Here we go again. I saw recently where some of the same people who gave us the Swift Boat ads are doing another round of attack ads, this time aimed at AARP.

You remember the Swift Boat people-they were the ones who cared so much for veterans that they smeared a combat veteran in order to help re-elect a non-combat veteran whose proposed federal budget would cut nursing home care for elderly and sick veterans and make other veterans pay a $250 annual fee for a prescription drug program and more than double their co-pays. With friends like these. The reason they are attacking AARP is because the organization opposes the president's plan to destroy Social Security in order to save it. I can only imagine what my late father, a combat veteran who lived his last years on Social Security, would have to say about that. I only know that [a]. it wouldn't be printable and [b] would probably include at least some mention of the horses those people rode in on. Of course, the ad group in question is too swift to come out and attack Social Security directly. They are much more subtle than the group of ultra-conservative college Republicans in Pennsylvania who made news last week by chanting "hey, hey, ho, ho, Social Security's got to go!" in support of Senator Santorum.

They realize that older Americans usually like to eat and keep their utilities turned on and younger Americans don't ordinarily have much of a problem with that. Instead, they are hoping to undermine the public retirement and insurance system by rousing the domestic non-Islamic Taliban to another cultural jihad against alleged infidels. Bogus culture wars are the best thing that ever happened to the over-privileged. The ads claim to target "the real AARP agenda," which they imply includes supporting same sex marriage and not supporting our troops. The AARP probably had no idea that this was their real agenda. They naively thought it had something to do with being an advocacy group for older Americans. That had to be a surprise. It kind of makes me wonder what my agenda really is.

With any luck, future ads might warn us that the Social Security trust fund has been messing around with yellowcake uranium and will develop weapons of mass destruction unless we preemptively strike. There have to be other great angles involving the threat Social Security poses to Bibles and the unborn.

I'm really looking forward to the one about how lesbians are going to take away our guns unless we immediately privatize the system. The great thing about the politics of cultural jihad is that you don't have to worry about real issues or facts. Truth usually just gets in the way of fear and hatred anyhow. Best of all, you can avoid drawing attention to embarrassing things like:

• The fact that George W. Bush has been predicting the immanent demise of Social Security and wanting to privatize it since he ran for Congress in 1978, when he said the system "will be bust in 10 years unless there are some changes." The year 1988 came and went without a busted system.
  
• The fact that experts admit that the system faces no immanent crisis. If we do nothing at all, the system will be fine for nearly 40 or 50 years. Minor adjustments, such as lifting the cap on payroll taxes for people earning more than $90,000 per year would pretty much stabilize it for the foreseeable future.
  
• The fact that over one third of all Social Security recipients are not retirees but sick or injured workers, their families, and survivors. Privatizing the retirement component of the program could not be done without damaging other parts of the program.
  
• The fact that Chile, the model for a privatized system, is not exactly a paradise. Privatization there was carried out under a brutal fascistic military dictatorship which came to power in 1973 by overthrowing the democratically elected government. The new government routinely had political opponents tortured and killed. Chile is now a democracy, but the privatized system that is the legacy of the dictatorship isn't living up to its promises. The New York Times reports that "Now that the first generation of workers to depend on the new system is beginning to retire, Chileans are finding that it is falling far short of what was originally advertised under the authoritarian government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet." Middle class participants who regularly contributed to the system are finding that private accounts "are failing to deliver as much in benefits as they would have received if they stayed in the old system."
  
• The fact that transitional costs for privatization would run into the trillions of dollars and weaken the US internationally. Wall Street firms would make billions in managing the newly private accounts. This would obviously increase the deficit, about three fifths of which is now financed by foreign countries. This means going even more deeply into debt to nations like China, which would vastly increase their control over the US economy. Why stop at compromising Social Security when you can compromise national security as well?

No wonder the ad folks prefer fear to facts. If I was them, I'd change the subject too.

Rick Wilson is a progressive columnist for the Charleston (WV) Gazette where this was first published on Thursday, March 3, 2005