BEWARE THE CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN PIRATES!

"AAARRRGGGHHH! I'M A
CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN,
AND I HATE ALL DEMOCRATS, PROGRESSIVES, LIBERALS,
AND ESPECIALLY OBAMA!"

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Ahoy, mateys! If you thought the only pirates left in the world today were those harassing ships off the coast of Somalia, you're dead wrong. There are a whole boatload of them operating alongside and within today's pathetic, far-right, conservative Republican Party.

You know the type. They noisily force their way on board the ships of progressive legislation and good governance, and then they hijack the truth, carving it up and turning it into distorted lies to suit their own purpose. You've seen them in action numerous times: Pirate Queen Sarah Palin spitting out lies about how President Obama's national health care reform agenda would create "death panels"; Cap'n Rush Limbaugh and his bumbling parrot, First Mate Glenn Beck, spewing venomous lies about President Obama being a fascist racist and his health care plan being "socialized medicine"; and other ships' mates like Senator Charles Grassley and health insurance lobbyists making irresponsibly false, rabblerousing statements about how a public option for health care would "pull the plug on grandma." Yet other reckless sword swingers like Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, Jon Kyl, and John Boehner have put their "NO!" Oars into the water in an effort to stall the vessels of progressive legislation and good governance altogether, so as to drive them into a Sargasso Sea of big money dominance, where allied corporate, special interest pirates can sink the vessels completely. Yeah, these conservative Republican pirates are all baddies, but they're not the worst of the lot. The worst pirates are those shadowy, far-right front groups which are set up and funded by secretive ultra-conservative multimillionaires and who create misleading ad campaigns to confuse and scare the public into rejecting the progressive agenda completely.

I saw a print media ad a couple of days ago from one of these sinister pirate groups called "U.S. Citizens Association." This is another in a long list of far-right front organizations set up by lobbyists, corporations, and wealthy ultra-conservatives to look as though it is composed of average, everyday Americans who oppose progressive legislation, and somehow sprung up out of nowhere to voice their concerns. Nothing could be further from the truth. The persons behind this group are deceitful liars. It turns out that their predecessor organization was called "Better Government Association." This was a direct name rip-off of the Chicago-based Better Government Association, Inc., a reputable nonpartisan watchdog group which has been targeting government corruption since 1923. This REAL Better Government Association filed suit in Federal Court against these rip-offs and the Courts sided with the authentic, original group, forcing these new conservative phonies to adopt their name change. The new "U.S. Citizens Association" which resulted is now actively engaged in fundraising, as was evidenced in the ad I saw. It purports to be a nonpartisan group of regular citizens, but a visit to its website reveals no information about its financial backers, officers, or founders, and it obviously has enough money to publish ads in suburban newspapers all over the country and defend itself in court. No loose-knit group of average citizens could possibly be THAT well funded---smells VERY fishy to me!

The ad in question is titled "Barack Obama and the Democrats did not inherit the bad economy; they caused it and made it worse." (Of course, only uniformed idiots would buy this junk. After all, the economy tanked in December, 2007, 13 months BEFORE Obama took office, and, as a result of his stimulus effort begun this spring, unemployment is now starting to ease its rate of climb, housing starts and home sales are up, and the stock market is rising). The subheading goes on to say "They now want to bankrupt the nation with socialized medicine and socialized energy taxes." As if that weren't enough, these charlatans then have another subheading stating, "This will greatly increase your income taxes, property taxes, utility bills and you will be denied health care." (Obvious bull, because the President has constantly pledged to NOT raise taxes on those earning less than $250,000 per year, and the aim of his health care plan is to ensure that EVERYONE has access to affordable, quality health care. The only ones denying anyone health care are these conservative Republican pirates and their bankrollers, the health insurance industry)! Then, as if in a wanted poster, they picture Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Janet Reno, Franklin Raines, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, and Barack Obama under a headline reading "These are the leading culprits who actually caused the subprime mortgage collapse which then caused the worldwide deep recession." The ad, which is formatted to look like a legitimate news article, is a twisted lie from start to finish.

No mention at all is made of the huge role played over the past 11 years by former Texas Senator Phil Gramm and other congressional ReRepublicans to greatly reduce regulations on banks and energy speculators, and how this set the stage for years of sloppy lending practices and $4 per gallon gasoline. (Conservative Republicans were in total control of Congress and the White House for the overwhelming majority of that time. If they were such great gatekeepers of the economy, how then did this irresponsible economic tampering come about, and how, then, are Democrats responsible)? No mention at all is made of Republican-instigated efforts to enact unrestricted free trade deals that have caused millions of jobs to go overseas, depressing wage scales and job levels here at home. (They reveled in the booty they got for keeping the minimum wage frozen for ten full years, too)! Not a word is uttered, either, about how Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush all but destroyed labor unions in this country, and how that has further depressed wages here and lowered our standard of living. And no mention is made at all about how gigantic tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, initiated and passed by conservative Republicans, has all but bankrupted our government. Nor is mention made that it was the Bush, and not the Obama White House, which overspent wildly in Iraq on a war that did not need to be fought, or that it was Bush, and not Obama, who instigated the first gigantic corporate bailouts. Instead, all these dishonest pirates do is blame Democrats and "liberal socialists." Their selective and jaded memory is disgusting.

The body of their ad contains one crazy far-right allegation after another: that Obama and the Democrats are on the verge of changing the U.S. from a capitalist country to a socialist one "more like Cuba and North Korea"; "during the past 8 years, the Democratic party political action group ACORN pressured banks to give mortgages to people who could not afford them"; under a public option health care plan "senior citizens especially will be denied healthcare, including those on Medicare"; "the United Kingdom and Canada, both of which have socialized medicine, are overwhelmed with cases of people dying waiting for treatment"; "the Obamas throw lavish parties on a regular basis at the White House for their socialist friends", "in capitalist countries only 10% of the people temporarily live in poverty. In socialist countries, 99% of the people live in poverty permanently."

None of these allegations are footnoted or referenced with verifiable fact, and ALL of them are patently absurd.

I don't see Obama shutting down newspapers and TV networks or setting up camps for political prisoners, or redistributing land and putting everyone in the country on a government payroll like what has occurred in Cuba or North Korea, do you? Of course not. ACORN, a group devoted to registering poor and minority citizens to vote, has no influence whatsoever over banks and is NOT an organ of the Democratic Party; senior citizens will NOT lose medical coverage under a public option; Canadians, Britons, Danes, Swedes, Dutchmen, the French, Australians, and New Zealanders are NOT dropping dead on the streets of their cities due to delayed medical care under their "socialized medicine" systems; the Obamas' parties are no more lavish than were the Bushes' (either of them), the Clintons', the Reagans', the Fords', the Johnsons', or any other of their predecessurs' parties; the U.S. Census official poverty rate was 12.5% in 2007 and rose to 12.7% in 2008, so that esposes another of this ad's blatant lies. And many of those people in that unfortunate category are NOT there "temporarily" but permanently. And I'd love the U.S. Citizens Association to tell the citizens of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, or France that 99% of them live in poverty. The USCA would be laughed at hysterically and met with deserved catcalls, for none of those countries has income extremes or abject poverty levels anywhere remotely approaching ours, and the USCA would certainly consider them to be socialist economies. The U.S. Citizens Association, like nearly all of its far-right counterparts, is simply long on allegation, innuendo, and hyperbole, but fatally short on fact. They are full of excrement.


You won't ever see the full truth presented in any of these far-right, conservative Republican pirate ads. These thieves repeatedly steal from all of us, blatantly siphoning money from the poor and middle class, and then funneling it up to the very wealthy in a sordid form of reverse income redistribution. They scream "class warfare" when the government lowers taxes on the middle class and poor but raises them even slightly on the piggish ultra-rich. Then they lie about, and blame somebody else, for the vast income shift from bottom to top that has occurred in this country for the past 30 years. Liars like this U.S. Citizens Association ought to be made to walk the plank at knifepoint for the myths they've perpetrated and the people they've scared and brainwashed. So be sure to warn all your friends and fellow seafarers to watch out for this filthy little deceitful bunch of scalawags. Meanwhile, I again call out to everybody everywhere from my perch in this crow's nest...

BEWARE THE CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN PIRATES!