Former Bush Aides Plan $250 Million Dollar Political Action Committee Targeting Liberals and Democrats

FreedomWatch.org, which, according to this Washington Post article, has Ari Fleischer as its spokesman, is aiming to raise $250,000,000.00 to influence the 2008 political campaigns. It has already made its influence felt in northwest Ohio when it got involved in the special election won by Representative Del Latta. This group is being billed as the conservative answer to MoveOn.org.

The funding of this group is particularly interesting. According to the Post article, one of its main benefactors is Sheldon G. Adelson, a Las Vegas casino executive who last year pledged an unprecedented $200 million to Jewish and Israeli causes. He is joined by others who support Bush's policies in the Middle East, particularly with respect to Iran and Iraq. This is how the Post describes the origins of this FreedomWatch.org: The organization was conceived at a Florida meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition last spring with the initial aim of defending Bush's policies in Iraq and Iran. According to the Post, these are the people running the organzation: Ari Fleischer, a former Bush press secretary and a Freedom's Watch founder. The other organizers are Bradley A. Blakeman, another former Bush White House official, and Mel Sembler, a Florida strip-mall magnate who served as Bush's ambassador to Italy.

Of course, their support isn't confined to just foreign policy, as the ads they ran against Robin Weirauch show. This is how the Post described the group's ads against Weirauch: Behind a blood-red foreground, the group's ad showed Latinos hurrying under fences and being frisked by police as a narrator accused Democratic candidate Robin Weirauch and "liberals in Congress" of supporting free health care for illegal immigrants

This is the same stuff we have been getting from the Republican Party and its supporters for years. Find a hot button issue, such as immigration, that can be used to get votes from working class voters, predominantly white, and then get wealthy poeple interested in other issues, such as taxation, or in this case, supporting Israel in the Mideast, to funds ads exploiting those issues. Of course, the pay-off for the working class voters never comes and the conservatives elected not only vote against illeagal immigration, but also against workplace safety, raising the mimimum wage, against regulating corporations and for obscene tax cuts for the rich.