See history of Fenton Communications who is running the Cindy Sheehan Campaign against President Bush....
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The Smear Campaign; Left-wingers have poured money into Bush-hating "527" groups, which straddle a fine line in an all-out effort to defeat the president
Insight on the News, May 11, 2004
The life and odyssey of fiftysomething PR guru David Fenton has been one radical adventure after another. In the sixties he dropped out of high school and got a job as a photographer for the Liberation News Service, which favored the Viet Cong in the war against America, becoming a confidant of hippie leader Abbie Hoffman. In the seventies he would serve as public-relations director of Rolling Stone magazine and organize antinuclear concerts with leftie entertainers such as Jackson Browne. During the eighties he grew more corporate and at the same time more radical, building offices for Fenton Communications in New York City and Washington while fattening his payroll by performing services for various communist state and "liberation" groups, including the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, the dictatorship of Grenada's Maurice Bishop that President Ronald Reagan sent troops to overthrow in 1983, the El Salvadoran terrorist Farabundo Marti National Liberation group and the conspiratorial Christic Institute, which spread vicious, baseless smears about retired U.S. military heroes.
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Along the way, Fenton got rich. According to a Weekly Standard article, he once told an interviewer he made about $100,000 per year in three years representing Sandinista interests. But he insisted to the neocon weekly in 1996, "I'm not a Marxist, I'm a Democrat!"
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Fenton has become an important power broker because of his behind-the-scenes role in shaping the agenda of MoveOn.org and being a force behind the media campaigns of other "progressive" anti-Bush groups.
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Fenton Communications, have for the last two years been the hidden hand behind its media savvy and presidential smears. To a large extent, MoveOn.org has become a creature of Fenton Communications.
A search of Lexis-Nexis and Internet databases shows that Fenton Communications has been listed as MoveOn.org's public-relations firm on press releases for the group and its affiliates since 2001. Indeed, MoveOn.org's Washington mailing address is on the same floor of the same building as that of the Washington office of Fenton Communications, and to reach a MoveOn.org employee in Washington, it's necessary to call the Fenton phone number. Fenton served as a judge for the group's recent "Beat Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest and contributed an essay to MoveOn.org's new book, 50 Ways to Love Your Country, by becoming a left-wing activist. Most telling is Fenton's use of personal pronouns in the essay to describe the group's activities. "Without the contributions of MoveOn members, we wouldn't be able to buy our own 30-second ads to unmask Orwellian deception propagated by our nation's leadership," Fenton wrote (emphasis added).
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After the RNC filed its complaint, the Kerry campaign hired Zack Exley of MoveOn.org to be its communications director. Exley and MoveOn.org have said they will not communicate with each other for the rest of the election.
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One common theme of MoveOn.org's ad is Bush's alleged dishonesty. The group and Fenton's Website even have referred to the strategy as the "misleader campaign." But critics of Fenton note that many of his campaigns, though they created great hype at the time, were completely discredited when the dust settled. If Fenton is questioning Bush's credibility, voters and the media might begin to look at his own. The Christic Institute charged in a grandiose lawsuit that anticommunist retired military personnel, including Maj. Gen. Jack Singlaub, a much-decorated soldier who operated behind enemy lines in World War II and commanded U.S. forces in South Korea, were involved in nefarious activities, from drug smuggling to murder. Fenton arranged the press conference to support the lawsuit at Washington's National Press Club and was identified by the left-wing Nation magazine as the Christic Institute's "public-relations consultant."
When the Christics could not produce any reliable witnesses, a judge ordered them to pay Singlaub and other defendants $1.2 million in legal costs, which put the Christics out of business. As wacky as the charges were, Singlaub says, they caused him great harm. "I spent a quarter of a million dollars defending myself against something that didn't happen," he recalls to Insight. "It was very painful."
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In MoveOn.org's new book Fenton begins his essay with the sixties motto: "If you don't like the news, go out and make your own."
Good post.
There's a National Review thread on FR now about how Cindy appeared in a Soros/Move On ad.