Stupid Tea Party Truther Tricks

The Corporate Lobbyist sites Firedoglake and Sadlyno are making a big stupid deal out of us linking to Americans for Prosperity.

First of all, they do not fund or Organize us, we’ve only talked to them in the capacity of getting speakers for our events. “Sponsorship” in this case only goes as far as that and simply broadcasting the event details to their members and mailing lists. Every “Sponsor” in those links has helped us in that capacity, none have given us funding or orginization.

As John Henke notes:

What Freedomworks and various other organizations are doing is not “astroturf” any more than the anti-war protests of some years back were astroturf because ANSWER and Moveon.org helped organize people around those events. Astroturfing is paid activism by an organization; it is not genuine grassroots activism that funded groups are simply helping to organize.

The Center for American Progress & Think Progress, of all groups, should know better than to use the word “astroturf” against funded, ideological 501c(4) organizations that are trying to organize activists. Especially considering how many funded, ideological 501c(4) organizations they have trying to organize activists.

The accusations Paul Krugman makes in the New York Times are very similar to the talking points that have spontaneously arisen in the Leftosphere recently, and their attempts to delegitimize these policy protests are not likely to stop unless the Right fights back. For starters, unless Krugman and the New York Times issue a correction, the people they have libeled should consider responding to this libel through appropriate legal channels.

None of us are paid to do it, and we’ve taken the financial hit to run this, as well as the donations from private citizens.

This is downright libel, just making crap up in their own echosphere with no proof. If jokes like Firedoglake, Krugman, and Sadlyno had any integrity, they’d retract it. Of course, they don’t have any, so I won’t expect one.

Again from Henke

For the record, astroturf really requires two things: (1) A claim to be organic/grassroots, and (2) non-disclosure of the non-grassroots group that is really behind the activity. Organizational involvement in activism is not, itself, astroturf. Nor is it astroturf when an organization conducts its own activism project with full disclosure of their involvement.

Hell, we try to be as transparent as possible, we hold our meeting in public places and the national organizing conference calls are publicly broadcasted.

This was privately started and a lot of people are trying to jump on board as it grows. Doesn’t mean they run the show, but a lot of people scared and desperate to find something to detract have latched onto their lie and they are going to try to repeat it enough times until they think it becomes true.

Edit: More on this http://www.melissaclouthier.com/2009/04/13/tea-parties-and-liberal-angst/

Edit 2: It’s a big case of projection http://www.aim.org/on-target-blog/the-vast-left-wing-conspiracy/

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.