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02.06.12 - 2:16 PM
Your Economy Get Very Weak. Also Along the Way You Get Stunningly Racist and Stupid.
Mazel Tov to Michigan's former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, currently running to unseat Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who has come up with the dumbest, lamest and most offensive political ad, ever. See his Super Bowl ad with the Chinese gongs and rice paddies and pidgeon-speaking young Asian woman! See his mock website - lanterns! dragons! the Great Wall of Debt! - blasting "Debbie Spenditnow." Despair for our nation.
"You borrow more and more from us. Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good. We take your jobs. Thank you, Debbie Spenditnow.”
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35 Comments so far
Show All"Okay, so, duh, uh, uh, uh" and other ways of marking time as my mouth tries to close. How many ways can you say "tone deaf" and "bad judgement." If Pete Hoekstra himself (I Googled his image just to make sure it wasn't an actor/imitator) had not made his full-faced statement on the ad I would have thought it was some sort of Onion piece. As I just read on another comment for another piece, (paraphrasing here) this kind of thing is liable to put The Onion out of business. How can even The Onion keep up? I have to admit, this is hilarious, just not in the way intended.
Or Jon Stewart or Steven PACMAN...
Pete Hoekstra is a big dumb ass in Michigan and most know it. It is patently laughable that he thinks he's ready to fill her shoes. I don't always agree with her but he is just a kook...like a few other goofballs we have in this state.
Check out http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Pete_Hoekstra#Record_and_controversies
I watched every minute of the Stupor Bowl and saw no political ads of Pete's. Dumb as it may be, it wasn't there...and I am in Deb's district.
Yeah, but did you watch every channel? I find it hard to believe he would have had enough money to get a time slot on any major channel during the super bowl.
Stone & Sun -
I'm also a Michigan resident. This bizarro Hoekstra ad pandering to anti-Asian stereotyping first ran to my knowledge in the local evening news time slot of WNEM-TV 5 last week Tuesday at 6:30 pm. At first I thought it was a Super PAC ad, but then Hoekstra came on grinning at the end to announce he approved the message. I still assume it was simply a first Swiftboat smear spot linked to the upcoming Republican primary here in the Great Lakes state.
I am not sure whether this racist bit also ran during yesterday's Stuperbowl coverage during the local market advertising breaks or not. I didn't see it broadcast during the times I was in front of the TV screen, if it did run. For some reason, I suspected the anti-Asian format was an attack theme Republicans were intending to run in other House or Senate races nationwide, playing off the standard "tax-and-spend" slogan of traditional two major party partisan attack American voters have now grown so accustomed to.
Bill from Saginaw
Who is the vapid self-hating Asian woman who degraded herself for this? Every Asian-American organization in the country should be making her life hell.
She is very obviously an American who speaks perfectly fine English - I would think in fact probably DOESN'T speak her family's pre-immigration language well judging from her total lack of any accent associated with someone who grew up speaking something else. It takes a little more than dropping the -s from verbs to make a believable accent... a bad person and a worse actress! She'll probably do well in porn, or Fox News, or y'know, both. "Me vote you long time!"
"Who is the vapid self-hating Asian woman who degraded herself for this?"
Just another Hollywood bound prostitute...
I wondered that too. Kind of like old westerns with "Indians" (not always) say, "Ugh." On the other hand I then wondered whether she thinks of this as a sort of secret joke on Hoekstra.
That's exactly what I was wondering.
She's probably all of 18, so I'll give her a pass.
Hoekstra is old enough to know better.
Fascist Asian-Americans are pretty common (c.f. Michelle Malkin), whose parents or grandparents were part & parcel of various dictatorships backed by the US as part of the Great Anti-Communist Crusade . . . Alas, the target of the ad is no better than most of the militarist Obomberites . . .
But the Tea-Bag Taliban... sorry, the 'Tea Party(tm)' (a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) crowd will eat it up.
This whole "be scared of China" paranoia reminds me of the hysteria about Japan in the 80's. What happened to Japan? My guess is the same that will happen to China. Then the right wing who continually want to shove it's "tea bags" down our throats will have another reason to celebrate Ronald Reagan or, the myth thereof.
I see very little parallels with Japan of the 1980's. Back where I lived in the 1980's we couldn't get enough of things Japanese. Every Chardonnay and Brie-eating yuppie HAD to have a Toyota Celica or MR2 and the latest Sony or Panasonic gadgetry in those days - all playing Kitaro music and Kurosawa movies from their Sony stereos and "Betamaxes". And the Japanese stuff was nearly all made by well-paid union workers.
FYI, MalikX, "This whole 'be scared of China' paranoia" goes much further back than the 1980s, and is not confined to Amerika.
It's just the latest variation on a traditional xenophobic theme.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril
I live in Florida and I saw the crap myself. At first I was not understanding it, then when I did I was outraged. So I went on Deb's website and contributed to her. I do not have much to contribute but if everyone who saw the commercial did as I did, the last laugh will be on these a-hole republicans. We can only hope!
"I went on Deb's website and contributed to her..."
Then you are just as much a part of the problem. As long as you support the Corporate controlled Elite Duopoly, these outrages and abuses will continue.
Ever heard of the logical error called the "sweeping generalization?
At the individual US representative or senator candidate level, there are sometimes significant differences.
And at the US state legislature level, the defferences become very significant. Pennsylvania would not be seeing untaxed and nearly unregulated fracking, my city would not be seeing it public transit system being dismantled, and would right now be seriously considering a single-payer healthcare syatem, if we had a Democrat Governor and democrat majority in our state general assembly.
Amen.
Just tonight, chanel 4(ABC) did an "investigation" into Liquor stores reembursing customers for their loses if they would break a bottle. It also included store eimployees losses when they would break a bottle. I used to work there. In my years there, I broke three bottles. This is news?????????
No, it is not news, it is propaganda. These loses are very slight. Here is the real story.
"Goverrnor" Corbet can fix the fiscal mess by selling off the liquor stores But. since the liquor stores generate a healthy profit to the state, the end result is a fiscal deficit. in years to come.. It is the same thing that Ellen Brown has been espousing.: local control.
WHAT?!
I'm in PA. Ed Rendell (D) was just governor for TWO TERMS and nothing of the sort of single payer healthcare was ever discussed. Poor families had to queue to get into a limited program to provide reduced cost health insurance, and if they missed one payment they were dropped.
What Rendell is working on (filling his pockets with millions on!) is hanging out with a pro-attack Iran group that were labelled a terrorist organization:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/08/mek-lobbying_n_913233.html
Here in Philadelphia almost all aspects of government are run by Democrats - completely domainated by them - and union emergency responders have been working without a contract for more than 3 years, the libraries have rolling brownouts, firehouses shut down, friends of the party grow rich and in shady real estate deals public schools get turned into charters.
PA Democrats are so committed to the environment that Bob Brady pushed for a very dangerous (taxpayer funded) Delaware River dredging scheme (US Army Corps of engineers) to deepen the river... to move natural gas. PA Democrats are so committed to the environment that they illegally appropriated funds to remove Green candidates from the statewide ballot.
I'm intrigued by angela 45's post above. Why in the hell would this anti-Debbie Stabenow spot be running on a television station in Florida? For Florida viewers, all the blather about Debbbie-Spend-It-NOW must have been totally incoherent unless you followed the roster of junior state Senators pretty closely.
A couple of other things about this particular ad.
First, should we believe the capitalization in the slogan wasn't calculated to carry a double meaning about the National Organization for Women? Although I disagree with some of Debbie's voting record (continued war funding, another anti-flag burning statute), she is staunchly pro-choice and not afraid to publicly identify with feminist ideals. I sense in addition to the anti-Asian refrain, there's some subliminal feminazism in the mix.
Second, briefly check out and scroll the link to Hoekstra's mock anti-Stabenow website. As authoritative sources on some of the spot's tax-and-spend-and-outsource-our-American-jobs melody line, faux journalism stories from the Moonie rag Washington Times is cited. Maybe this is more Murdochian fair and balanced psy ops. It can't be racist if we focus on the big, bad Chinese and appreciate the cultural family values that ethnic Korean Christians proudly contribute to the neoconservative cause.
Finally, don't forget Peter Hoekstra's own voting record. This guy in Congress was a staunch Bush/Cheney national security hawk on everything from Iraq to torture to NSA domestic wiretapping to keeping Gitmo's military tribunals going. To the extent that the thrust of this attack ad seeks to link deficit spending financed by sale of US bonds to the Chinese in order to finance the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Bushies' global war on terror to Senator Debbie Stabenow, wannabe Senator Hoekstra should be one of the last guys to toss those particularly smelly cow pies.
Bill from Saginaw
Hmmm... does anyone else notice a deliberate and constant parade of right wing nut jobs appearing everywhere? This is giving the [cough,cough] 'democrats' an excuse to move yet further right. Dissolution and succession are the only logical outcome for the USA. Humans cannot self govern more than a few million units.
There is no left and right, Democrat or Republican, just the Empire. And the so called Republicans are now digging under the barrel for candidates for November. The Dems have out 'righted' then at every turn. The election will be similar to that is an 3rd world 'democracy' and will be the will of the corporatists, not the people.
This commercial was produced by the same guy, Fred Davis III, who gave American political discourse such gems as the Carly Fiorina 'Demon Sheep' ad & the John McCain 'Obama Celebrity' spot, among others. Among his other dubious 'achievements' was being the media shill for his uncle, Senator James Inhofe, & the infamous 'Willie Horton' ad. That Davis has continued as a prime slime merchant is not surprising; what is hopeful is that he is losing his touch and is on the down slide towards being a shameful relic from a begone era of political advertising.
As Alex Cockburn like to point out, it was Al Gore that made Willie Horton an issue in the Democratic primaries, and the Republicans picked up on it in the general election. One might call that "an inconvenient truth."
There is nothing racist about this ad. It's stupid on many levels, such as the fact that offshoring to China got started mostly under Reagan...Chrysler began building Jeeps in China in 1984 I believe...
And I'll lay ten to one odds the actress is a Republican, maybe Vietnamese. Notice she speaks perfect American English with some phony breaks thrown in for effect. Out here in Orange Co. California the Vietnamese Little Saigon community is ULTRA right wing Republican.
...and it looks like it was filmed in California to boot!
They don't call him Pete Hoaxstra here in Michigan for nothing! But don't worry about Debbie Spenditnow, us regular folk here in Michigan refer to her as Debbie Stabyounow for here work and vote for the banking and credit card enhancement act of 2004! That one vote wiped out alot of her constituents here in Michigan!
There is no logic, just a link by association of job loss to federal spending, fueled by the power of resentment. However it is true that the more we are hurt the more resentful we become and the less capable we are of reasoning or finding a solution. The solution would be a trade policy that protects our jobs and a stimulus policy that insists on spending money on American made goods. A stimulus that gives us more discretionary cash in our pockets via tax breaks which allows us to use these dollars to consume goods made abroad will have a less stimulative effect than a stimulus dollar spent directly on goods and services provided here in the US. We need trade policy, protection of workers and stimulus dollars spent here. Pete will give us none of this but will Debbie support the other position? Will she support a trade policy that mandates a percentage of the value of goods sold here in the US be made in the US? Will she support infrastructure projects that use US made steel and pay decent wages to those who are employed by them? Will she show us a path to economic empowerment of the US that benefits the average worker? If Debbie can't show us a way forward--Pete will show us a way backward. The resentment of Pete is ill placed but it is a powerful emotion that he appeals to and it will win unless the case for hope is made in a direct and compelling way-- the case that government can use its powers to improve our lives.
"will Debbie support the other position? Will she support a trade policy that mandates a percentage of the value of goods sold here in the US be made in the US? Will she support infrastructure projects that use US made steel and pay decent wages to those who are employed by them?"
Probably not. Offshoring jobs is policy for both parties, as Bill Clinton made clear ...
Vile and putrid. Breathtakingly so...
"Nothing racist or xenophobic" here unless you pay attention. OK! Fair Enough! She's an Asian and a foreigner. We blame this nice Asian woman for our problems. I don't like this kind of mess at all. I like Asian women, and any straight man who doesn't isn't a good American. She's a nice gal. If somebody wants to make something bad out of that, Lee Marvin would simply say "The bastard has no damn respect!"