Conservative cash cow
I got this email a week or so ago:
You may not know it from watching the news but your voice is needed now more than ever. It may seem like a lonely time to speak out for conservative ideals, but that only underscores the need for us to give voice to the principles that have made our nation and our people so exceptional, the only principles that can keep America on track for generations to come.
Yes, conservatives sure are lonely, what with only Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the entire a.m. radio dial and myriad wingnut websites and control of the House despite losing the House popular vote, etc., etc., etc.
We took a big hit in November. We suffered setbacks at the polls with reverberations in the halls of power, and that can tempt us to shrink away from the spotlight right when we risk letting the Left run wild with their dangerous liberal agenda. But we cannot surrender the principles that have made America the shining bastion of freedom on earth.
Yes, someone actually wrote that.
We've seen socialist-liberalism up close and we always come away more sure than ever that the ideas at its core are as bankrupt as the governments where they take hold. The superiority of conservative ideas ensures that they'll endure, but it's up to us as conservatives to ensure that they triumph. That's what should be crystal clear now.
You know who came away less sure of that nonsense? The American people.
To this end, the Conservative Campaign Committee - an outgrowth of this year's Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama PAC - is launching a TV ad campaign in the midst of the Fiscal Cliff debate. Our message is this: it was not the taxpayers who got us into this fiscal mess. It was the politicians who spent like drunken sailors, out-of-control for years on end. They grew the size of government, put more people on the government dole, receiving taxpayer money in a redistribution of wealth that drains the resources of those who produce, hire and invest in this country.
Who elected those politicians? The taxpayers. But the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama—which, remember,
didn't defeat Barack Obama—has a solution!
Our first goal in this important TV ad campaign is to raise $100,000 - and we must do it fast as deals on the Fiscal Cliff negotiations are likely in the first few days of the New Year. You can make a contribution to our TV ad campaign - HERE.
Will you please contribute $25, $50, $100 or more to this very important effort?
I'd never heard of these jokers, so I
looked them up.
73% of Funds Raised Go to [Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama] Leaders, Consulting Firm
CDBO, a Political Action Committee (PAC) registered with the FEC, reports that it has raised $1,242,360 in the first half of 2012, much of it from small donors giving $50 or $100. (It has spent about the same amount during that period, $1,216,665.) CDBO seems to raise these funds through a steady stream of broad-based fundraising appeals like email blasts and online ads, which warn people of the dangers of a second term for President Obama, and suggest the best way to make Obama a one-term president is to donate to CDBO.
The majority (seventy-three percent) of the funds raised by CDBO in the first half of 2012 has gone to CDBO Executive Director Joe Wierzbicki, his consulting firm Russo Marsh, and CDBO Vice-President Ryan Gill. More than thirty-three percent of the dollars CDBO raised from the Tea Party faithful has gone into the pockets of Wierzbicki and Gill, largely for "fundraising commissions" or "consulting fees."
We've seen this conservative grifter culture at work with the
high-profile Dick Morris, but this obscure outfit shows that the grifterism runs deep. A bunch of tea party nuts create a Super PAC, send hysterical emails to like-minded fellow travelers, raise over $1.2 million, then pocket 73 percent. So we shouldn't be surprised that the $324,000 left over wasn't enough to, you know, defeat Barack Obama.
But it's a good scam if you can make it work, and these grifters did. So why not keep running the scam after the election? All they need to do is ramp up the hysterics to new levels, something that's always come easy to them.
