Instapundit linked on Thursday to an article about a handful of AARP members burning their membership cards to protest the group’s support for the Republican-backed Medicare prescription drug bill, which contains some tepid reform provisions but is objectionable to the Left mostly because it’s supported by President Bush and might help him get re-elected.
Now, if you read his blog, you know that Josh Marshall is perennially outraged — shocked, shocked — about what he calls “Astroturf” — events designed by professional political activists and calculated to look like genuine grass-roots uprisings. Now, my first instinct was that the AARP protest by ‘ordinary senior citizens’ — coming on the very day that Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton were tearing into the AARP in a coordinated attack — smelled to me an awful lot like the same thing. Turns out, in fact, that MSNBC reported that “[t]he protest was organized by two liberal advocacy groups.” Hmmmm.
Anyway, I checked Marshall’s blog just to see if he was suitably shocked, but assuming (given the increasingly partisan tone of his writings lately) that he would just be silent on the issue, and be shocked and outraged only when he sees such tactics used by Republicans. Ah, how naive I was. On Thursday — the very day of the Democrats’ publicity offensive — Talking Points Memo had this item:
Money talks, and AARP walks.
To find out more about the ugly truth and what you can do to make your voice heard, go to this page at the Campaign for America’s Future website.
The page being one that carries a picture of an AARP member burning his membership card, under a blaring headline Attention AARP members, and directs AARP members to take the following actions:
:: Organize your own protests in your community.
:: Email Bill Novelli and tell him what you think.
:: Go to AARP website and give them a piece of your mind: https://community.aarp.org/rp-health/start
:: Go to www.oufuture.org for more infomation and action ideas.
:: Go to www.retiredamericans.org/ for a retiree organization that stands up for seniors.
It’s Josh Marshall’s turf. Don’t you try to play on it.