Does Bush's "Muhammad Horton" ad go too far?

http://www.tnr.com/blog/campaignjournal?pid=1440

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The ominous slow-motion footage comes about halfway through the 30-second ad. A female voiceover darkly warns about John Kerry's agenda, charging, "On the war on terror: weaken the Patriot Act used to arrest terrorists and protect America." On the left of the screen flash the words "John Kerry's Plan." On the bottom a red box warns, "Weaken Fight Against Terrorists." If you look closely, on the right side of the screen you can see an airplane taking off.

The center of the screen is filled with three different rectangles of slow-motion video. In the top panel travelers at an airport study the arrivals and departures monitor. In the center panel there is a shadowed image of a person wearing a gas mask. And on the bottom there is a close-up of a swarthy, somewhat sinister-looking man with darting eyes who slowly turns toward the camera. He is clearly the terrorist in this scary montage.

The Bush campaign held a conference call for the press this afternoon to unveil the ads, and one reporter asked whether it was appropriate to use an Arab-American to depict a terrorist. Campaign aides said the actor in "100 Days" wasn't Arab-American. One official on the call insisted it was just a "very generic" image.

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that will just piss off millions of Americans.

Has one terrorist been arrested since 9/11? Oh yeah, the shoe bomb guy.

I'm so pleased that the Repugs are losing the election all by themselves.

e: that way they didn't stereotype or slander real Arabs, right?

. . . but they wanted viewers to think they were.

How was this one different?

I guess nothing is too hard to believe with these people.

:crazy:

They may seem silly to those of us in the trenches, but they're highly effective when saturated into the swing states. And no one's ever gone broke underestimating the taste of the American (voting) public.

They're polished, professionally done and will win the election for Bush if not immediately and effectively countered.

We will need to match--or outspend--Bush on every single one of these ad buys or WE Will Lose The Election!

Get your checkbooks out...Now!!!

that anyone would decide who to vote for based on information gained by watching political ads. :(

It would be so much better if people knew what was going on.

The people are not quite so stupid, old friend, as they are often taken for: it will seem over the top to just about anyone that Sen. Kerry actually plans for things such as are hinted at here to happen. Nor is it a good thing, particularly this far from the election, to have your advertisements become a subject for controversy, as this one surely will.

One of the problems with the enemy's advertisements thus far seems to derive from a poor testing process: they cannot test them widely on a genuinely un-comitted audience, for they must keep their lines secret before use, and could not trust that real folks involved would keep their mouths shut concerning what they saw; therefore, they must test them on dedicated supporters only, or even on staff and their families. This is likely to lead to misapprehensions concerning the effect they will have, once exposed to the general populace.

"Desperate men do desperate things, and stupid men do stupid things. We are in for a desperately stupid summer."

"LET'S GO GET THOSE BUSH BASTARDS!"

I posted a thread about this article on March 6th. It was published in the Mpls. Star Tribune on March 5th.

The basics:

Arab-Americans are a huge factor in Michigan, which Bush narrowly lost in 2000. Bush was the first presidential candidate to win the endorsment of the Muslim Public Affairs Council and he had an 83% approval rating among Muslims prior to 9/11.

Now, their support of Bush has dwindled due, in large part, to the Patriot Act.

"Zouher Abdelhak owns a jewelry store (in Dearborn) and remembers being aggressively wooed by the Bush campaign in 2000. 'George Bush is a liar,' he said. 'He told us he'd be a fair broker on the Middle East...The campaign said they wanted 100 $1,000 checks from us in the community, but told us to keep everything behind closed doors. They didn't want to talk about our issues out in the open. We Arab-Americans were naive....'"

www.startribune.com

It sounds like they got what they wanted from the Arab-American community, double-crossed them, lost their support, so now it doesn't matter anymore what their ads suggest about Arabs!

We get some pro-Kerry Arab American grounps to speak out against the ad in the media, and then it will backfire on Bush like the Sept. 11 ads did.

He looks nothing like Timothy McVeigh. How odd...

...from The King and I.

Et cetera, et cetera, and so forth. ;)

low down dirty tricks

...ad used in 1988 was racist. The policy of letting violent criminals out on weekend furloughs was indefensible. I think it was legitimate to point out a real-life example of how this policy resulted in harm to the public. Willie Horton provided that example. If a white man had been given a furlough and then went out and raped some woman, the ad would have been just as effective. Why is it taboo to use Willie Horton's face in the ad when he was, in fact, a real-life personification of this ludicrous policy? Have we reached the point where we're so sensitive that he cannot acknowledge wrongdoing by any minority without being accused of racism?

Just my 2 cents.

Review what FDR said during the 1944 election

How they speak down to americans. They have absolutely nothing else in their playbooks. What else does Rove have. There has to be something.