Apparently, bad ideas are contagious.
On the heels of a disastrous billboard campaign from the Heartland Institute that linked people who understand climate change with serial killers, an organization in Colorado has released its own tasteless campaign comparing President Obama and other Colorado politicians with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The billboard campaign was rolled out at 28 locations around Colorado by the conservative organization Compass Colorado.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims that the Holocaust was a myth, believes that the U.S. government perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and has bragged about how effective Iran is in recruiting suicide bombers who “enlighten our future.”
President Obama has said that “this country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy. A strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.”
According to Compass Colorado, that belief in clean energy is egregious enough to compare Obama to a dictator who promotes mass murder.
When the Heartland Institute attempted the same kind of campaign, the fallout was swift — with 11 corporations pulling support from the organization. Ahmadinejad doesn’t have the same kind of lurid cultural relevance that Ted Kaczynski or Charles Manson have in America, but the attempt at shock value is no different than Heartland’s.
And just like Heartland, Compass Colorado is patting itself on the back for such a ridiculous campaign.
Who decided this was a good idea?
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Joe, and anyone else who may be interested: My name is David Goldstein. I am a very interested citizen (non-scientist), a Stanford Grad and a climate change activist. I have contracted a billboard thru Clear Channel to go up in Minneapolis tomorrow (Tuesday) for 1 day- the text: “Guess who believes in Climate Change” and the link to my newly constructed website: http://www.itsphysics.org The site is up-please go and check it out. I don’t mention Heartland at all, but this is certainly meant as a response- I’m from Philly and we don’t take things laying down!! I’d LOVE for Joe to run an article tomorrow (with picture of the billboard). My email is dagold56@hotmail.com
Could we please stop dignifying bought-and-paid-for shills for the fossil fuel corporations by referring to them as “conservative”?
It suggests that they have some sort of principled political philosophy or ideology, which they do not.
They are simply propagandists and/or lobbyists for a particular group of corporations, who find it useful to bamboozle gullible people by pretending to be “conservatives”.
But their fake, phony, trumped-up, Madison Avenue-scripted, focus-group-tested, so-called “conservative” pseudo-ideology is as bogus as their pseudo-science and pseudo-economics.
There’s no need to help them bamboozle people by going along with their pretense. Indeed, it is important to let genuine political conservatives know that these fossil fueled-stooges are lying to them, not standing up for them.
What a disgusting propaganda. It is more than offensive, it is ridiculous!
By the way, Ahmadineyad is an (islamic) CONSERVATIVE, and a lot of the (progressive) Iranian people has shown his opposition to him:
Bella ciao Iran (Beautiful Goodbye /زیبا خداحافظ)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjhUUnZfgN0
Yar e Dabestani e man (Series of clips and pictures from the 2009 Iranian election protests)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_62cCkZYbM&feature=related
Having shown him as a tyrant that refuses to leave power by making himself reelected in fraudulent elections (and then do a violent crackdown on the opposition), I must say that what the West have been doing with Iran is injust (to say the least) with the Iranian People.
I want to say, the paranoia about a an iranian nuclear weapon reminds me of the alleged “weapons of mass destruction” of Iraq in 2003. All Iran has done is to develop nuclear energy.
Developing nuclear energy makes sense in the time of Peak Oil.I am not a fan of nuclear energy, but according to international law, any country has its right to develop an energy policy that includes nuclear.
And even if Iran were to make a nuclear weapon, that means it will be used? At most a few nukes could be built. Israel, UK, France and USA have thousands of them. The numbers are crystal clear: a few vs. tens of thousands. Any Iranian attack would be a suicide.
And what about Pakistan, that in the past helped islamist groups in Afghanistan and has accumulated an important number of nukes?
If the West had achieved something, is to give the Iranian government an external enemy, exactly what the dictators need to have popular support. After all those sanctions and menaces, nuclear energy is no longer a matter of energy security, but of national dignity
And to conclude, putting tension in the Middle East is precisely the kind of things that drive oil prices up by speculation. Those rumors about a crazy plan to bomb Iran nuclear facilities had scared energy markets.
If anything Obama has not distanced himself from any action like that. An attack to Iran nuclear facilities would be a disaster worse than Chenobyl and Fukushima. It would be a war crime, a Nuclear Holocaust, and will trigger a regional war and the interruption of the Gulf oil production (including the supply of Saudi Arabia).
Obama should make that clear, without fearing the powerful lobbys that make push for such an insane action.
Ahmadinejad has never denied the Nazi Judeocide. He questioned why Israel was established in the Middle East and why the Palestinians have been made to pay for European crimes. He never threatened to ‘wipe Israel off the map’, but, quoting Khomeini, stated that it would ‘disappear from the pages of history’ just like the USSR, in other words, peacefully. I do not see Iran, or Israel or the USA or my own country as my ideal society, but to engage, even tangentially, in mendacious hatemongering against Iran or any other state, preparatory to military aggression, which is outlawed by the UN Charter and International Law, is, in my opinion, just the type of behaviour that has got humanity into its current disastrous state.
I agree with you (but I still have the homework to check the Iranian-English translation of the Ahmadineyad quote myself and his declarations about Nazi Genocide).
Why did you reply to me?
My links are not about the western paranoia about iranian nuclear energy, but about his repression of the Iranian opposition after a (highly likely) fraudulent election. That is for me his main guilt.
And yes, despite not being a fan of the Iranian nuclear program (nor the Israeli and Pakistani either)I found just obscene how crazy can so much people be to propose the bombing of nuclear reactors, an action with consecuences worse than Chernobyl + Fukushima that would be, unlike the fantasy attack against Israel or Europe, a true nuclear Holocaust.
Q: Can you prove that bad ideas are contagious?
A: The modern Republican Party.
The campaign which is shown here is truly despicable as far as comparisons or linkages
But how about a billboard campaign to trace Ahmadinejad and the whole 1979 Iranian revolution to where blame truly belongs? To the CIA-backed Coup that put US-backed dictator The Shah into power.
The 1979 revolution by the extreme fundamentalists happened because the US backed a brutal torturing murdering dictator, the Shah of Iran, up until then.
Worse, the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected Mosaddegh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
The CIA also supported the very first coup in Syria that got rid of a representative government, after which a series of coups by dictatorships led to…today.
The CIA also had Noriega on the payroll. The CIA also had the young officer Saddam Hussein on the payroll (that is the one example I need to confirm more fully) and not last and not least, well documented that CIA put billions (with a B) into the hands of the most extreme Islamist fundamentalists it could find, the mujahideen in Afghanistan a group that became powerful and from which Al Qaeda networks and the Taliban naturally evolved from, once such extremists had lots of money, power, and training and weapons.
Any chance the real roots of such things as Ahmadinejad will come to billboards any time soon?
You may find this video interesting:
SOVIET AFGHAN WAR DOCUMENTARY Part 1/5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8Vmx9Pg5Js
It has nearly 400 000 views. They should be millions.
And how convenient for the target audience that the prez is black, the wild-eyed guy is Muslim, and the representative, despite not being Jewish to my knowledge, has a name that sounds Jewish.
Coinicidence?