Shrub uses stiff to drum up votes, but he gets stiffed!

[shemp]

Conservative Ad Angers Reagans (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/16/politics/main623467.shtml)

(CBS/AP) Ronald Reagan's family is criticizing the use of the late president's image in a conservative political ad that aligns Reagan with President Bush and attacks Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

The ad by the conservative interest group Club for Growth, which is to begin airing Wednesday, compares Reagan's battle against communism with Mr. Bush's war on terror, showing footage of Reagan at the Berlin Wall and Mr. Bush at Ground Zero. It also claims that Kerry was "wrong then, wrong now" on national security.

Reagan family spokeswoman Joanne Drake said Tuesday that permission is needed for anyone to use Reagan's likeness in an ad because doing so implies that he endorsed one candidate over another.

"No one has requested the permission to use his image in an ad, nor would we feel it appropriate to give such permission at this juncture," Drake said. "We protect his image very carefully, particularly as it relates to politics."

[subgenius]

Good for them. Another example of the schism between cons and neo-cons.
Republicans need to wake up to the fact that their party has been hijacked.

[Nasarius]

I suspect the Reagans support Bush more than Kerry, but it's extremely tasteless and self-serving to pull this kind of crap right after Reagan died. That, I think, is just as disrespectful to Reagan as the people who are happy that he's dead.

[Nasarius]

I hope most people noticed how meaningless the Kerry quote is out of context, so I dug it up:
Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first president to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to think about that because: how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the president's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says, and says clearly, "but the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people." But the point is they are not a free people now under us, they are not a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world. I think we should have learned that lesson by now.
http://www.evergreenreview.com/kerry/kerry4.html

Can you really disagree with that? Vietnam was a failure; you can't fight communism with brute force when the people you want to "free" are against you.

[Nasarius]

Part of the speech referenced is actually in PBS's Great American Speeches (http://www.pbs.org/greatspeeches/timeline/#1970), one of only four speeches in the 1970s.

Really, what was the Bush team thinking? What an awful quote to use. It has nothing to do with Reagan. It has to do with Nixon and Vietnam. There are plenty of anti-Reagan (http://mediamatters.org/items/200406080007) quotes from Kerry to use.

The Reagan/Bush part of the analogy doesn't work either. Reagan didn't defeat Communism by invading countries; he did it with political and diplomatic pressure.

Sadly, anyone who's going to be influenced by this ad is probably unlikely to do any research about it. *sigh* Such is politics.