New Lows in Right-Wing Advertisements

Reader pmooney in TPMCafe (TPMCafeRight-Wing Ad: "Your Life Depends" On Vote): "I think the democrats should run an add showing Pearl Harbor footage and the date 'December 7th, 1941.' Then another image showing VE and VJ celebrations and the tag 'what you get 5 years later, when democrats control the government.' The next image would be 9/11 and 'September 11th, 2001' followed by the exact same images in the republican commercial with the header '5 years later, when republicans control the government.' Then perhaps some Katrina images with the caption 'and that's not all.'"

I think this is a brilliant strategy for the November elections. What has "fear, fear, fear" gotten us? A war that should never have been fought, American influence around the world at an all-time low (even in the pre-Revolutionary War days), an entire region of the United States of America living in the ruins of a catastrophic set of storms one year ago and so on and so on...



This has been playing here in Missouri, where there is a hotly contested Senate race between incumbent Senator Jim Talent(R) and Claire McCaskill(D). I don't know how much play this is getting because I don't watch a lot of local television (thank God for satellites!), but it's only message seems to be, "vote Republican or terrorists will swarm all over the country, killing everyone they see."

Jim Talent has an enormous war chest to fund his own ads to supplement the Progress for America's (a 527 group) ad above. In his own ad, he is trying to give the impression of an everyday Joe taking a quick break from shuffling through reams of papers to spout a laundry list of vague descriptions of what he has done for Missouri.

He has to be vague; for example, he says that he has helped to find alternative energy--but his alternative is to give Big OilTM huge tax breaks and funding to drill for oil in the ANWR, not to develop renewable and environmentally responsible fuel sources.

That's the way it always goes with politicians--you always have to read the fine print.