Truth Squads

GOP describes squads of supporters as “propaganda teams to deceive voters”

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
February 13, 2012

The Obama campaign is to “educate” and deploy what it describes as “truth teams” to ensure that any attacks on the president’s record are feverishly countered in the run up to the general election.

ABC News reports that teams of Obamanoids will be launched initially in 13 “swing states,” including Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia.

“The goal is to ensure that when Republicans attack President Obama’s record, grassroots supporters can take ownership of the campaign and share the facts with the undecided voters in their lives,” the campaign said in a statement.

“If the other guys are going to run a campaign based on misrepresenting the president’s record – and their own – we have two options: sit back and let these lies go unchallenged, or fight back with the truth,” deputy Obama campaign manager Stephanie Cutter said in an email. ”We’re fighting back.”

Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski issued a response to the news, noting “The Obama campaign is organizing propaganda teams to deceive voters because Americans are catching onto the reality that Obama’s record doesn’t match his rhetoric.”

“How else will they mask the broken promises like introducing another trillion dollar deficit or the fact that the president continues to recycle the same proposals without ever seeing results?” Kukowski told ABC News in an email.

This is not the first time the Obama campaign has deployed squads of jacked up supporters in such a way. In 2008, Obama’s “Fight the Smears” campaign involved more than 1 million supporters in “public education” roles.

One “Obama truth squad” in Missouri vowed to arrest anyone telling ‘lies’ about Obama, and acted to otherwise intimidate anyone criticizing him or his policies.

Obama also made use of incredibly Orwellian sounding “truth squads” to aid in flagging up and denouncing opponents of his health care plan in 2009. The Obama campaign asked supporters to report any negative press or emails to the White House.

The Obama campaign also asked truth squads to work overtime to refute every claim made by author Jerome Corsi in his book “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” – an investigation into claims that Obama is not a natural born US citizen.

However, the plan somewhat backfired when the squads began to re-write history and were called out for suggesting tangible truths were made up lies on Corsi’s behalf.

In September last year, the Obama campaign also launched a new website called AttackWatch.com, offering Obama volunteers “new resources to fight back”.

The obsession with denouncing and refuting every criticism of Obama by his campaign is a long running one. Perhaps the most dangerous proponent of such activity is the man Obama appointed to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein.

As Obama’s “Information Czar”, Sunstein repeatedly called for an internet “Fairness Doctrine”. Sunstein proposed an online model whereby any article or blog expressing an opinion of dissent against the White House or Obama would be mandatorily accompanied with an official government rebuttal on the same page

Sunstein also outlined a plan for the government to infiltrate “conspiracy groups” in order to undermine them. In his January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” he proposed that “under imaginable conditions” the government “might ban conspiracy theorizing” and could “impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.”

In effect, Sunstein stated that he wished to tax or ban outright, as in make illegal, opinions and ideas that the government doesn’t approve of.