What a complete shock.
The latest lib grassroots astroturf group “The Other 95%” was founded by a career leftist who also co-founded the confused Billionaires for Bush group.
The Billionaires for Bush leftists were upset Iraqis was liberated from the Saddam Hussein regime. They liked the Clinton strategy.
Neil Munro at the The National Journal reported:
Tea Party activists and their myriad rivals in the Democratic Party’s coalition of supporters are using new media technology and tactics in a rapid-fire campaign to undermine, counter and demean the other side’s appeal to swing voters.
Shortly before this year’s April 15 tax day protests, for example, Marco Ceglie and several friends used Facebook to rally perhaps 100 people to stage a counterprotest in Washington under a professionally made banner declaring themselves “The Other 95%.”
Standing before a bank of reporters and cameras, Ceglie said that “we’re just moderates, we’re just Democrats, Republicans, we’re the other 95 percent, and we’re tired of seeing this fringe 5 percent [of Tea Party activists] on the news every night bashing taxes.” When interviewed by National Journal, Ceglie said the rally was “pretty much as grassroots as it gets… I’m not a Democratic activist myself [and] my first vote was for George W. H. Bush.”
But Ceglie’s website reveals his long career as a left-leaning political activist, including stints at the antiwar group Bring Them Home Now and at Billionaires for Bush, a street-theater group organized to protest the policies of George W. Bush. When asked whether he’s running an authentic grassroots campaign or an Astroturf campaign, Ceglie replied, “It depends on how you define ‘grassroots.'”
“I think a few people getting together to make a sign is much more authentic and sincere” than a corporate-funded Tea Party movement, he said. “My living is teaching people how to get their message out,” he said, adding that “I don’t make a full-time living in politics. I wish I did.”
Tea Party activists scoff at Ceglie’s group. “They’re Astroturf,” said Jim Hoft, who operates the GatewayPundit website. Grassroots movements are led by people who “generally have not been in politics, or associated with politics,” he said, adding that “80 percent of the people [in the Tea Party movement] are people who have never protested before.” In contrast, he said, Ceglie and his peers “are hard-core activists…. They’re experts, they’re weaned on this stuff.”
The emergence of the Other 95% group comes as Democrats have begun to reassess their initially scornful criticism of the Tea Party movement as “tea baggers,” as corporate-funded Astroturf, as racists and as potentially violent. On March 30, for example, President Obama said the movement contains “a broader circle” of people “who are legitimately concerned about the deficit, who are legitimately concerned that the federal government may be taking on too much.”
This more conciliatory message, however, is accompanied by a stream of statements from other top Democrats declaring the Tea Party groups to be extreme, racist or a potential cause of terrorism.
Once again we’re looking at a top-down stuctured leftist group unlike the true grassroots structure we see in the tea party movement. No wonder their freaking out.
There’s more at the The National Journal.
