The Bush Ads

If people who lost SONS, DAUGHTERS, WIVES, or HUSBANDS are complaining about the ads, they should be pulled off the air. I dont give a flying **** what you have to say to defend Bush. If you didnt lose someone that day in those towers , you have no clue where they are coming from.

this isnt about politics. its about respecting the survivors of those lost on that horrific day.

 

Not only is our Osama hunt driven by the coming elections, so is our Afghanistan policy. This guy writes for the WSJ and the NYT.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16897
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Late in the summer of 2003, with American forces bogged down in Iraq and Saddam Hussein still at large, the Bush administration appeared to have what one senior US official in Kabul described to me as an epiphany. With no turning point in Iraq in sight, he said, no accomplishment that might help the President's approval rating as the country entered an election year, Bush's advisers decided that Afghanistan needed to be turned into a success story. If Osama bin Laden could not be caught, at least there should be an Afghan presidential election that could be publicized as a major step forward in the war against terrorism. For that to happen, more money was needed, reconstruction had to be accelerated, and the creation of new Afghan security forces speeded up. And, for the first time, the official said, the US began to recognize that to carry out these plans, the warlords had to be neutralized.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the new US ambassador to Kabul and President Bush's special representative to Afghanistan, describes US policy somewhat differently. The administration, he told me in Kabul in December, now believes that by pumping money and effort into the country at a quicker rate and achieving more rapid results, the US can speed up its withdrawal.
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rimrocker pointed out the biggest problem earlier. It's not just that Bush uses 9/11 images in his adds. If he wanted to run an add and say when we were attacked, I stepped up as a leader.

But to use 9/11 at the same time he is stonewalling and being uncooperative with the comission investigating 9/11, at least makes Bush appear insincere. If it was such a monumental event, why not cooperate in every possible way with the commission investigating the tragedy.

 

Although I absolutely despise what Bush as done in the past 4 years, and would actually vote against him in the upcoming election if my vote would've mattered(meaning I'm not living in Texas), I just couldn't see what was so bad about the ads.

Now, I can see how the ad might not be very tasteful, that some might find it offensive. But good lord, it's a freaking political ad! It's suppose to grab people's attention and appeases to their senses. It's suppose to be gimmicky. It's sad that voters now rely on 30seconds spots to choose our leader, but it is the truth. Honestly, I've NEVER seen an ad where the candidate actually talks about anything that actually delves into the issues seriously.

I mean, if you think this ad is irrelevant to the election, then Kerry's "Vietnam Veteran ads" were even worse. I mean, how does Kerry's 'heroics' in Vietnam any more pertinent to him being a good president than Bush for 9/11? If anything, 9/11 is a much more important part of Bush's portfolio than Kerry with his. Actually, if one were to pick apart every ad either side has run, I doubt any side would come out well.

 

Do you think there might be people who did lose family and friends on 9/11 who may even like the ads. I heard one on the radio yesterday.

 

Kerry's Viet Name records aren't the most important thing. But they are at least somewhat relevant. It shows that Kerry has been in combat. We have soldiers in combat as we speak. This shows that one of the two men understands what's involved in combat, and won't enter into those situations lightly or without that that understanding.

It also shows that he shows leadership through the most pressured of times.

Like I said when reparaphrasing what rimrocker said. It isn't that Bush used 9/11 in his ads. It's that he used it when he isn't cooperating with commission trying to correct what happened that day.

 

Nice post, meh. Much like GreenVegan, your political ideology is not clouding your common sense.

 

To use a sports analogy, does this mean that players make the best General Managers? I don't see how actual combat makes a person much more qualified at foreign policy and wars.

What? How does his leadership(and from what I've been watching, he wasn't exactly someone in command of many troops) in those times correlate with the pressures he'll face in the white house? I mean, the white house is not a life-and-death environment. I want a president who can make good decisions and help turn around the economy. Not someone who can make snap judgements while his life is in danger.

And as I have said, it's a freaking political ad. When has hard facts EVER gotten in the way of a good piece of propaganda? In fact, the story of the Boston "Massacre" wasn't exactly told by the colonists in anything resembling the truth. And that helped cause, well, the American Revolution.

 

Like I said it's not the most important factor, but it does give one a certain understanding that somebody who hasn't been there can not have. If that's not a valuable quality in a candidate in your opinion then so be it. To me it is a quality I will take into consideration given the times and situations we live in.

I can also compare this to how easily the current president will put our troops in harms way. Perhaps someone who's been in combat would stick the idea of using force only as a last resort.

Kerry was indeed in charge of men and given the responsibility to carry out missions. It's true that the whitehouse isn't life or death to the president himself. So if a person responded well under even more extreme pressure, it could be said they will be even that more calm and collected under the pressures that the President faces.

Yes it is a political ad, and facts often don't get in the way of them. However if someone is personally affected by a great tragedy and then sees the tragedy which took their loved ones from them use in a hypocritical way, people certainly have the right to be angry.

Just because it's only a political ad doesn't mean people who are deeply affected by 9/11 wont' get angry when images from that are used in a self serving, hypocritical way.

 

NewsweekMarch 15 issue -

The controversy over President George W. Bush's new TV ads featuring firefighters and fleeting images of the 9/11 attacks threw campaign officials on the defensive—and raised questions about the Bush team's ability to effectively spend its massive $150 million war chest, some GOP insiders say. The president's ad team, led by Austin, Texas-based media maven Mark McKinnon, had carefully road-tested the spots in focus groups, and Bush himself signed off. But the rollout of the ads, which argue that Bush has made the country "safer, stronger," was quickly marred by charges from some 9/11 families that the Bush team was seeking to exploit the attacks for political gain. One scene shows footage of a flag-draped coffin of a terror victim; another has an American flag waving in front of World Trade Center wreckage. Publicly, Bush aides were dismissive and insisted the flap had only strengthened their plan to make 9/11 "a central topic of the campaign." "There's no way you can talk about George W. Bush without talking about September 11," said one campaign adviser. "It's like talking about Franklin Roosevelt without mentioning World War II." But privately, some GOP strategists were disturbed by the backlash and suggested the ad team had misjudged how the imagery would play. "It's quite shocking to a number of Republicans to watch them stumble out of the block like this," said one veteran GOP consultant, who added that the big question in GOP circles is "Do they [the Bush-Cheney campaign] know how to spend" their huge budget?

Another, less publicized aspect of the ad flap: Everyone but the firefighters were paid actors. The firefighters posing in a firehouse was "stock" film footage of volunteer firefighters -- shot and available for purchase to the general public.

The flap is likely to put renewed attention on the White House's continuing wrangle with the 9/11 Commission. Kristin Breitweiser, a leader of a 9/11 family group, charged it was "hypocritical" of the Bush team to use September 11 when the president has refused to turn over sensitive intelligence documents to the full commission and, more recently, insisted that Bush himself will meet with the panel's chair and co-chair for only one hour. Even some GOP panel members are miffed at the White House stand—and blame it on administration lawyers. In what appears to be an attempt to defuse some of the controversy, NEWSWEEK has learned, White House officials have privately signaled to the commission that Bush will not rigidly stick to the one-hour time limit. When time is up, Bush won't walk out if there are still more questions, an aide said.

 

“Those ads they're running for President Bush - shouldn't they talk about 9/14 instead of 9/11? That's when he got to town, right? When I saw the first ad, I thought Rudy Giuliani was running for President. “

--Mike Lupica

 

A little Catch-22 in the Bush ad...

"January 2001. The challenge: an economy in recession."

But the recession didn't start in January and weren't they selling the tax cut at that time based on the idea that things were going so well, we could afford to give money back to the middle class as long as the middle class was in the top 10%?

I also saw where 54% of people polled by Gallup thought the 9-11 imagery was inappropriate.

 

No kidding! The first Bush tax cut was sold, in large part, with the idea that some of the surplus should be returned to the taxpayer. That we could afford it. Now they're trying to rewrite history and are depending on that infamous American problem... short-term memory loss.

(unless you're talking about Bill Clinton... then Republicans can give you the tiniest detail in wondrous Technicolor)

 

hmmm, now it looks like the whole "controversy" over these ads was paid for by a group financed by teresa heinz-kerry. wonder if this is a violation of campaign finance laws? wonder if john knows?

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/20231.htm

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(MRS.) KERRY'S CASH CONNECTION

March 9, 2004 -- To hear some folks tell it, families of the 9/11 victims have risen en masse to denounce President Bush for using brief images from Ground Zero in his campaign commercials.

We have no doubt that the use of the images is appropriate - given that the president's leadership in the wake of 9/11, and his conduct of the War on Terror, are under drumbeat assault by John Kerry and the Democrats.

But now it turns out that this whole furor is driven by a tiny group that's motivated by a far-left agenda and a festering hatred of the president - and has some quite dubious financial ties.

Leading the rhetorical charge has been an outfit called September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows - which, the group admits, has only a few dozen members and represents relatives of no more than 1 percent of the 9/11 victims.

More to the point, the group was formed specifically to oppose the entire War on Terror: Not just the campaign against Saddam Hussein, but also the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Indeed, the group's leaders traveled to Afghanistan, drawing a detestable moral equivalence between the 9/11 attacks and U.S. bombing of the Taliban and opposing "violent responses to terrorism."

Then, before the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a Peaceful Tomorrows delegation went to Baghdad to "demonstrate solidarity" with Iraqis - a move that Saddam's deputy, Tariq Aziz, termed at the time "a very important international development."

They also demanded that Congress set up a $20 million fund to compensate Afghan "victims" of the U.S. military.

And back in January 2003, the group said had it had gotten a "verbal commitment" to the fund proposal from the junior senator from Massachusetts - John F. Kerry.

Little surprise there - because Peaceful Tomorrows' parent group, the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, has received millions from foundations controlled by Kerry's heiress wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

A spokesman for Kerry insists that her donations to Tides were earmarked specifically for environmental charities based in Pennsylvania. But money is fungible - and the Tides Foundation has a lot more than greening the earth on its plate.

It has given millions to anti-war groups since 9/11 - particularly the extremist MoveOn.org.

Tides has also funded groups like United for a Fair Economy, which has been involved in violent anti-globalization street protests.

For example, the Ruckus Society, which was largely responsible for the anarchy in Seattle in 1999 and trains would-be environmental terrorists in the practice of "monkey-wrenching" - the willful destruction of construction equipment and so on.

Tides gets much of its funds from philanthropists like Mrs. Kerry and billionaire George Soros - who has made defeating President Bush his top personal priority.

As Richard Berman, director of the Center for Consumer Freedom, told Congress in 2002: "The Tides Foundation distributes other foundations' money, while shielding the identity of the actual donors."

Call it charitable money-laundering.

This, then, is the fringe crowd that declares itself "offended" by the Bush ads.

They're people who are offended by anything this president does - and they are working hard to put John Kerry in the White House.

Remember that the next time you hear a news report about "widespread popular outrage."

 

No more than 28 dead relatives? What a bunch of poseurs!

 

Ah yes, groups... The Heinz-Kerry article cited above is innuendo and six degress at its finest. The following however...
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The vast right-wing conspiracy is back in business
Those delightful people who brought you Paula Jones, Willie Horton and Whitewater are back, and this time they've got John Kerry in their sights.

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By Joe Conason



March 9, 2004 | As strategists in both parties gird for what all expect to be an unusually nasty presidential election, the stage has been set by the revival of a conservative crew that might be called "the usual suspects" -- including consultants Floyd Brown, Craig Shirley and David Bossie. With new Web sites and fundraising vehicles already running, these veterans of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" against the Clintons are now launching the first wave of "independent" commercial attacks on John Kerry, the Democratic nominee-to-be.

At Citizens United, the boisterous Brown and his sidekick Bossie are raising money to air their latest video creation, which blasts Kerry for his expensive haircuts and his wife's wealth, tagging him as a "rich elitist liberal from Massachusetts who says he's a man of the people."

Meanwhile, Grassfire.com, a new "grass-roots" outfit overseen by Beltway insider Shirley, has produced an ad that claims Kerry is "more liberal than Ted Kennedy." Aside from "nonpartisan educational" groups like Grassfire, his clients have included the Republican National Committee, the Republican Majority Committee, the American Spectator, the Club for Growth, the Conservative Political Action Committee, the Federalist Society, the National Rifle Association, News World Communications and the Washington Times Foundation.

If the names of Brown and Bossie sound more familiar, they attained notoriety together during the Clinton era as indefatigable promoters of the bogus "Whitewater" scandal. They served as publicity agents for David Hale, the crooked and discredited former Little Rock municipal judge whose allegations against the Clintons forced the appointment of an independent counsel. Among mainstream journalists panting for a career-making Watergate-style scandal, Brown and Bossie found many a gullible mark. For nearly a decade they churned out junk night and day. For a while, Bossie went on the payroll of the Senate Whitewater Committee; later he worked for Rep. Dan Burton's House Committee on Government Operations investigating Clinton and Al Gore -- until he was caught distributing doctored tapes to the media.

Their scorched-earth campaign tactics were epitomized by Brown and Bossie's 1992 paperback broadside "Slick Willie: Why America Can't Trust Bill Clinton." Among the ugliest features of this little pamphlet was a chapter of unsupported and anonymous insinuations about Clinton's role in a female student's suicide. Their "investigation" was later called "an unusually brazen dirty tricks operation" in a report on "CBS Evening News." (In light of recent discussion of the president's National Guard service, the authors may now regret at least one of "Slick Willie's" chapter titles -- "Brave Men Died in Vietnam: Where Was Bill Clinton?")

Craig Shirley, who presides over a large, Virginia-based P.R. firm with his wife, Diana Banister, played a less prominent but no less toxic role during the Clinton years. Among Shirley's notable clients were Paula Jones, the Clinton sexual harassment accuser who later modeled for Penthouse; and Gary Aldrich, the retired White House FBI agent whose fabricated tales of Clinton motel trysts and pornographic West Wing Christmas trees made his book a bestseller.

Yet as Kerry has reason to know, these operatives didn't commence their unsavory careers during the Clinton era. In 1988, they made political history with their first intervention in a national campaign, the so-called Willie Horton commercial. That was the racially inflammatory ad that helped bury the presidential hopes of Democrat Michael Dukakis.

The Horton ad appeared not as part of the Bush-Quayle campaign, whose strategists shied away from such obvious racism, but under the auspices of a shadowy organization called "Americans for Bush." According to testimony filed with the Federal Election Commission, which investigated the financing and planning of the Horton ad in 1990, the ad's actual creators included Brown and Shirley. Others involved included Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, and a young producer named Jesse Raiford who was simultaneously working on TV commercials for Roger Ailes, then his boss at the official Bush-Quayle campaign. (FEC commissioners and investigators strongly suspected unlawful collusion between Bush-Quayle and Americans for Bush, but Republican members of the commission quickly killed the probe.)

The rather primitive commercial featured the scary mug shot of Horton -- a sullen, scruffy-looking, African-American murderer who got weekend passes from prison while Dukakis was governor. Its provocative appeal to white fear was so blatant that even the Bush campaign was embarrassed, but Brown gleefully described it as the "silver bullet" that ruined the Democratic nominee.

Brown hasn't entirely lost his taste for stoking racial animosities. He currently works for the Young America's Foundation, where he oversees the indoctrination of youthful conservatives at the former Reagan Ranch. The YAF recently honored Rhode Island student Jason Mattera as the "top conservative student activist in the country," apparently because he sponsored a "whites only" scholarship at his school in protest of affirmative action.

But neither Brown nor his fellow hunters is likely to use racial ammunition against John Kerry. They would be thrilled by a sex scandal, real or faked, and they are eager to stoke resentments against gays and lesbians, not to mention Frenchmen. And although they have so far confined themselves to the tired "Ted Kennedy liberal" trope, that doesn't mean they won't go much further during the eight months ahead. They will do whatever the official Bush campaign can't or won't -- and they have had more than 15 years of target practice.

 

It's not slander! To be slanderous, something has to be not truthful and guess what.......it is the truth!!!!!! Jeez, you people are ridiculous. They didn't even support action against Afghanistan for chrissakes and you're going to say that it was slander? There is no pleasing you people. You can't be reasoned with. You must be defeated electorally.