Your Astroturfing, My Grassroots

Does anyone else feel that our current administration has been conducting itself in a manner that shows it never expected to meet with any resistance?

I mean, even during the campaign Obama balked at even the attempt to make fun of his ears. Is it childish and stupid to make fun of him for a physical defect? Sure, but no more so than to constantly riff on his predecessor's tendency to mispronounce words.

After getting elected, Obama has begun pushing through his agendas like there's no tomorrow--literally. He pressed the Stimulus bill through Congress like it was on fire, demanding it be signed immediately with no time to read it.

When the Tea Party protests began, the administration poo-pooed them as "tea-bagging" racist rednecks, with Janeane Garofalo as the mouth-piece for that smear campaign. The official word was that these protests were racially motivated and concerned entirely with the idea that a black man was now President. Reporters who covered the scene talked over or cut off the people they interviewed, alleged that they were paid to be there by Fox News, and refused to show interviews with the articulate, erudite protesters, choosing only to show men like the guy who drew up a likeness of Obama dressed as Hitler (Of course, Bush-Hitler posters, effigies, etc. were all perfectly acceptable).

This shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone. After all, demonizing the opposition was the Obama Administration's primary tactic during the election. First attack John McCain, then go after Sarah Palin with both barrels. Now the problem is Rush Limbaugh. Libtards in the media learned that tactic as well (hell, they taught it) and used it against Carrie Prejean.

This tactic works pretty well when you use it against a single person. Now, people who would probably agree with Sarah Palin on most issues, were they to actually bother to figure out what she was all about, call her an idiot and laugh at the idea that she ever thought she could be Vice-President. They actually believe that she said she could see Russia from her house, or that she refused to answer Katie Couric's question about news sources because she doesn't read the news. It couldn't have been that the question was an obvious attack question. Let's say Palin had answered it. If it had been primarily right-wing news sources, such as Fox News, Couric could have used that to show that Palin didn't have an open mind. If they were left-wing news sources (ie: mainstream media), Couric could have used that to show that even she doesn't believe her own message.

But the tactic starts to break down when you apply it to a whole group of people. For example, the Tea-Party rallies. What you probably don't know is that most of the people who showed up don't call themselves Republicans. I base that on the numerous interviews conducted by various right-leaning journalists who did cover the events and actually let the interviewees talk. Most of them thought of themselves as independent, centrist or libertarian. In other words, the very people Obama says he's a part of! Obama ran on a platform of being a centrist, and won quite a few votes from people who assumed he meant it. Now, here are his people, his centrists, attending a rally to protest the burden of debt he's leaving for our children, and the media, with full approval of this administration, dismisses them as racists.

This is all not even to mention that a large number of Tea-Party protesters were black as well as centrist. Shouldn't Obama have been in their midst, considering he ran on a platform of speaking up for these very people?

Now that Obama's healthcare plan is sparking the same sorts of revolt, Obama's administration is at it again, only this time they're not relying on washed-up comediennes to spread their slander. The House Speaker herself has gotten in on the act, suggesting that town hall protesters are showing up with swastika's on their signs, and that they are not actually protesters at all, but "astroturfers" who were paid by insurance companies to be there.

Let's first of all talk about the supposed swastika's at these rallies. To hear Pelosi, and the Left-parroting mainstream media, tell it, these swastika-carrying loonies are right-wing nutjobs who don't really give a flying fig about healthcare; they just can't stand it that a black man is President.

What Pelosi and her posse won't tell you is that the only confirmed swastika's showing up at these meetings are being carried by supporters of far-left weirdo Lyndon H. LaRouche. That's a far cry from the "right-wing" conspiracy that Pelosi is trying to warn us of.

Now let's look at her term "astroturf." What is astroturf? It's fake grass. As such, it's also become a term for when a lobbyist group pretends to be a grass-roots movement of concerned citizens when it's actually a hired group, well-funded by an industry that stands to lose (or gain) something in the concurrent debate.

The argument that the town hall protesters must be astroturfers stems from Pelosi's statement that the protesters showing up were far too well-dressed to not be on some insurance company's payroll somewhere. According to her, if someone shows up to protest anything the Obama administration is for, then they'd better be unwashed bums or that's a sure sign that they're just in it for the money.

Well, Nancy, let's examine the two sides and see which one looks more like a grass-roots movement and which looks more like the astroturf.

On the one side, we have ACORN, SEIU, MoveOn.org, HCAN, and numerous other special-interest groups, all of whom either helped Obama get elected (ACORN, MoveOn.org) or who have openly thrown themselves into the tank with Obama during and after the election. To try and claim that these groups are bi-partisan is to show yourself to be blantantly blind to reality. These groups don't even claim to be bi-partisan themselves, but they don't mind if you believe it. It just makes their message more sellable.

When these groups show up at protests, they arrive in style in four or five sleek buses, and they file out with their matching, professionally printed signs. They have sound systems and organized chants. Infiltrators into their organizations have proven that these supposedly grass-roots groups are well-funded by charitable contributions from various government officials. Many of them will admit that they are on staff with these organizations, and are therefore being paid to show up.

Is there anything wrong with getting paid to spread your party's message? Not at all. That's capitalism. But the problem comes in when they, and the party they represent, claim that they're just a concerned citizens group who have no official connection to the Democratic party. When they say that these protests are just spontaneous uprisings against the deliberate "misinformation" being spread by the right, they prove themselves liars when the amount of money, organization and professionalism that goes into these rallies is evident upon casual observation.

And of course, it goes without saying that every member of these groups is a card-carrying Democrat, and they all voted for Obama in the election.

Now let's look at the town hall protesters (see, already they're less professional; they don't even have a name). They seem to show up at these protests, but they're not bused in. They have to drive themselves. They might be organized, but more in the manner of a church picnic than a political rally. The signs they carry are all hand-made. They may have bull-horns, but they don't typically have the kind of sound-system you'd usually associate with expensive DJ's. Ask any of them if they are being paid; they'll all say no. They're there because they're concerned about the kind of healthcare the Obama Administration is forcing on them. They're concerned that while the bill may not expressly state that the old, or those with pre-existing conditions, will not be covered under the new plan, the wording of the bill suggests that if the government decided these people were too much of a burden (and you know they would) they could immediately cut funding, or refuse to provide it. If you talk to these protesters, rather than talk over them or cut them off mid-sentence (Take note, MSNBC and CNN) then you figure that out rather quickly. Not only are they not claiming to be paid by anyone to be there, but the only evidence offered to say that they are is Nancy Pelosi's banal claim that "they're too well-dressed" to be a legitimate grass-roots organization.

And let's not forget that relatively few of them were McCain-voting Republicans. Most, like the Tea-Party rallies, call themselves independent, centrist, or libertarian. Many even say they voted for Obama, believing him to be centrist.

When you examine all that evidence, it's pretty clear that the Obama Administration's definition of "astroturf" and "grass-roots" needs to be tweaked slightly. Or swapped.

But that's what an administration does when it expected to encounter no resistance, when it fully believed that a huge majority of Americans had fallen in love with President Obama, and would never question him about anything, but instead meets with resistance almost immediately from the very people they claimed to be speaking for.

Let's examine just for a moment how scared Obama and his cronies must really be by this "astroturfing" movement. They've planted people at their town-hall meetings with questions pre-approved by the administration. They've endorsed "doctors" who supported this plan, who turned out not to be doctors at all. They've pre-screened which private citizens get to come into the building and actually speak with their congresspersons, and when those who manage to pass the screening get in, and actually ask a question challenging the health-care bill, they are either ignored, shouted down, or told to shut up or they'll be escorted out.

The media has, no surprise, gotten in on the act. On MSNBC, Contessa Brewer shows us a clip of a man at a town hall meeting with a gun, and drones on in this "tsk tsk" voice about "white people" showing up at town hall meetings with guns now that a "man of color" is in the White House. The video clip she runs suspiciously doesn't show the man's face, and it's no wonder why when you see the full clip. The "white" man with a gun who surely must be a racist angry at the "man of color" in office turns out to be...a black man. A black man who, by the way, did not identify himself with the Republican Party.

Now, when it comes to showing up to these town hall meetings with guns, I have to say that's foolish at best. First of all, the meetings are about health-care, not second amendment rights. Second of all, the gun-hating left needs no more ammunition to paint us all as gun-toting rednecks out for violence, or ready to lynch the new President, so why give it to them? Thirdly, it distracts from our message and allows the media to focus on the one or two aberrations rather than focusing on what our message really is. They don't listen to us anyway; why give them more reason to pull the focus away from what we are actually saying?

Despite that, it is criminal dishonesty to attempt to incite a race-riot by editing footage to match your preferred narrative. It is all the more revolting when you consider the absence of cameras when a group of SEIU thugs surrounded and attacked an unarmed black man, called him "nigger", and put him in the hospital, for the "crime" of handing out yellow flags saying "don't tread on me".

These are the actions of administration that is afraid and will stop at nothing to silence any opposition rather than risk their message getting out. It is clear that Obama and his cronies don't want you to know what's really in this health-care bill. They themselves haven't read it and claim that there is "no need to". They offer vague niceties when questioned directly, but nothing substantive. They try, vainly, to demonize the opposition, not realizing it's the folks they're trying to court who are the opposition now. It's how they've been running their campaign from the beginning.

And now the sheep they so thorough fed on "hope and change" are starting to wake up and realize that this is not the change they hoped for. And this administration is totally unprepared for that.