Thursday, February 9, 2012

ROMNEY THE LIAR USING GUTTER-LEVEL RIGHT-WING HITMAN TO MAKE HIS ADS

Willard is waging one of the dirtiest, ugliest campaigns in American history. The candidate himself regurgitates every preposterous lie imaginable. If anything, his ad campaign is even worse, a phenomenal river of filth. Incapable of giving any real rationale for his candidacy, Willard relies on ads that stick the knife in his opponents in a variety of nasty ways. And who does Oh-So-Pure Mittens have working for him? The most notorious right-wing smear merchant in America

Romney, unlike the remaining Republican candidates, has served no time in Washington. Yet he’s relying on a media offensive managed by operatives who have long been at the heart of Washington’s Republican attack machine. One of the leaders of this advertising war is Larry McCarthy, a veteran media consultant best known for creating the racially charged “Willie Horton ad,” which, in 1988, helped sink Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for President.


McCarthy, who is fifty-nine, helps direct the pro-Romney group Restore Our Future, one of the hundreds of new Super PACs—technically independent political-action committees set up by supporters of the candidates—that are dramatically reshaping the Presidential election. PACs have existed since the nineteen-forties, but for decades an individual donation was limited to five thousand dollars. The power of PACs increased exponentially in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals could spend without limit—and pool their money in PACs—to influence elections, as long as they didn’t fund candidates directly. Super PACs have already injected fifty-six million dollars into the 2012 race, most of it going to negative advertising. Restore Our Future has spent seventeen million dollars—more than any other PAC—and fifteen million of that has gone to producing and airing ads made by McCarthy’s firm, McCarthy Hennings Media. By contrast, Romney’s official campaign has spent only eleven million on ads. The Super PAC is technically fighting a proxy battle on behalf of Romney, but in practice it has become the head warrior.


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[From an attack ad against Gingrich]: At least one of the ad’s accusations was demonstrably false. As a closeup of a Chinese flag saturated the screen with red, the narrator claimed that Gingrich and Pelosi had “co-sponsored a bill that gave sixty million dollars a year to a U.N. program supporting China’s brutal one-child policy.” Politifact, the nonpartisan fact-checking organization, assessed the bill in question, the Global Warming Prevention Act of 1989, and found that it barred any U.S. funds from being used to pay for “the performance of involuntary sterilization or abortion or to coerce any person to accept family planning.” The claim earned Politifact’s lowest rating: Pants on Fire.


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[About McCarthy's work in the 2010 campaign]: In the summer of 2010, the American Future Fund aired an ad, created by McCarthy, that Geoff Garin describes as perhaps “the most egregious” of the year. The ad accused Representative Bruce Braley, an Iowa Democrat and a lawyer, of supporting a proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, which it called a “mosque at Ground Zero.” As footage of the destroyed World Trade Center rolled, a narrator said, “For centuries, Muslims built mosques where they won military victories.” Now a mosque celebrating 9/11 was to be built on the very spot “where Islamic terrorists killed three thousand Americans”—it was, the narrator suggested, as if the Japanese were to build a triumphal monument at Pearl Harbor. The ad then accused Braley of supporting the mosque.


In fact, Braley had taken no position on the issue until an unidentified cameraman came up to him at the Iowa State Fair and asked him about it. He said that he regarded the matter as a local zoning issue for New Yorkers to decide. In general, he said, he valued America’s tradition of religious diversity. Soon afterward, he told me, the attack ad “dropped on me like the house in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ” Braley, who won his seat by a margin of thirty per cent in 2008, barely held on in 2010. The American Future Fund’s effort against Braley was the most expensive campaign that year by an independent group. 


Braley said of McCarthy, “He doesn’t have the courage to put his own name on a ballot and run for office, or even to put his own name on his ads. Instead, he’d rather make tons of money by anonymously demonizing people. He’s profiting from Citizens United in the lowest way.” He went on, “The corporations are laughing all the way to the bank. It’s a good investment for them. And the consultants are making tons of money. They’re the winners. The losers are the American people, and the truth.”


And this is the lying SCUMBAG that Willard is coordinating with illegally--do you really doubt it?--to bring down his opponents. Democrats, beware: Romney the Liar has an utterly amoral professional liar working for him.


Expect the worst.

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