Right-wing swift-boater David Bossie and his organization Citizen's United have geared up for the release of a "documentary" attack film on Barack Obama.
Jonathan Martin reports Bossie
is spending about $250,00 on Fox News ad time through week's end to promote his latest effort: "HYPE: The Obama Effect."
Reidblog reports:
"Hype" is the latest video hit job by a very disturbed guy named David Bossie, who heads the aforementioned Citizens United, and whose past credentials include creating those fake Bill Clinton-Gennifer Flowers audiotapes and getting fired as chief investigator for fellow nut-job Dan Burton's House Government Reform & Oversight Committee back in the 1990s. More about Dave:
Bossie started his political career (almost) innocently enough in 1988 when he served as the National Youth Director of Senator Bob Dole's unsuccessful presidential campaign.
In 1992, Bossie was working for the right-wing organization Citizens United (the group that "invented" Willie Horton). As executive director of Citizens United chairman Floyd Brown's "Presidential Victory Committee," he used taped conversations allegedly between then-Governor Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers as part of an advertising and "800" number scheme to smear Clinton. The tapes have since been discredited because they were edited and doctored. A direct mailing from Citizens United using this material was made to look as if it were an "official" mailing from Bush campaign -- and the Bush people alerted the FEC to the mailings in an effort to stop them!
Bossie spent a great deal of time in 1992 in Arkansas, digging dirt on Clinton. David Corn reports in the May 6, 1998 issue of Salon that "at one point, Bossie got into a fistfight in Arkansas with a private detective who claimed Bossie had welshed on a $10,000 payment for anti-Clinton material."
That same year, Bossie harassed the family of a suicide victim. "An anonymous and untraceable letter" was faxed to some 30 news organizations "claiming Clinton had had an affair with a former law student who committed suicide 15 years ago," an "emotionally distraught young woman, seven-months pregnant" named Susan Coleman. Only after the fact of the fax campaign did Bossie attempt to contact the family for "confirmation," and did so in a repetitive and unrelenting manner suggestive more of harrassment than fact-checking. Bossie, with help from former Washington DC police officer James Murphy, went so far as to follow Susan's mother to a hospital in Augusta, Georgia, where her husband was seriously ill and recovering from a stroke. They "burst into the sick man's room and began questioning the shaken mother about her daughter's suicide." (Source: CBS News, July 13, 1992, quoted at The Allodium web site)
Media Matters has also covered Bossie's scandal packed smear career for some time:
Bossie was fired in 1998 from his job as chief investigator for the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight -- which was investigating alleged Clinton White House campaign finance abuses -- for his role in releasing selectively edited transcripts of former Clinton administration official Webster Hubbell's prison conversations. (Hubbell went to prison for defrauding his Little Rock, AR, law firm.) According to a May 7, 1998, article in The Washington Times, "Mr. Burton said David Bossie had 'chosen to resign,' although House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Mr. Burton 'fired the one person he should have fired.'" The Washington Times quoted Burton conceding: "A mistake was made in not including in the 30 pages of transcripts a couple of comments made by Mr. Hubbell about himself and the first lady. They were relevant, and they should not have been left out." The Washington Times concluded its piece by noting, "Mr. Bossie is no stranger to controversy. ... Republicans said yesterday that they also blamed Mr. Bossie for the notorious melon-shooting, staged re-enactment of the death of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr."
http://mediamatters.org/...
Wait till you see the star-studded cast Bossie has lined up for his puke-umentary, including some of my all time favorite Oreo's.
WING-NUT CAST
Michael Barone
Dr. Richard Benkin
Sec. William Bennett
Ken Blackwell
Amb. John Bolton
Tucker Carlson
Frank Gaffney, Jr.
Jim Geraghty
Karen Hayes
Gov. Mike Huckabee
Congressman Duncan L. Hunter
Duncan D. Hunter
Ron Kessler
Dick Morris
Robert Novak
Former Illinois State Senator Patrick O'Malley
Former Illinois State Senator Steve Rauschenberger
Senator Rick Santorum
Jill Stanek
Shelby Steele
Joe Watkins
Armstrong Williams
Byron York
(Just love that comment " Big Government doesn't help people, and it certainly doesn't help the people in MY congregation" from the Rev Joe Watkins- who has a congregation of about 85 members in Philly) and suffers visibly from a condition known as "Trinity Envy".
The Trailer:
Though Bossie produced and was geared up to push his attack film on Hillary Clinton, Hillary: The Movie, when she didn't get the nod, Bossie had to switch gears.
Floyd Brown and David Bossie: Back in the Swift Boat captain's chairs
These days, however, Brown's new organization, The National Campaign Fund -- which launched a new website "ExposeObama.com" -- and Bossie's Citizens United have added Sen. Barack Obama to the mix.
Brown recently told Time magazine that "he had established several other front groups to fund a long-range effort to erode Obama's support, including a second PAC, called The Legacy Committee, a 527 organization called Citizens for a Safe and Prosperous America and a so-called "social welfare" 501(c)4 nonprofit called the Policy Issues Institute."
Bossie told Newsweek that he was "assembling material for TV spots about Obama's ties with [Bill] Ayers, a Chicago professor and unrepentant former member of the Weather Underground, a group that bombed several government buildings to protest the Vietnam War."
Well folks - here's the big swift-boat we've been waiting for. Since FAUX Spews will be the main promotional source, doubtful that this so-called documentary is going to convince anyone of anything. Those Obama haters in the low information voting column will only have their delusions confirmed.
What saddens me I suppose is the overload of black faces to do the dirty work. But there have always been Tom's and Tio Tacos and some folks will do anything for their 15 minutes of infamy so I guess this speaks to equal opportunity bigotry and wrong-headedness.
UPDATE: Thanks to Artchess who pointed out that the NYT is also covering this:
Citizens United to Release Anti-Obama Documentary