Ignore the part in the new RNC ad where it looks like Manhattan Island is racing away from the Statue of Liberty. We'll get to that, later.
Republican National Chairman Michael Steele's latest gift of a gaffe to politicos is in the form of a new ad posted to YouTube Monday.
"The RNC will launch a new TV ad featuring chairman Michael Steele next week, taking the unusual step of appealing for donations via the airwaves in heavily GOP markets," Hotline reported Friday. "The 60-second spots will run in Tulsa; Oklahoma City; Cincinnati; Greensboro, NC; and West Palm Beach, FL. Steele will follow up the ad with personal visits to each market, where he will hold fundraisers. 'Pres. Obama and Nancy Pelosi are experimenting with America. Massive government expansion, government takeovers, redistribution of wealth, and staggering debt to countries like China and the Middle East,' Steele says in the ad. 'It's wrong, we can't afford it. It threatens our freedom.'" He continues: "But if people pull together, people can take our government back. Go to OurFreedomMatters.com. Make a donation. Washington is not listening. The President is not listening. Make them listen. Join with us. Go to OurFreedomMatters.com. Or dial 1-800-524-9004. Make a donation today, because our freedom is worth fighting for."
Steele's ad blasts Obama and House Speaker Pelosi for "experimenting with America," but the last newspaper headline shown in the advertisement belonged to a column which also took shots at the last Republican presidential administration.
In his March 27, 2009 op-ed entitled "Staggering national debt threatens future of working families", David S. Broder's very first line claimed, "With a bit of bookkeeping legerdemain borrowed from the Bush administration, the Democratic Congress is about to perform a cover-up on the most serious threat to America's economic future."
The ever-growing national debt will require ever-larger annual interest payments, with much of that money going overseas to China, Japan and other countries that have been buying our bonds.Reacting to this scary prospect, the House and Senate budget committees last week took the paring knife to some of Obama's spending proposals and tax cuts. But many of the proposed savings look more like bookkeeping gimmicks than realistic cutbacks. The budget resolutions assume, for example, that no more money will be needed this year to bail out foundering businesses or pump up consumer demand, even though estimates of those needs start at $250 billion and go up by giant steps.
Republicans on the budget committees offered cuts that were larger and, in some but not all instances, more realistic.
But the main device the Democratic budgeteers employed was simply to shrink the budget "window" from 10 years to five. Instantly, 5 trillion dollars of debt disappeared from view, along with the worry that long after the recession is past, the structural deficit would continue to blight the future of young working families."
Broder continued in the column that the RNC would use a year later to attack Obama, "The Democrats did not invent this gimmick. They borrowed it from George W. Bush, who turned to it as soon as his inherited budget surpluses withered with the tax cuts and recession of 2001-02. But Obama had promised a more honest budget and said this meant looking at the long-term consequences of today's tax and spending decisions."
Last week, as RAW STORY reported, Steele went on Fox News to carry out damage control Thursday after revelations that an RNC campaign strategy presentation portrayed President Obama as the Joker from Batman and appeared to hold Republican donors in contempt.
A presentation on strategy delivered to Republican donors and fundraisers on Feb. 18 featured a graphic entitled "Evil Empire" that included cartoons of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, with the title "Cruella DeVille and Scooby-Doo."The presentation also suggested that Republican donors are "ego-driven" and can be made to give money by appealing to their animosity against the Obama administration.
The presentation displayed "an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives," wrote Politico's Ben Smith, who originally obtained the document.
The news has outraged some Democrats, with DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse telling the Washington Post: "If you had any doubt, any doubt whatsoever, that the Republican Party has been taken over by the fear-mongering lunatic fringe, those doubts were erased today. ... Republicans across the country have cheered on crowds where these very images appeared.
On Fox News Thursday, Steele described the presentation as "unfortunate."
"This is not the kind of presentation I want to make to staffers, or to our donors, or anyone else, because it cheapens the political process," Steele told Fox's Megyn Kelly.
Last November, RAW STORY noted, "A selected sampling of prior Steele statements that have caused a ruckus include referring to Rush Limbaugh as a practitioner of "ugly" entertainment, claiming he went from "pro-life his entire career" to believing abortion is an "individual choice," offering "slum love" to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, hinting that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney lost in the 2008 presidential primaries because he was Mormon, and suggesting that the GOP was in dire need of a 'hip-hop' makeover.
Other "he said what" quips include his hoping to attract more blacks to his party by offering them "fried chicken and potato salad" and joking that the GOP needs "to uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets.”
Last March, Politico reported Steele was "[s]teadily becoming a dependable punch line" due to his frequent gaffes.
As for the shot of the moving city of New York while the camera and the Statue of Liberty stay still in the foreground?
Perhaps its meant as a metaphor for the country drifting away from Obama? Perhaps the stock footage of the Statue predates 9/11 and it was the only way to not show the twin tower in the scene? Or perhaps Lex Luther's diabolical plot to create his own super-continent has been rehatched?
Only the RNC knows for sure. And they'll probably never tell us.
