In a political season marked by some pretty vicious attack ads, the Democrats have just sunk to a new low. A left-wing group called the Agenda Project Action Fund boasted that it is launching “a multi-pronged blitzkrieg attack that lays blame for the Ebola crisis exactly where it belongs — at the feet of the Republican lawmakers.”
Erica Payne, the group’s founder and president, said in a statement: “In launching this effort, we will be the first major progressive group to directly blame GOP budget cuts for the nearly 4,000 deaths caused by the Ebola crisis.”
Sounds absolutely absurd, doesn’t it? But sadly, there will be a whole lot of what are charitably called “low-information voters” who buy into this hate campaign. (“Low-information” means those dummies who can’t name their senators or congressman or even the three branches of government, but can always be counted on to check the “D” boxes when they mark their ballots.)
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The group said its new ad, which is called “Republican Cuts Kill,” will target Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, Pat Roberts in Kansas and more than a dozen other Republican politicians as well as their votes that cut the budgets of the National Institute of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and gutted foreign aid — all programs that could have dealt with the epidemic.
By the way, this is the same sleazy organization that created the infamous TV ad where a Paul Ryan-look alike pushed an elderly woman in a wheelchair over a cliff. So you can bet they won’t let the truth get in the way of a headline-grabbing publicity campaign.
The truth, of course, is that the CDC doesn’t suffer from a lack of funding. Its current budget comes to a staggering $6.9 billion, which is $300 million more than President Obama requested in his budget proposal for fiscal year 2014.
And even the rather minor cuts to its budget in the past can’t be blamed on Republicans. The biggest reductions came about because of sequestration, a measure originally proposed by Obama.
No, the problem isn’t how much money the CDC or the NIH receives from us beleaguered taxpayers, but how they decide to spend it. In the past, they have financed studying why lesbians are more obese than straight women, the dangers of having sex with Mexican prostitutes and even a cost/benefit analysis of the sex habits of snails.
By the way, don’t hold your breath waiting for Allison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic candidate running against McConnell in Kentucky, to denounce this example of gutter politics. Heck, she’s the same person who has refused to admit that she voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Not exactly a profile in courage.
The Senate race in Kentucky is so close that even a sleazy attack ad like this one could make a difference. Even before it appeared, Republican strategist Karl Rove put the election there in the toss-up category. While I’ve never been a big fan of McConnell’s less-than-inspired leadership as Senate minority leader, his defeat this November would be a severe blow to Republican morale.
Will such despicable fearmongering work? Or will it actually backfire by energizing the Republican base? We’ll find out in three more weeks.
Until next time, keep some powder dry.
Chip Wood was the first news editor of The Review of the News and also wrote for American Opinion, our two predecessor publications. He is now the geopolitical editor of Personal Liberty Digest. This article first appeared in PersonalLiberty.com and has been reprinted with permission.
