I'd always associated John Philip Sousa with some mighty fine band music -- and our acquaintance ended there. He wasn't really mentioned in history courses or anything else I took, and curiosity never compelled me to research his family tree. So it came to quite a surprise for me when a "John Philip Sousa IV" sent me an email -- or, rather, sent an email to someone who doesn't exist at a website I manage.
Yes, the Tea Party apparently is not above using spammer services.
I'd block them or send them a "cease and desist" note, but the truth is that the hysteria is just so darn entertaining at times. For instance, the current letter opens with:
Dear Patriot,
Sheriff Joe's opponent, liberal Paul Penzone, just released the most horrific ad I've ever seen.
It features a child actor describing a fictional case of child abuse and claims Joe lets child molesters go free!
It's disgusting. It's immoral. It's a bald-faced lie!
We need to fight back and fight back now!
The Huffington Post has a slightly different account of the ad (which can be seen at the bottom of the article) :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The spam mail continues with a morally outraged defense of "Sheriff Joe," saying that the lawman "protected Maricopa County's kids" though, after reading the various reports on the over 400 cases that the Arpaio botched, one wonders what set of standards the man used to determine which cases should be investigated and which shouldn't. I am assuming from what I read in other sources that it's NOT a sex crime to Sheriff Joe if you're two years old and Latino -- or, at least, not a crime worth investigating.
Another rather entertaining bit of prose goes like this:
Penzone has the financial resources to absolutely blanket the airwaves with this ad. And if he needs more money to air this filth, he'll get it from George Soros, La Raza or even Barack Obama himself.
I decided to look up Mr. Sousa, and found (from his own website) that he was " was Honorary Chairman of Enduring Freedom, KIA Fund which raised millions of dollars and dispersed those funds to the widows and children of those who had died fighting terrorism in Iraq and in Afghanistan." When I looked up "Enduring Freedom" their website says that they're "a charitable, non-profit organization that is dedicated to honoring the men and women of the United States Armed Forces by the procurement and placement of patriotic artworks for permanent display in prominent public places."
The link to the "Enduring Freedom Killed In Action" site (obtained from a Wounded Warriors link) goes to a Japanese site of some sort (www.killedinactionfund.org) The Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org) shows that the site was active from 2003-2006 (and it's a shame that it's still listed as a resource, six years AFTER it quit "accepting donations") and showed the same four stories for most of the period. I do wonder where those "millions of dollars" were spent, other than in producing and promoting patriotic artwork. It's my thought that the families of vets killed in those wars need a bit more than some artwork (and I say that as someone who is also a professional artist.)
...and that's how I spent part of my morning.
Mother Jones has an article on Mr. Sousa IV over here: http://www.motherjones.com/...
(brief explanation about being webmaster: a good internet friend died several years ago and I keep her site up and running because the income provides some small revenue from the family. I don't have enough money to make a correctly priced buyout of the site, so I just run it for them. And as demigoddess of the site, I control the horizontal and vertical and email and anything sent to that dot-com address that isn't to anyone in particular gets sent to me. And while my deceased friend was a conservative, nobody in her family is named "Raymond.")