Harry Reid SLAMS The Koch Brothers ‘They’re Trying To Buy America!’ (Video)
by Bob Cull
Senator Harry Reid took to the floor of the Senate Wednesday morning to blast the Koch brothers and their campaign of disinformation and half truths in an attempt to, as he so accurately puts it, "buy America."
In
his original comments on the misleading ads run by their Americans for
Prosperity conservative advocacy group Reid had said that every single
ad that they have run has proven to be false. He was chided for that
statement by Republican members and returned to speak again this time
saying that the majority of their ads are misleading if not outright
false.
The Senator is right. A search of Politifact
for AFP political ads yields a list of 3 stories and 7 statements
between June of 2012 and February of this year none of which were rated
as completely true.
The
best rating any of these AFP sponsored ads got was the infamous ad
about a woman in Tennessee who claimed that because of Obamacare she
lost her insurance which had cost her $52 a month and was forced to pay
$373 a month for the plan which she purchased through the federal health
care website.
In
this case, although the site did not rate it, it was a matter of
factual omissions that made the ad less than honest. The woman chose
the second most expensive platinum plan available to her and will have
no deductible with a maximum out of pocket payment of $1500 a year.
The other 9 items were rated between misleading and false, with one rated half true.
Reid quoted from an editorial by Mark Mellman in The Hill
which is highly critical of the methods employed by the Koch brothers
and AFP. He points out that nearly all of their ads would fail to pass
scrutiny if they had to abide by the same standards as an ad for a
consumer product. He uses an ad from Louisiana which features people
opening their mail to discover that their insurance has been cancelled
due to Obamacare. These people are actually actors but unlike an ad for
a consumer product they are not required to disclose that and they
don't, they allow the public to believe that these are real people.
He
then points out that even in the ads where real people are featured the
whole truth is scrupulously avoided, such as in the ad attacking
Representative Gary Peters (D-MI) and featuring Julie Boonstra who suffers from leukemia.
Boonstra
tells the camera that she has lost her "wonderful" insurance policy due
to Obamacare, and now she is facing huge out of pocket costs which are
going to financially destroy her. She goes on to say that she is likely
to die because she can no longer obtain the medications that were
keeping her alive.
That
was all 100% weapons-grade BULLSH*T. Boonstra is not facing huge
increases in expenses. At worst she will spend $2 per year more than she
was before. She has not lost her doctor, nor has she been unable to
obtain her medications.
Senator
Reid is absolutely right when he says, "what's going on with these two
brothers who made billions of dollars last year, and attempt to buy our
democracy is dishonest, deceptive, false and unfair. Just because you
have huge amounts of money you should not be able to run these false
misleading ads by the hundreds of millions of dollars. They hide behind
all kinds of entities, Mr. President, it's not just their front
organization Americans for Prosperity, they give money to all kinds of
organizations, lots of money. You see when you make billions of dollars
a year you can be just as immoral and dishonest as your money will
allow you to be. It's too bad that they're trying to buy America and
it's time that the American people spoke out against this terrible
dishonesty. The Koch brothers are about as un-American as anyone that I can imagine."
WATCH:
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