Here's a couple more. Both are from Mike Shelton at the OC Register.
Posted on 03/10/2004 7:52:04 PM PST by kristinn
Move over, MoveOn.org -- new competition is coming.
An array of polemical, political sites is debuting online, utilizing the interactive features of the Internet, and promising to provide a major outlet for visceral attacks on both major candidates for the White House this fall, President George W. Bush and -- presumably -- Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass).
Back in 1988, independent attack ads emerged on TV and helped shape the perception of Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for president, as weak on crime. The ads touted the story of felon Willie Horton, let out of jail during the governor's administration.
Now, 16 years later, privately funded, third-party Websites are leading the way with harsh, fact-and-document-based portrayals of the contenders, leaving the formal campaign organizations free -- or at least freer than in the past -- to market themselves with positive messages and pose themselves on higher ground.
"The idea is to create a stream of pollution that seeps into the mainstream media," Sidney Blumenthal, former White House aide in the Clinton Administration and author of the book, "The Clinton Wars," told United Press International.
The technology-based tactics have been demonstrably effective thus far during the campaign. The independent sites provide video, audio, interactive games, and even copies of actual government documents in the Portable Document Format or PDF, so visitors can e-mail the materials to others. That is a lot more interactive than campaigns have ever been with TV or direct mail.
A site called Democrats.com, for example, aggressively touts a story about President Bush's rescheduled drill weekends in the Alabama National Guard in the early 1970s, offering $1,000 to anyone who had "actually seen" Bush on duty there and publishing the records online.
"We have broken important news stories on our site, including our recent publication of records from George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard that the White House did not know about," Bob Fertik, managing partner of Democrats.com, told UPI. This hardball tactic led to a fuller disclosure of the military records by the White House, Fertik claimed.
"There is no doubt in my mind that the Internet has political value," said Miki Dzugan, president of Rapport Online Inc., a marketing firm in St. Paul, Minn.
The Democrats.com site describes itself as the home for "aggressive progressives," and helps pay its bills by merchandising "Impeach Bush!" bumper stickers, among other paraphernalia.
Another site, Wintersoldier.com, places records from Sen. Kerry's anti-war protests online, including the transcript of the full question and answer session before a U.S. Senate committee, where the young Vietnam veteran detailed, among other activities, his trip as a civilian to the Paris Peace talks involving the U.S., South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese governments.
"I have been to Paris. I have talked with both delegations at the peace talks -- that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government," Kerry said during testimony on April 22, 1971, before the Foreign Relations Committee, according to the transcript posted on the site.
Wintersoldier.com also features audio sound bites -- in the MP3 format -- of Kerry describing what he did in Vietnam, both in testimony before the Senate and in an interview.
"Yes, I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed," Kerry said in the sound bite. "I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages."
Scott Swett, the producer of the site and a board member of FreeRepublic.org, told UPI that Wintersoldier.com also features compressed video footage of Kerry standing in a line on the Mall in Washington during a protest rally; and excerpts from the senator's out-of-print book, "The New Soldier," co-authored with friends from Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
"More than anyone, John Kerry is responsible for the popular image of Vietnam veterans that we've seen in movies like 'The Deer Hunter' and others," Swett said. Swett's site is receiving hundreds of e-mails each week from readers, many of whom are pointing him in the direction of new documents and materials.
Swett said he got the idea for the site when he tried to buy a copy of Sen. Kerry's book on eBay.com, and found the $500 price tag exorbitant. "I wanted to make the information about Kerry available to the public," said Swett, "without them having to buy the book."
MoveOn.org, the prototype site for this kind of activity, also employs computing technologies to get its message across. For example, the site has posted a Webcast of remarks on Jan. 15 by former Vice President Al Gore to MoveOn.org members, making it available to all visitors. MoveOn.org also posts a PDF version of an ad it placed in The Washington Post, as well as 30 second TV spots, for members to download and distribute.
"These groups can now also prepare an ad that they never plan to put on the air, but it can be put on the Internet and reach a very targeted audience," Jeff Stein, an assistant professor of electronic media at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, and a political analyst at KWWL-TV in Waterloo, Iowa, told UPI.
Blumenthal said he thinks some of the sites may be coordinating their message with professional political operatives. "There is a general understanding that there is a division of labor in the campaign," he said. "The president is lifting his positive message in TV ads and the dirty work is left to surrogates."
Too much coordination can be costly -- and perhaps illegal -- as evidenced by the letter an attorney from the Republican National Committee wrote last Friday regarding an advertising campaign being undertaken by MoveOn.org.
The letter charged the organization's campaign violates federal soft money finance rules because it directly advocates the election or defeat of a federal candidate. The site has been promised funding from billionaire George Soros and other wealthy liberal activists.
These third party political sites are far more daring than the offerings of the Bush campaign, or the Kerry organization. Fertik said his site, Democrats.com, expects in the coming weeks to release more "evidence that Bush is lying when he claims he fulfilled his obligation to the National Guard."
Originating such stories on independent, third party Internet sites might shield the campaigns from potential voter backlash, such as what happened when former New Hampshire Gov. Howard Dean's campaign produced ads containing negative personal attacks against rival Democrat, Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) during the Iowa caucuses in February.
A report in the March 2004 issue of American Demographics magazine, a leading journal for behavioral scientists, suggests the ads undermined Dean's goodwill with Iowa voters and might have cost him a victory there.
Famed for fundraising online, the Dean campaign may have fared better with another Internet tack in Iowa, experts said.
"The Web can be used in a variety of ways and will provide cover for campaign organizations that do not want to dirty their hands," Rich Hanley, director of graduate programs in the school of communications at Quinnipac University, Hamden, Conn., told UPI.
Gene Koprowski covers online issues for UPI, a sister news organization of Insight.
Those lies were the basis for some significant national policy. From 1977 - 1985 (in the wake of Vietnam) there was no GI bill in this country. Pat Schroeder led the effort to defund the Vietnam Era GI bill. When the Montgomery GI was brought back it was NOT grandfathered to include those service members who had enlisted between those dates. In fact, it specifically excluded them.
So, most of the Marines who were killed or wounded in Beirut in 1983 had no GI bill. The sailors and aircrew who struck back at Quadafi had no GI bill.
John Kerry and the democrats so demonized the American military that our servicemen were castigated for a generation and it was all based on a lie.
Regards,
TS
This is how the Democrats treat our military.
There are a lot of lies to dispel, and they're reinforced by thirty years of repetition.
But it's a start.
No, it isn't fair. Now, taking that factor into consideration know that this applies to many of the Lt.Col's and above in the officer corps and the 1st Sergeants and above in the enlisted ranks. Then watch what they do and how they defend this nation and put up with the deployments and all the rest of it and still manage to lead the finest military in the world in an incredibly selfless way and it is - to me - very humbling.
To watch the democrats politicize this and then attack our military is beyond the pale.
Regards,
TS
The librats are getting more and more desperate as the election draws closer. As all FReepers are well aware, the liberal establishment will make every effort to undermine the Bush administration and its reelection campaign, using every gutter tactic available in their bag of tricks, distortions and lies. After losing the 2000 election, the Democrats are out for blood and the Kerry campaign is playing hardball, while the Bush campaign so far, is playing softball. Kerry has had an open field far too long. This election will turn on who can best capture that 5% of independent swing voters that all close elections are determined by. It's time to reveal Kerry for what he really is, an ultra liberal and euro-socialist. "Team Bush" needs to step up to the plate and go on offense. And the sooner the better.
I told the writer "www.freeper.org" when he asked for the FR Network site, and I suspect he just wrote it down wrong...
www.freerepublic.net is also the FR Network. www.freerepublic.org appears to be "under construction." I don't know who has the rights to that one.
If they want down-and-dirty political attack ads, it occurred to me, then maybe I should create some "political material" myself. And since it's my site, I can be as extremist and wicked as I want to be, without fear of being banned. Heh heh heh...
Here's a couple more. Both are from Mike Shelton at the OC Register.
Check out the Left, oops, I mean Right:Albright's State, Soros' Estate?[Y]esterday, Tuesday, Dec. 21, 1999... Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, blocked a $500 million loan guarantee by the U.S. Export-Import Bank to the Russian company, Tyumen Oil, invoking the 1978 Chafee Amendment, i.e., claiming that the deal was supposedly contrary to the U.S. national interests... [T]he only entities which benefit from it are one George Soros, a business tycoon, and BP Amoco, a foreign-owned multinational... If in doubt, consider what the Ex-Im loan guarantee was to be used for. Tyumen wants to buy American-made oil equipment and services! About $295 million from the Dallas-based Halliburton; and some $203 million from ABB Lummus Global of Bloomfield, NJ... The Journal never mentions, for example, that George Soros is an investor in a company which Tyumen has been trying to acquire... Nor that the "troika" (BP, Soros, Tyumen) have been embroiled in a classic commercial dispute for over a year.... If the Journal were really a voice of "conservative" business interests in America, it would have screamed bloody murder on account of the former travesty (export of goods restriction), if not the latter (export of jobs).
by Bob Djurdjevic
The Wall Street Journal,
Letters to the Editor
Why Kosovo? Follow The Money!When the Kosovo war broke out, and the "Allies" took up the cause of that Albanian terrorist gang known as the Kosovo Liberation Army, Antiwar.com received a lot of email from baffled readers who wondered: "Why Kosovo?" Here was an impoverished and isolated country in a notoriously unstable region of the world, without any strategic or military value to the US, the conquest of which could only add to our burdens. Virtually none of my correspondents believed the official explanation – that the Milosevic regime was slaughtering tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians in the province, and was determined to "cleanse" Kosovo so that it would be ethnically Serb. Since the inhabitants of Kosovo were then more than 90 percent Albanians, this would have meant the complete depopulation of the province – a policy that made absolutely no economic or political sense. The supposedly "humanitarian" motives of the NATO-crats were a fraud from the very beginning, it was clear, and in any case their fraudulence was proved after the war when UN forensic experts went in and recovered and identified a little over 2,000 bodies (including Serbs). But this only deepened the mystery, and the question went unanswered: why Kosovo, of all places, the closest thing to a Third World country in all of Europe? Over a year after the "humanitarians" bombed Belgrade and reduced much of Yugoslavia to rubble, the answer is beginning to take shape... When George Soros invested $150 million in the region – most of it backed up by fail-safe US government guarantees – he declared that this was not strictly a humanitarian effort. While known for his philanthropy, Soros said that in the case of his Balkan investments he would be guided by the concept of "tough love" and insisted that the new enterprise must be "driven purely by profit." With $100 million of the US taxpayers' money in his pocket, Soros and his gang are swooping down on the prostrate body of the Serbian nation like vultures feeding on the liver of Prometheus... Our own Olympians seem determined to visit a similar fate on the Serbs – who, for their part, seem to be guilty only of getting between George Soros and $5 billion. Analyzing two key documents – a November 1999 International Crisis Group (ICG) paper on the Trepca mining complex, and a February 2000 article in the Toronto Star by ICG consultant Susan Blaustein – Johnstone saw it all coming, and with such stunning accuracy that one can hardly believe that her piece wasn't written yesterday. What is especially revealing is the role of the International Crisis Group in fomenting the takeover of Trepca – and the role of Soros as the ICG's main sugar-daddy.
by Bob Djurdjevic
August 16, 2000
It probably was not accident.
Here's a fast grab of mostly homebrew work from our side:
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