Posted on 07/05/2004 2:15:30 PM PDT by jmstein7
As happened in Whitewater/Lewinsky, the New York Senate race, and MoveOn.org, conservatives in general and Freepers in particular underestimate their enemy.
Once the Clintonoids got shot down in the Supreme Court, and Paula Jones was promised her day in court against the President, they went into full attack mode against Jones, Linda Tripp, Ken Starr and his deputies, Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, Henry Hyde, Kathleen Willey, and made false insinuations that Monica Lewinsky was a stalker in the vein of the mentally-deficient woman who broke into David Letterman's home. Did it work? Well, that depends on what the definition of the word "work" is. Clinton was impeached by the house, but won a decisive victory in the Senate trial.
In the case of MoveOn.org (formally "Censure and Move On"), created in order to promote a meaningless, instantly forgotten "censure" of Bill Clinton for his crimes of perjury and suborning perjury, at least a handful of half-bright Freepers had the stupid idea of answering the group's requests for pledged donations with phony names and phony figures. This stunt, by the way, is popular among jerks who like to scam the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Marathon.
If this was widespread as some claimed, the amount of money that MoveOn.org actually received fell far short of that which was pledged. That must have been a source of frustration for the quasi-non-partisans involved in the effort to save Slick Willie's bacon. But MoveOn used the inflated pledge amounts to their advantage by reporting in their press releases the number of pledges and the inflated dollar amount of the pledges, NOT the actual number of donors or the amount they actually received. This made it seem like there was more grass-roots support for the effort than there was. That's NOT bad publicity.
This led not to the dismissal of MoveOn as a just another website crawling across the Information Superhighway, but its promotion as a major player in the national debate about what would happen to Clinton, who was still riding high in opinion polls despite the tawdry nature of the Lewinsky revelations.
Only the people behind MoveOn (founders Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, who are from wacko-left Mecca BERKELEY, CA despite their self-description as from "Silicon Valley") know for a certainty how much the high pledge totals elevated their profile on the national scene. An argument cannot be made that it diminished their self-promotion; it was just a website, and six years later, it is a household word, a multi-million dollar concern funded by multi-millionaires and billionaires, like Bush-despiser George $oro$.
Pabianice, I don't know how you ascertain that "Every time Moore opens his mouth, he turns 15,000 independents into Conservatives while gaining the Liberals exactly zero." It doesn't make a lick of sense to say that the success of Fahrenheit 9/11 (and make no mistake, it IS a financial success) has occurred in a vacuum, and that if conservatives simply ignore MOOre, he will fade from the scene and not be a constant distraction to the Bush re-election effort. Besides, the Clintonoids are coming to a cinema near you with Harry Thomason's The Hunting of The President, based on the book by Gene Lyons and Joe Conason. Sincere, confused people are going to have questions raised by the untruths, and pretending that a terse "no comment" or a laugh-off from the Rove mouthpieces will end the inquiries is not only an exercise in wishful thinking, it's inconsistent with recent history.
MOOre is a liar. The more he defends his lies, the closer he comes to hanging himself with his own words. ('It's a not a political movie'...wait, 'Yes it is.' 'It's investigative reporting,' but it's not 'journalism,' it's an 'op-ed piece,' thus relieving it of obligation to be fair or balanced, etc.) But he won't hang himself until someone starts demanding an explanation of his deceptions. And if nobody demands answers, that leaves the likes of the Clintonoids, MoveOn and MOOre to control the terms of debate.
Sorry, can't help. I'm too busy tilting at windmills.
Hey, Nice pile!
Thanks for the ping!
Michael Moore is nothing more than a Leni Riefenstahl wannabe with a lust for money.
He is also registered to vote in two states, according to thesmoking.com.
He may not have had to, since he is also a resident of Michigan. He is registered to vote in both states, according to thesmokinggun.com and he has his car registered in one state while he holds a driver's license from the other.
ping
BTTT!!!!!!
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