Not content with having spent years in the White House purveying damaging lies America is paying for in lives and treasure, Ari Fleisher is behind Freedom Watch's $15 million TV ad campaign urging an ongoing war. The campaign is aimed at Republican districts represented by members of Congress whose support of the war in Iraq has been wavering. Joe Conason writes in Salon:
While Freedom's Watch may prefer to present itself as a voice of veterans and to imagine itself as an expression of grass-roots voters, it more closely resembles United Seniors Association or Americans for Job Security. Like those other front groups, Freedom's Watch has a big budget, a partisan agenda and a roster of right-wing talent to wield temporary influence, whether during an election campaign or a policy struggle, while making little or no real effort to organize citizens outside the Beltway. It isn't surprising that the White House would resort to a blitz of this kind, because they have often worked so well in the past.
But the manipulative style of the Freedom's Watch ads -- and the apparent decision to air them against wavering Republicans -- signals desperation, not strength. This campaign is aimed at the base, not the broader public that despises Bush and wants the troops brought home. Launching such an effort now may hold a few votes for the White House in the upcoming congressional struggles over the war, but it is cheapening the emotional currency that Republican strategists have relied on during the past three election cycles and will undoubtedly seek to exploit again next year.
Such strategies eventually exhaust the public, and what helps now may be ruinous later. Perhaps there is poetic justice in Republicans turning on one another with the same cynical lies and manipulations that led to the war in the first place.
