Turning astroturf into grassroots

Daily Kos brings up some new astroturf. Let's have some grassroots fun with it, shall we? Happily, the Kerry campaign relies on volunteers’ own brains to write letters to the editor, etc. Not so for GWB. Karl Rove-approved scripts are online at the GWB ’04 website, ready for anyone to cut & paste and e-mail as a letter to the editor. Since this is nothing but phony grassroots politicking, it’s known as Astroturf. Well, what I’ve done is take the Bush-approved script and messed with it a bit, and then used GWB’s own bandwidth to send a pro-Kerry LTE. How, you ask? Point your browser to http://www.georgewbush.com/Economy/WriteNewspapers.aspx?AgendaID=2 (there are probably other places at this website to do this for other policy issues, like foreign affairs, for instance). Take the approved text, and change it as follows: (bold = my changes) New job figures and other recent economic data show that America’s economy is weak and getting weaker – and that the President’s jobs and growth plan is clearly not working. The Labor Department announced that employers added a mere 288,000 new jobs in April. In total, only 1.1 million jobs have been added since August, with 8 consecutive months of modest gains. The truth is that the US economy has lost a net 1 million jobs since Bush took office in 2001. No president since Hoover has presided over a four-year term where the economy failed to add jobs.