Fused with So-called Tea Party, AFP Showcases “Bachmann Overdrive”

While Netroots Nation met in Las Vegas this past week, the so-called Americans for Prosperity held a counter event. Peter Peterson’s group populated its event with folks like Michelle Bachmann and Sharon Angle.  Along the way, it also showed that it is fused with the Republican Party and the so-called Tea Parties.  Then to boost itself, AFP tried to pitch the story that it outcompeted Netroots Nation, but that’s false.

AFP started RightOnline to counter Netroots Nation, celebrating its fifth anniversary and holds the event each year in the same city as the progressive event.

Telford received huge cheers for saying that with 1,100 registered attendees, RightOnline was larger than Netroots Nation. He said the progressive event had estimated “between 1,000 and 2,000 attendees.” But Netroots Nation’s official spokeswoman Mary Rickles told TPM that Netroots has 2,100 registered attendees.

It’s not the only deception by AFP.  As most readers here know, for twenty years, Peter Peterson’s astroturf, “Americans for Prosperity” has tried to propagandize Americans and line up Rethugs and DINOS in its posse of New Deal annihilationists.  Peterson seeks the Great Upending, the elimination of all federal programs (except the massive pretense at a security infrastructure (see this week’s WAPO series on the subject), and, of course, massive tax cuts and subsidies with taxpayer dollars to the industries he supports).

It is one thing to differ from most Americans. That’s his right.  It is quite another to wage a long-term deceptive campaign to institutionally hurt them and leave them penniless, without health care, and hope. It is also quite another to align with dangerous and malignant candidacies like those of Bachmann and Angle. Yes, this week AFP proved what it is for the world to see and tells you what you need to know.

“Armed and dangerous” (remember she called for TeaParty folks to be “armed and dangerous) Michelle Bachmann was one of the “stars” at the AFP Conference.   She’s the one who called for an investigation to see if the Obama Administration is “un-American.”  Ironically, Ms. “armed and dangerous” is the one who repeatedly treads into dangerous territory.

Also featured was one of the biggest dissemblers on the American political stage.  Angle isn’t a credible candidate, but she plays one for today’s GOP–and AFP.  She will not even answer questions from the press and just last week ran away from reporters at a press conference she herself called.  Angle now falsely claims, and repeated the false claim at the AFP conference this past week here, that she never said she favored getting rid of Social Security. She also scrubbed her website of her past utterances.  Fortunately, Harry Reid got the screen shots before she did so.  

Remember Peter Peterson and the AFP the next time you hear the deficit hawks talking as though Americans have to give up everything except excessive funding of tax cuts and perennial war. Peterson is a corporate propagandist, whose institute spews mis- and dis-information everywhere he goes. Yet Peter Peterson provides the talking points to all of the hypocrite so-called deficit hawks.  (It’s hypocritical to want deficit-building tax cuts for the rich and corporations while telling Americans they can’t have a job, a pension, or even a living wage.)  And he is essentially a discredited Tea Party organizer, as his phony conference showed once again this past week.  Peterson’s organization also bussed people to “Tea Party” rallies all over America. Anyone who thinks Michelle Bachmann and Sharon Angle should be in office is as untrustworthy as the two of those candidates are useful idiots.