Does the right hand know what the other right hand is doing?

MoveOn.org recently came under fire from the Republican National Convention for hosting two ads created by someone else that compared Bush to Hitler. They wanted blood. MoveOn did the responsible thing and pulled the ads. Now it's important to remember that MoveOn did not make or sponsor or pay for the ad in anyway. It was made by a private citizen who then posted it to MoveOn's website for their campaign BushIn30Seconds.

So this week, the Club for Growth, a prominent Republican PAC, similar in scope and intention to MoveOn came out with an ad in Iowa that described supporters of Howard Dean as a:
tax-hiking,
government-expanding,
latte-drinking,
sushi-eating,
Volvo-driving,
New York Times-reading,
body-piercing,
Hollywood-loving,
left-wing freak show (source: Club For Growth)

That, folks, is a direct quote from the ad. Since when did it become okay for a group of politicians to openly call another portion of the American populace a 'freak-show' just because they don't agree with their politics? And when did someone become a freak for eating sushi, or drinking a latte, or driving a Volvo? I'm having trouble with this.

Latte-drinking...Now I remember reading somewhere, that the president's own chief speech writer is a big fan of Starbucks. He must be a latte-drinking freak himself.

Volvo-driving...Last time I checked, Ford owns Volvo. Does that mean you're a freak for driving a car built by an American company? In fact, Bill Ford, chairman of Ford (who owns Volvo) personally contributed to George Bush's campaign.

Hollywood-loving...Weren't the Republicans falling over themselves to get in line to love Arnold in California? Why yes they did. They wanted to change the Constitution just so Arnold can run for President! But that was proposed by Orrin Hatch, who also gets a lot of money from the MPAA, a Hollywood institution. And weren't the Republicans the first party to make an actor president? In fact, Republican leadership in the House collected $16,000 more from Hollywood companies than their Democractic counterparts. (source: opensecrets.org) It doesn't seem like the Republican party has any love lost with Hollywood.

government-expanding...I think this is the most disturbing accusation. Bush has presided over the largest budget increases and expansion of government powers since Lyndon Johnson and FDR. He hasn't vetoed a single spending bill that has come to him from Congress, and discretionary non-defense spending has risen 21% since he's been in power. The Federal government grew at a rate of 2.4% per year while Clinton was in office. So in a three-year period, the government of Bill Clinton grew 7.2% compared to the 21% for Dubya. You could view this as 14% increase, or a 300% increase, depending on how you want to skew the numbers. But it doesn't matter which way you skew it. This man promised to reign in government, but in this, he has again been a miserable failure.

All in all, it sounds like the Republicans, and George Bush specifically are pretty freaky themselves. So what can we say about the ad? It's a damn shame that the Club for Growth feels it has to be involved in such conspicuous dishonesty to not even smear a candidate, but the people who support a candidate that they feel offers a better vision of the future.

Regardless of what you think of Dean's policies, or of Dean himself, I think you can agree it's beyond the pale to call his supporters freaks.