The SuperPAC supporting (but definitely not co-ordinating with!) Newt Gringrich yesterday released another negative “documentary” attacking Mitt Romney.
Called “Blood Money” the film links the former head of Bain Capital to Damon Clinical Laboratories, a medical testing company the equity firm controlled during the early 90s that was subsequently found guilty of having massively defrauded the Medicare system by billing for millions of unnecessary blood tests.
Whether this new line of attack will have sufficient time to influence next week’s Florida primary election remains to be seen.
The complete film by the SuperPAC supporting Newt Gingrich called “When Mitt Romney Came to Town.” It’s quite an artful hatchet job.
As expected, the Republican establishment and most of the corporate media is pushing back strenuously against what it chooses to regard as an outrageous attack on Capitalism. Here, for example, is Newt Gingrich getting put through the wringer this morning by Steve Douchey and the not-so-friendly slackwits on Fox News:
Their follow-up guest was sleazy former NYC Mayor Rudy Guiliani who blasted what Gingrich and Rick Perry are doing as being “ignorant” and “dumb” – further claiming that “its building ignorance of the American economic system…it’s playing on the dumbest, most ridiculous ideas about how you grow jobs.”
Interesting discussion from this weekend’s “Up w/ Chris Hayes” program about the true nature of Mitt Romney’s dubious wealth-extracting endevours in the “free market” as a private equity investor (the polite term for “corporate vampire”).
Oblivious to ironic contradiction on multiple levels, the anonymous SuperPAC backing Newt Gingrich has released a trailer for a half-hour long, fact-based “documentary” (not to be confused with an expensive negative smear campaign) entitled When Mitt Romney Came to Town that promises to expose with much pathos and gloomy cinematics, the devastating effects of Romney-owned Bain Capital’s evil business model on the working folk of America:
It’s expected that the film will be released to coincide with the South Carolina primary – a wrastlin’ showdown that promises to be supremely vicious and ugly.
Manitoba is one of the five provinces having elections this fall, so along with many other folks across the country, we here in “The Keystone Province” (yes, that’s actually its official nickname – bet you didn’t know that!), are being subjected to the obligatory barrage of negative political advertising from the various parties. Or so I’ve heard. Not owning a TV, I mercifully avoid most commercial ads, but morbid curiosity still compelled me to check out some of them.
Here’s one from the PCs featuring several “ordinary citizens” complaining about various perceived failings of the current NDP government:
I’ll reserve my impressions of it for the time being, but I’m curious if any readers/viewers want to share their thoughts. Or if you don’t want to go to the trouble of doing that, you can just cast a vote:
Here’s an absolutely pathetic “Conservative” attack video from “GritGirl” counterpart “ToryBoy” claiming that Michael Ignatieff “DOESN’T CARE ABOUT RURAL CANADA” because… get the logic here: the recent series of advertisements featuring him in a wooded setting was actually filmed at a lakeside park near Toronto.
Oh, and he lives in an “UPSCALE YORKVILLE CONDO IN TORONTO!” Well sheesh, what an elitist prick, eh! Actually, I’ve seen his condo (on TV) and it didn’t look all that fancy to me.
But wait, doesn’t Stephen Harper reside in Calgary Southwest? That’s wasn’t exactly “rural” the last time I lived in that city (average family income there is $123,000). According to the logic of “ToryBoy” I guess Harper must not “care about rural Canada” either.
Is this really the shoddy and ridiculous level of attacks the Conservatives are going to stoop to? Maybe they should take a page from the Liberals book and say: “We can do better.”
Note: For reasons unknown, the video has been “removed by the user” since this was posted.
You know, some days you’ve just got to be amazed at the galling douchebaggery of Conservatives. Witness this latest attack video from ToryBoy1 (not to be confused with ToryBoy69):
Freeze-frame at 20 seconds in and you get this:
Actually the screen-cap for the video, funnily enough.
Now, you might at first glance think this was ripped from a news story, or at the very least an editorial, by the Kingston Whig Standard, right? Wrong. In fact, it turns out to be nothing more than a Letter to the Editor from a Mr. Glen Parker, a legionnaire who resides in Gananoque, Ontario (apparently).
Mr. Parker is a rather frequent letter writer, having mailed off other epistles to the local Kingston paper, as well as the Toronto Star telling people to quit whining and asking their government for assistance when they get in legal trouble overseas and warning of the dangers that might befall the country if the “looney left” (his quotes) “gets its hands on the purse-strings” of the nation.
“A major cyclical downturn, but nothing that requires major government intervention”
Well, that’s what “Grit Girl” would have people think, with this new and expanded version of a previous attack video, that comes on the heels of today’s figures reporting that unemployment hit a 7-year high, with the loss of another 61,300 bringing the number cut since October 2008 (back when there was no recession, remember) to 357,000 jobs cut, or 2.1 per cent of the work force.
But oh-oh! Here’s what Harper said in context on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program at the beginning of March:
I’m not generally a Keynesian, but when you have the kind of drops in economic activity we’re having and interest rates near zero and financial sectors, the banking sector not translating investments into saving or savings into investments, you have no choice but to have the government move in, observe those funds and put them to work. Now, one can criticize is it fast enough? Is it effective? Are the long-run benefits sufficient?
But I think the fiscal stimulus does have to be done and obviously, there’s going to have to be major non-market fixes to the financial sector and to the housing sector. We’re just fortunate in Canada we don’t have to do those kinds of policies because they’re fraught with enormous long-run danger in terms of creating moral hazard, risks to future economic decisions. But we haven’t had to do that. As you said, we don’t have the bank failure in Canada and we don’t have on the housing side, we have also regulation on government housing insurance that’s prevented sub-prime type of situation. We have a cyclical downturn but nothing that requires major government intervention.”
So, is it fair to take a remark the PM made about the housing and financial sector and attach it to the mounting tide of unemployment? Especially so when the government is, in fact, taking the plunge into unprecedented deficit spending that could fairly be argued represents a “major government intervention.”
Maybe this sort of thing is pleasing to Liberals and I suppose fair is fair given how the Conservatives lie through their teeth with their malicious attack ads, but I’ve never much subscribed to the notion that two wrongs make a right.
Oops. Sorry, that’s ToryBoy (to be precise, “ToryBoy1” — not to be confused with ToryBoyX573). Anyway, here’s the latest boffo attack ad from the Harper’s brainacs at Dooche Central:
Oooooo… pretty scary, boys and girls. Thunderous, plodding music. Owooooo! Quotes taken out of context from 2½ years ago!!! And a headline from CBC News from a year ago speculating that the Liberals might raise the GST back up to the level it was when the economy was riding high before the Conservatives drove it into a wall! And all the while, money just flying out of your poor wallet. That is YOUR wallet isn’t it, Mr. and/or Mrs. “Average” Canadian? I mean you are white and married with two kids, right?
Stephen Harper’s Conservatives: Because playing politics is so much more fun than mismanaging the economy!
I’ll have to confess that I’ve got some mixed feelings about the latest round of negative attack ads from the Liberals. On the one hand, I wish they had kept to communicating an upbeat, optimistic message about their bright, shiny new “Green Shift” plan and the dreamy vision of a greener, more prosperous economy filled with “green manufacturing” jobs and lovely multicultural people feeling all misty about their low-emission, carbon-free future…
But on the other hand, the Conservative slime merchants, sleazebags, character assassins, and backroom cabal of hatchet men (not to mention the frothing horde of slackwits queuing up for the latest sale on pitch-forks and torches at Wal-Mart) have been relentlessly hammering away at Dion and the Liberals in general as being the embodiment of corruption, moral decrepitude, faggotry, spineless dhimmitude, and all-around evil incarnate for years now, so, you know what… fuck it. Really. Screw you and the whole dumbfuck train you rode in on.
Nice guys finish last, as we’re told with great Nietzschean certitude by our friends on the right who love nothing more than to triumphantly bark about how great achievements can only be made over top piles of lesser, weaker creatures mercilessly crushed underfoot. So fine. Right back at ya…
How terribly convenient that the press just suddenly awoke from their deep slumber to take note of the fact that the Conservative Party website was, until last week, a ludicrous joke that was so crudely offensive and disgustingly juvenile in nature that it even repelled many of its own supporters.
Saying the site was “in poor taste,” Harper said the puffin feature has been removed.
“And my apologies for it having been up… We have acted to remove this caricature. We can fight the Liberals without doing that.”
Even so, other new Conservative Internet ads cast Dion as an elite professor who is out of touch with ordinary people, a strong contrast to their portrayal of Harper as a gentle family man.
So, the execrable Conservative Party website that was “in poor taste” — but went entirely unnoticed (or at least unremarked on) by the mainstream press for more than two years — has now been replaced by an insipid mélange of bland puffery interspersed with vicious attacks against “Proffesseur Dion” that accuse him of being a criminal with Nazi affiliations, amongst other things… Not to mention this libelous sleaze-pit dedicated to filleting Stéphane Dion’s character with bucket loads of slime. Yeah, that’s something the “straight up guy” in the slimming blue sweater-vest should be really proud of.
A counter-site called “This is Dion” has been launched by the Libs. Fisherman, skier, hockey player, “family man”… you know the routine.
Red Tory v.3.0.3 