Paul M Peterson

Fox News Corporation (FNC) uses fake grassroots campaign to promote itself

Across America, the shellacked G.O.P. have organized an astroturf campaign to protest anticipated taxation on the current national debt. Started by conservative talk radio hosts, and promoted heavily by Fox News <1>, these T.E.A. (an acronym for Taxed Enough Already) parties have cropped up in every corner of the country. Even Michelle Malkin is getting in on the act.

Look for this to become a yearly event. April 15 will now be the GOP’s Earth Day, complete with nationwide protests. This PR war has been brought to us by Fox News. Fox is using the “parties” to promote their nightly line up. The parties themselves were the brain child of Frank Strategies, a Washington D.C. PR firm whose past work includes a smear campaign against Al Gore.

This is what the official website Teapartyday says

Are you fed up with a Congress and a president who:

* vote for a $500 billion tax bill without even reading it?
* are spending trillions of borrowed dollars, leaving a debt our great-grandchildren will be paying?
* consistently give special interest groups billions of dollars in earmarks to help get themselves re-elected?
* want to take your wealth and redistribute it to others?
* punish those who practice responsible financial behavior and reward those who do not?
* admit to using the financial hurt of millions as an opportunity to push their political agenda?
* run up trillions of dollars of debt and then sell that debt to countries such as China?
* want government controlled health care?
* want to take away the right to vote with a secret ballot in union elections?
* refuse to stop the flow of millions of illegal immigrants into our country?
* appoint a defender of child pornography to the Number 2 position in the Justice Department?
* want to force doctors and other medical workers to perform abortions against their will?
* want to impose a carbon tax on your electricity, gas and home heating fuels?
* want to reduce your tax deductibility for charitable gifts?
* take money from your family budget to pay for their federal budget?

The website then goes on to suggest that the remedy for these ills is to organize a tea party in your neighborhood. Notwithstanding that most of the citizens who will be attending these parties are actually getting a tax cut under Obama’s plan and also notwithstanding that the radicals who actually dumped tea into Boston Harbor in 1790 were considered treasonous left wing militants, the above list has precious little to do with fiscal policy. It is clearly a list designed to bring a conservatives blood pressure up.

Having said that, for once, conservatives and I agree on something: Taxes Do Suck! I hope that in a spirit of cameraderie and brotherhood, leftists will join their protests, swarming them with plenty of dreadlocked hippies sporting “free mumia” posters and “free Leonard Peltier” T-shirts. Meanwhile, we can remind them that the bailout of the banks started under George Bush without a peep from the reich wing. We can also remind them that stealth fighters ain’t cheap, that maintaining 190 military bases around the world is responsible for a huge chunk of the budget and that a nuclear warhead is the most expensive piece of useless junk ever created.

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