Meet the Astroturfer Planning to Swift Boat Obama
Meet the Astroturfer Planning to Swift Boat Obama
“Yes, it’s the swift boating of the president,” says the founder of a dark-money group claiming to speak for ticked-off Navy SEALs.
May 4, 2012
By Adam Weinstein
Who’s funding Vets for a Strong America, and how does it spend its money? There’s no way to know. The group is registered as a 501(c)4—a “social welfare” group that can engage in political activities without disclosing its donors.
— Adam Weinstein
Veterans for a Strong America describes itself “a grassroots action organization committed to ensuring that America remains a strong nation by advancing liberty, safe guarding freedom and opposing tyranny.” Founded in 2010, the ostensibly nonpartisan group kept a low profile until earlier this week, when it posted a splashy online ad that uses statements from President Barack Obama to suggest that the commander-in-chief boasted about his role in killing Osama bin Laden, dishonoring America’s military in the process.
Joel Arends, VFSA’s founder, chairman, and sole staffer
“Heroes don’t polilcize their acts of valor,” the ad declares amid shots of American soldiers and quotes criticizing Obama’s “shameless” and “despicable” attempt to claim credit for bin Laden’s death. Not all of those quotes are in context: The video flashes “Obama Spikes the bin Laden Football,” a headline from a post in which Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum wrote that the bin Laden raid proved Obama’s “leadership.”
Karl Rove praised the ad on Twitter, calling it “powerful,” and it rapidly burned up the right-wing blogs. “The swift boating of Obama has begun,” The Atlantic announced. “One thing that’s clear from this advertisement, if more current and former SEALs decided to come out of the woodwork in opposition to Obama, it could do real damage to him.”
Addendum: he’s also of the Pam Geller, Robert Spencer and Frank Gaffney “school of Sharia paranoia”:
…After VFSA hosted a forum for Newt Gingrich in Florida early in the primary season, Arends unloaded to a conservative journalist about how “Islamic Jihadists are infiltrating public schools and the military with their evil message” through the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He continued:
I’ve seen what radical Islam does, I’ve seen those car bombs…you know what? There are groups like CAIR today who are working to kind of, with this creeping sharia here in America, who are working to plant the seeds of the sharia code and sharia law that finds itself manifested in the Middle East…
They’re not going to assault us in the streets like they do in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what they are gonna do is they’re going to try to infiltrate into our schools, try to get in front of young, impressionable children, and in our public school systems, you’re gonna find a welcome audience. You’re gonna find some administrators out there, these politically correct teachers and administrators who love to bring these kinds of organizations into the classroom because they think they’re being politically correct.
