We are now less than one year away from the presidential election of 2012. And we are not the only ones keeping track.
At the White House, the deal-making is over and the campaigning has begun. The president has sworn off compromise and negotiation. Now he is telling Congress that it is his way or the highway, in a transparent effort to fire up his dissatisfied political base. Members of the Obama team have no real expectation they will actually get their way, but the president is comfortable with the highway. He has now begun a nationwide campaign swing of fundraisers and rallies that will dominate his schedule until Election Day 2012.
But this political campaign has two faces. Even as Obama has hit the road to shore up his core supporters, his surrogates will tackle the dirty work of trying to discredit his adversaries. In politics, smears and character assassination usually come from anonymous sources and untraceable rumors. This time, the operation is not shy of advertising its intentions. The Obama campaign`s latest attempt to spread fear and loathing among the masses has now been unveiled.
AttackWatch.com is a website supposedly aimed at countering anti-Obama "smears" with "facts." In reality, the site is trying to spread misinformation and whip up anger against anyone who disagrees with President Obama. Apparently, the truth hurts.
Visitors to the site are asked to submit detailed reports of any "attacks" on Obama to his campaign. Visitors are also urged to give his campaign the private email addresses of anyone they know "who needs to know the facts."
This is not the first time Obama`s supporters have urged Americans to report their friends and neighbors for dissenting. The first came in the debate over health care, and the White House set up an official White House email address for it. The only difference now is that the request is funded by the Obama campaign, and posted on a website starkly colored in black, white and blood red. The architects of this online enemies list are attempting to define the truth only as they see it. Anyone who disagrees must be misinformed or filled with malice.
The reason I`m calling your attention to this propaganda machine is that it prominently features a page on what it calls "gun control gossip." This web page reflects Obama`s best effort to portray himself as a friend of gun owners, declaring that "President Obama believes in common sense gun control laws compatible with Second Amendment rights."
As for "proof" that Obama supports the Second Amendment, the site repeats his claims from the 2008 campaign, when he said: "There`s nothing I will do as president of the United States that will in any way encroach on the ability of sportsmen to continue that tradition." Apparently, the president still doesn`t understand that the Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights not to protect "sportsmen," but to help all Americans preserve life and liberty.
The president`s own record tells the truth about his stance. In addition to appointing two Supreme Court justices with clear records of contempt for our Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Obama has also stacked his administration with anti-gun zealots like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder. Their attitude toward our rights is represented by "Fast and Furious," the government`s disastrous cross-border gun smuggling scheme that ended up arming Mexican drug cartels--and artificially inflating the trace statistics that were abused to justify new restrictions on our rights.
The White House apparently feels an especially sharp political sting from Obama`s support for a United Nations global gun control treaty. The website even quotes a release from NRA -ila saying that the final treaty has not yet been drafted. What Obama doesn`t tell you is that his administration changed the official u.s. position on the treaty from strong, unwavering opposition, to support for the treaty if passed by "consensus." And that was a green light for the global gun ban crowd to start running roughshod over our Second Amendment rights.
NRA-ILA has been warning Americans about U.N. gun control schemes for nearly 20 years. We`ve monitored every treaty proposal to date, and there is no doubt that what is taking shape at the U.N. is an all-out attack on the constitutional freedom of American gun owners.
On the U.N. and other issues, we`re not afraid to tell the truth about the president`s record. If that lands us on the Obama campaign`s enemies list, then so be it. I hope they put us at the top.
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