Friend,
This is an emergency. None of us will soon forget the stomach-churning, personal attacks Barack Obama endured during the '08 presidential campaign. Very sorry to say, we ain't seen nothing yet. According to an explosive article this morning in the New York Times, Mitt Romney's friends are wasting no time preparing to spend millions of dollars engaging in character assassination:
The $10 million plan, one of several being studied by Joe Ricketts [founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade]...calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
It gets uglier:
The group suggested hiring as a spokesman an "extremely literate conservative African-American" who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a "metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln."
The 54-page attack plan ominously promises to "do exactly what John McCain would not let us do" Does this make you mad as hell? I sure am. Well, let's do something about it right now.
Online stock broking juggernaut TD Ameritrade, which boasts 6 million customers, is frantically trying to distance themselves from the proposed $10 million smut campaign. But the man who commissioned the proposal, Joe Ricketts, founded the company and remains a major stakeholder.
It's time we send a message with our wallets to Ricketts and any corporate suit out there thinking about putting some skin in the game of politics of personal destruction: If you have money in TD Ameritrade, pull it out and take your business elsewhere.
Can you ask 5 of your friends to join us in hitting TD Ameritrade where it hurts - their profit margin - until they publicly call on Ricketts to shut down his hate-spewing Super PAC.
We need to take a stand right now, send a message that these kinds of reprehensible attacks have no place in our political discourse. If we fail to respond when these attacks rear their ugly head, the floodgates will open to new lows of character assassination that I don't even want to think about.
Thanks,
Jeremy