From Think Progress comes this breakdown of the 25-minute ad produced by the National Republican Trust PAC, and which is airing on Fox affiliates around the country:
Several Fox television stations and one ABC affiliate in key battleground states are running a Republican front group’s anti-Obama propaganda as paid programming in the final days leading up to the election. The National Republican Trust PAC, run by conservative conspiracy theorist Scott Wheeler, has purchased airtime in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, and North Carolina to broadcast its 25-minute “Breaking Point” political attack ad, starting last Friday. Using clips from Townhall.com, World Net Daily, Fox Business, CNSNews.com, and Glenn Beck, narrator E. W. Jackson invokes the boogeymen of ACORN, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the New Black Panther Party, Hamas, and Mao Tse-Tung to paint President Obama and the Democratic Party as “extreme,” “treacherous,” “socialist,” and “with hostility” towards America.
As I wrote two years ago during the presidential campaign, the National Republican Trust launched a “shock and awe” campaign against Barack Obama, that included linking him to terrorists and claiming that he planned to give out drivers’ licenses to would-be terrorists:
The PAC was founded by Scott Wheeler, a former correspondent for the Moonie-owned Insight magazine, and Peter Leitner, a former Pentagon adviser and president of the Higgins Counterterrorism Research Center, which trains law enforcement personnel on counterterrorism.
Wheeler has a history working for anti-Democratic, scandal-mongering conservative publications. Before working for Insight, Wheeler was a correspondent for the “American Investigator,” a syndicated monthly television program that conservative activists hailed for fueling the fires of the numerous Republican investigations of the Clinton administration in the 1990s.
One 2008 NRT ad against Obama, filled with outright falsehoods and smoke-and-mirrors innuendo, was pronounced “despicable and wrong” by the Cato’s Institute Jim Harper. Earlier this year — using the same phony terrorism scares and anti-Muslim fearmongering — the NRT was behind an anti-Park51 campaign. Wheeler, who claimed to have brought the “monstrous 13-story mosque” to America’s attention, demanded in a fundraising appeal, “we need to ask Democrats the simple question, ‘Do you stand with America, or do you stand with her Enemies?'”
In other words, conspiracy-minded, us-versus-them attack ads are nothing new for this crew; its crusade against Obama and the Democrats in 2010, though, has explicitly religious intentions that both assert he is a Muslim and that he and the Democrats are anti-Christian. The 25-minute “Breaking Point” ad employs the narrative skills of African-American pastor E.W. Jackson, a favorite of the religious right who, in his recent “Open Letter to the Black Church Community,” wrote that the black community is in the “death grip” of the Democratic Party, which “has become a Coalition of the Godless, supported by abortionists, homosexual activists, pornographers, casino gambling, activists calling for legalization of marijuana and the anti-Christian ACLU.”
Some of Wheeler’s recent columns at the conservative site Townhall have included “America’s Enemies Prefer Obama,” “Queen of Jihad” (referring to Nancy Pelosi), and “Obama Stimulating Marxist Revolution Using Taxpayer Money.” These, and the ad, are not merely words of political demonization; they evoke religious conflict and Christianity versus satanic forces.
The PAC raised $11 million and spent $10 million in the 2008 cycle; this time its haul is quite a bit smaller (about $3.4 million so far). But that hasn’t stopped it from upping its efforts over 2008. In a fundraising appeal for “Breaking Point,” Scott Wheeler wrote, “Our explosive documentary “Breaking Point” will fully nationalize this election and electrify a huge voting base of American loving conservatives. There will be no way for Democrats to defend what we will bring to light.” In another, he wrote, “We are going to produce a 25 minute documentary on Obama, Reid, Pelosi and what the other corrupt Democrats have done to our country with their left-wing allies such as billionaire George Soros, the big labor unions and radical Islamists.”
