Let’s all take a deep breath, appreciate the gravity of the moment, and then burst out laughing at the hapless representative from the 4th district of Louisiana, Rep. Jim McCrery (R).
Since it garnered a lot of media attention, you probably saw that the Campaign for America’s Future — one of the lead pro-Social Security advocacy groups — started running ads in McCrery’s district knocking him for being in the pocket of Wall Street interests set to gain from privatization.
It was a tough ad. But in the day of Swift Boats and the gay-loving AARP, it hardly charted any new territory in aggressive political speech. And it had the added benefit of being pretty undeniably factual.
So what does our man McCrery do? He’s threatening to bring the courts in to enforce the Social Security speech code and get the ad pulled off the air.
According to an AP story which ran mid-evening on Tuesday, Rep. McCrery had his lawyer write a letter to the stations running the ad claiming that the ad is false and defamatory and threatening that running it “exposes you to possible legal liability.”
And what was the defamatory claim, exactly?
The letter says what’s defamatory is the ad’s claim “U.S. Rep. McCrery wants to privatize Social Security and cut our guaranteed benefits.”
This one really shoots McCrery to the top of the list of arch-social security bamboozlers. Republicans don’t have to call privatization ‘privatization’ anymore. And they can try to jawbone reporters out of using the term. But presumably the word itself has yet to become itself a cause of action. And cut your guaranteed benefits? Can’t we hit McCrery’s dingbat lawyer for threatening like a frivolous lawsuit or something? No one denies that the president’s plan will cut guaranteed benefits. The claim is only that private accounts might make up the shortfall.
I mean, it’s hard to know how much to belabor this man’s ridiculousness. But perhaps it is enough to see it as a sign of the low ebb to which phase-out has arrived that a representative who has already flip-flopped on this issue twice in the last six weeks is now responding to a hostile political ad by threatening legal action for making claims that are demonstrably factual.
