Ari’s At It Again

This (h/t Steve Benen) is hilarious:

When a group of former White House aides formed a political advocacy group called Freedom’s Watch last summer, its initial wave of ads featured battered Iraq war veterans pleading for support for President Bush’s “surge” of troops.

Last month, the theme changed dramatically as the same group splashed dark, grainy images of illegal immigrants across television screens in northern Ohio, attacking a Democratic candidate’s position on the divisive domestic issue.

Freedom’s Watch has loudly announced that there will be no limits to what it might do…. While initial reports suggested a budget of $200 million, people who have talked to the group in recent weeks say the figure is closer to $250 million, more than double the amount spent by the largest independent liberal groups in the 2004 election cycle.

Lemme clue you in, folks:

1) If Ari Fleischer really was able to get enough right-wing sugar daddies to fund his useless and counterproductive TV ad campaigns to the tune of (Dr. Evil)…250 MILLION DOLLARS…(/Dr. Evil), he wouldn’t have just run a few ads in northern Ohio last month. The whole frickin’ country would be blanketed with TV ads, running in dozens if not hundreds of markets. As the WaPo article touting the alleged strength of Ari Fleischer’s Watch mentioned, the northern Ohio ad campaign cost "roughly $100,000", $80,000 of was paid for four days before the ads ran by Sheldon G. Adelson, a Las Vegas casino owner who allegedly is the group’s main financial backer.

If they really had $250 million on tap right now, they’d be running ads right now, without waiting for the sugar daddies to pony up, to get the desired narrative started; instead, aside from the recent Ohio run (which only happened after a quick cash infusion from their main sugar daddy) we saw about $15 million of ads last summer that sucked, inspired a counter-campaign that debunked them to a fare-thee-well, and to top it all off were counterproductive (last November, right after Ari finished spending $15 million of his patron’s money all across the nation, public disapproval of the war hit a record high of 68%). (Oh, yeah: Their massive focus-group efforts to sell war with Iran last November didn’t work out so well, either.) Of course, the WaPo article touting how Big and Scary Ari’s group is makes a point of mentioning that the Republican on whose behalf Ari ran the northern Ohio ad campaign did indeed win his special election, but they don’t mention the failure of Ari to change minds on Iraq or Iran.

Of course Ari won’t share his financials with us, because the one thing that these guys hate more than anything else is sunlight and oversight. Like the teenaged Karl Rove showing up to debates with his shoeboxes full of blank “note cards”, this is all about scaring us into submission so they don’t have to fire a shot.

But hold on a minute.

Adelson himself pledged last year to donate up to $200 million to "Jewish and Israeli causes". How does running racist ads exhorting us to Fear The Scary Brown Catholic People equate with protecting Israel?

Oh, I see: This isn’t about protecting Israel, it’s about protecting Republicans in general and neocons like Bush and Cheney and the PNAC Platoon in particular, and their lying grifter guru Ahmad Chalabi. Because if Adelson had actually stopped to honestly think about whether neocon policies, particularly the invasion of Iraq, had actually made Israel safer, he’d have to admit that they in fact hurt Israel:

"Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat," says L. Marc Zell, a former law partner of Douglas Feith, now the undersecretary of defense for policy, and a former friend and supporter of Chalabi and his aspirations to lead Iraq. "He had one set of friends before he was in power, and now he’s got another." While Zell’s disaffection with Chalabi has been a long time in the making, his remarks to Salon represent his first public break with the would-be Iraqi leader, and are likely to ripple throughout Washington in the days to come.

Zell, a Jerusalem attorney, continues to be a partner in the firm that Feith left in 2001 to take the Pentagon job. He also helped Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew Salem set up a new law office in Baghdad in late 2003. Chalabi met with Zell and other neoconservatives many times from the mid-1990s on in London, Turkey, and the U.S. Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons before the Iraq war: "He said he would end Iraq’s boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery]." But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend’s moves were a deliberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return to Iraq and run the country.

Chalabi’s ties to Iran — Israel’s most dangerous enemy — have also alarmed both his allies and his enemies in the Bush administration. Those ties were highlighted on Monday, when Newsweek reported that "U.S. officials say that electronic intercepts of discussions between Iranian leaders indicate that Chalabi and his entourage told Iranian contacts about American political plans in Iraq." According to one government source, some of the information he gave Iran "could get people killed." A Chalabi aide denied the allegation. According to Newsweek, the State Department and the CIA — Chalabi’s longtime enemies — were behind the leak: "the State Department and the CIA are using the intelligence about his Iran ties to persuade the president to cut him loose once and for all."

Think about it, Sheldon: If you really care about Israel, you shouldn’t be backing people like Ari Fleischer — neocons whose utterly arrogant cluelessness allowed them to be conned so easily by grifters like Chalabi. Remember, Sheldon: You can’t cheat an honest man. You of all people should know that.

Furthermore, I see that much if not most of your money nowadays is coming to you from investments in Asia and from the fact that Vegas casinos nowadays have blown off the middle-class gamblers that originally enriched the town in favor of high-rollers from the Far East. You know, the people whose markets are tanking just like ours, after they found out that all the paper George W. Bush and his buddies had them buy over the years to finance the Iraq War is utterly worthless?

What happens to your empire, Mr. Adelson, when your Chinese and Japanese and Singaporean customers discover that you’ve been taking their money and using it to prop up Bush so he can continue his ruinous economic and foreign policies? You might want to think about that awhile.

Related posts:

1. Biden on Iran: ‘Some Real Doubt’ About The Electoral Outcome
2. Israel Gearing Up For Iran?
3. How Can We Negotiate in Good Faith with the Iranians When We Play Dumb About Israel’s Nukes?
4. Republicans Talk, Ahmedinejad Smiles
5. Valuing Democracy: Iran, Iraq and the War Supplemental