“Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” Slanderers Launch Campaign Against AARP Over Social Security
Published by Warrior Tang February 21st, 2005 in US Politics |
 |
This is making the rounds now. Background:
Taking its cues from the success of last year’s Swift boat veterans’ campaign in the presidential race, a conservative lobbying organization has hired some of the same consultants to orchestrate attacks on one of President Bush’s toughest opponents in the battle to overhaul Social Security.
The lobbying group, USA Next, which has poured millions of dollars into Republican policy battles, now says it plans to spend as much as $10 million on commercials and other tactics assailing AARP, the powerhouse lobby opposing the private investment accounts at the center of Mr. Bush’s plan.
“They are the boulder in the middle of the highway to personal savings accounts,” said Charlie Jarvis, president of USA Next and former deputy under secretary for the interior in the Reagan and first Bush administrations. “We will be the dynamite that removes them.”
Some of us recall the Republican party’s opinion of the Greatest Generation and the elderly poor in general:
We’ve had four more years pass where the age cohort that is most Democratic and most pro-statist, are those people who turned 21 years of age between 1932 and 1952 — Great Depression, New Deal, World War II — Social Security, the draft — all that stuff. That age cohort is now between the ages of 70 and 90 years old, and every year 2 million of them die… We will all work until we’re 65 and have the same pension. You know, some Bismarck, German thing, okay? Very un-American.
The AARP’s crime? Apparently, it was supporting the Republican Party’s Medicare proposal, against the interests of AARP members, to befriend the Republican Party. Because, as you recall from the State of the Union, Bush claims to be open to dissent and alternatives…
[Update 10:57 02/21/05 by Tang: More anti-AARP ads, via JMM:]
In a way, it’s a shame they withdrew the ad. Millions of voting seniors never got to see it, and I’m sure they would be delighted to know what the Bush administration thinks of them.
Enh.. I’m cynical enough to think they’d get more Republican AARP members to quit the AARP than the Republican Party. Even with that bad a campaign, even if it could be tied more directly to the White House. I’ve been in a cynical mood lately, though.