More on the MoveOn ads
You can see the advertisement mentioned in the previous post here. The Kuhl campaign is asking stations to take the ads off the air, claiming they contain factual errors. Here’s their reasoning (from the Elmira S-G):
Kuhl does not dispute that he has repeatedly voted for defense spending bills that provided billions of dollars to fund the war.
The controversy centers on an ad that accuses Kuhl of “dumping billions” into Iraq — including $18 billion to Halliburton KBR, an engineering and construction company that was awarded three Defense Department contracts to help rebuild Iraq. The last contract awarded to Halliburton was in January 2004 — a year before Kuhl took office.
These advertisements are getting a lot of attention. MSNBC has an item about them in their First Read column, for example. Other Congressmen are being targeted as well:
MoveOn.org Political Action is going up with two ads this week targeting GOP Reps. John Sweeney (NY-20), Randy Kuhl (NY-29), and Charles Bass (NH-2). The roughly $600,000 ad buy is part of MoveOn.org’s “caught red-handed” campaign, which the group says is an effort to hold Republicans “accountable for failing to stand up to the Bush Administration” on Iraq.
Related posts:
The ad doesn’t say “Randy” gave $18 billion to Halliburton, it just says $18 billion was given to Halliburton and implies that he wants to continue spending money on Iraq.
I think it’s misleading.
That’s what I took away from it too. You can only get so much nuance into a 30 second spot.