MoveOn 'Baby Alex' Ad Propaganda Smear of McCain

If you scan through the 24-hour news channels, you probably have seen the “Alex” ad.

It opens on a young mother with her baby as she says: “Hi, John McCain. This is Alex. He’s my first.

“So far,” she continues, “his talents include trying any new food and chasing after our dog. That and making my heart pound every time I look at him.

“So, John McCain,” she concludes, “when you said you would stay in Iraq for 100 years, were you counting on Alex? Because if you were, you can’t have him.”

“It’s a powerful ad,” my wife Ellen said after seeing it once, “and it will influence many women.”

This ad was concocted by the psychological warfare propagandists of two far-left groups. One is MoveOn.org, created in the 1990s to argue America should “move on” and not punish the perjury under oath and wildly unethical behavior of President Bill Clinton.

Now, of course, MoveOn.org’s Political Action Committee has no desire to move on from presumptive Republican presidential candidate Arizona Sen. John McCain’s awkward reference to keeping U.S. troops in a peaceful Iraq as we now keep troops with little problem in Japan, Germany, and many other countries.

And, of course, MoveOn.org is careful to give this ad’s viewers no inkling that this was the context in which McCain spoke.

Allied with MoveOn.org in funding this anti-McCain smear ad is AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. This is a public employees union whose fat political bankroll comes, in effect, from your taxpayer dollars.

One of the truly unethical schemes of modern politics has been that Democrats in power have unionized millions of government employees, then gotten kickbacks in the form of campaign contributions from the dues unions squeeze out of these public employees.

How different is this from the bad old days when civil servants were threatened with loss of their jobs if they refused to make direct donations to the Democratic Party machine?

The ad itself certainly violates the spirit of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Law. This ad is a 527-style “swift boating” of McCain, and perhaps is part of the $40 million that radical billionaire George Soros has pledged for ads smearing McCain.

As to the ad itself, it is illogical nonsense. Since Republican President Richard Nixon ended the draft during the Vietnam War, the kind of conscription that in theory could drag young men who never served in the military or National Guard off to war against their wills has all but disappeared.

If baby Alex somehow wants to volunteer for war, he must wait 17 years or so to become an adult — long past the outer limit of an eight-year McCain presidency — at which point Alex will be his own person with freedom to choose.

The MoveOn.org ad’s young mother speaks of this baby as “mine,” not “ours,” and makes no reference to a husband — all the better to reach resentful single mothers, one of the Democratic Party’s cornerstone constituency groups.

But the political left has an advantage here. The majority of those who vote for Democrats come from that half of our population that has an IQ of 100 or lower.

These sheep neither notice nor care about the irrationality and cynically manipulative nature of this dishonest all-feelings, no-brain ad. It’s no accident that the actress performing this ad spoke her lines like a dimwit, all the better to bamboozle its target audience.

McCain will ignore this ad, and wisely so. It is a sermon delivered to the choir, to those who already oppose him. Why waste time, energy or money to counter it, and thereby give it more attention?

But what if the Republicans chose to fight this fire with fire?

Imagine a few logical 527-group counter-ads done in the same style, each opening on a similarly empathetic, highly emotional young mother and her baby named for Alexander the Great: “Hi, Barack Obama. This is Alex. He’s my first. But if you’re willing to have him die in some future terrorist 9/11 attack because you want to surrender in the war against terrorism and bug out of Iraq and its other battlefields, you can’t have him.”

“Hi, Barack Obama. This is Alex. He’s my first. But if you expect him to pay off the $4 trillion in tax increases and extreme government spending you advocate — and to spend most of his working life paying an 83 percent tax rate to fund your socialist schemes — you can’t have him.”

“Hi, Barack Obama. This is Alex. He’s my first. But if you want to conscript him and his children into being taxed to bankroll a world government that violates American constitutional rights and destroys American sovereignty, you can’t have him.”

“Hi, Barack Obama. This is Alex. He’s my first. But if you want to require him to provide unpaid ‘community service’ to radical political or environmental groups in order to get his high school diploma or other credentials, you can’t have him.”

“Hi, Barack Obama. This is Alex. He’s my first. But if you want to force him into public schools where government teachers will propagandize him with values contrary to the fundamental beliefs and morals of our family’s religion, you can’t have him.”

“Hi, Barack Obama. This is Alex. He’s my first. But if you want to deny worker elections as a way to force him to join a left-wing labor union like AFSCME and pay dues that are used, against his will, to elect promise-breaking Democratic politicians like yourself, you can’t have him.”

With the breaking of his written pledge to accept the spending limits of public campaign funding if his Republican opponent did likewise, Obama has proven himself to be not a new voice of hope but the same old untrustworthy voice of special interest politics as usual.

We now have other corroborating evidence of this in Obama’s unwillingness to denounce, and to call upon MoveOn.org and AFSCME to halt, this disreputable ad.