McCain campaign have been up to lately. This is the choice quote: "...there is no evidence [Obama and Ayers] are close friends."

There's also a quote from Wisconsin Republican Party spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski defending the mailer:

"We're not calling Barack Obama a terrorist," she said. "We never have and never will. He is not."

The mailer was just a small part of the party's overall message, she said.

"I guess our goal is to put the information out there and let people make up their own minds," Kukowski said. She said despite nearly two years of campaigning, Obama remains an "unknown figure."

No, you're not directly calling Obama a terrorist, but by trying again and again to (falsely) make him out to be a close personal friend of Ayers, and putting things like "Terrorist. Radical. Friend of Obama." on your mailers, you're coming damn near close. And your followers are clearly getting the message.

As for Kukowski's claim that Obama is still an "unknown figure," I call bullshit. We've got several auto/biographies, a pretty damn thorough vetting of him through his state and national Senate campaigns and his years long run for the presidency, and more. This assertion that we still "don't know the real Barack Obama" is as ludicrous as asserting that dinosaurs and man roamed the Earth together.

5 comments:

George H. said...

I wonder what would happen if you just wrote "Return to Sender" on that?

illusory tenant said...

I wouldn't be surprised if the GOP has actually been generating some degree of sympathy for William Ayers. Most people probably never even heard of him before and now they may have learned that he's spent the last several decades working on public education.

He's hardly a threat to anybody anymore and if Obama is guilty by some sort of association fallacy, then so are the dozens of others who served on the various Annenberg Foundation boards, most of whom would be considered classic pillars of the community.

Emily said...

And apparently, 3,000 professors have enough sympathy/respect for the man as he is now that they've signed a statement of support for him.

Unknown said...

I got one of these too (posted here and here. I wonder what I did that got me on their mailing list, and how I got on twice (the second time with a misspelled last name).

What a bunch of slugs.

L. Wynholds said...

well, almost everyone at one mcc coop got one, although no one seems to have gone through the effort to distribute the stack into the resident's individual mail slots...

probably because housing coops are known hotbeds of neoconservativism.

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