Interesting post from Redstate (Now keep an open mind!) by Erickson:
My mother constantly gets mail at her house begging her for money to fight the good fight. More often than not, the groups begging her for help have “Tea Party” in their name and they are all scams.Give money to a conservative candidate and you too will see your mailbox explode. “But we cannot pull from FEC filings,” they claim. That may be the law, but when has that stopped them? Try this — give a handful of conservative candidates enough money to get printed in their FEC disclosures. “Mistype” your name. Watch as you suddenly see an avalanche of direct mail, all with your name mistyped.
It may not be entirely clear what he’s referring to there, he’s talking about the scam factor. It’s not as if the left was devoid of this, I get plenty of shadowy or confusing looking pleas for money all the time from progressive groups — or at least groups with progressive sounding names. Unless I know who they are and know people who work for them, those emails don’t even get opened.
But in all fairness the right has devolved into a full on scam feeding frenzy. If you read that post at Redstate you’ll see it in full bloom in the comments section, where may readers weigh in that they only contribute to their favored group or individual and no other. Which of course they presume is not a scam.
But it probably is, because the entire right runs on scam power these days. The sole focus of the GOP party bosses and celebrities are to 1) enrich themselves by any means possible and 2) enrich their very close wealthy friends by any means possible. Any means possible often means every kind of duplicity imaginable. That’s just how they roll and it’s a real head scratcher to try to think of how they can ever get out of that predicament.
Your conclusion is not logical. As you state them, the facts are as follows:
* A person donates to a conservative candidate.
* The candidate discloses the donor’s address in an FEC filing.
* Someone uses the address thus gleaned to scam the donor for money, purportedly in the name of some right-wing organzation.
So, if I was a scammer, how would I try to get money from conservative people? Of course by pretending to be conservative myself! Does that mean the scammers are actually conservatives? Of course not! Heck, even if I was a left-winger trying to scam conservatives for their money, I’d pretend to be right-wing! It just makes sense.
Only if these requests are legitimate, i.e. not scams, would you have a point in accusing the right of using desparate mail-begging tactics. But you can’t claim those are scammers and blame the right at the same time.
And of course your last paragraph is not supported by any preceding arguments at all.
I had a professor in college who made a hobby of this. He’d misspell his last name in different ways and keep track of which mailing lists he ended up on.
To be fair, I never got junk mail from progressive causes until I contributed to Planned Parenthood.
Now, it’s a regular occurrence. The difference is that the causes seem to be legitimate — Doctors Without Borders and the like.
My gift just keeps on giving.
I have purchased magazine subscriptions for various nieces & nephews. I always sign them up with a bogus middle initial so that they can track which magazines are selling their address.
A friend of mine is a conservative, Fox News Republican (disabled vet). He is on every single scam mailing list in existence. I donate to several progressive causes and, yes, I get lots of “related” causes hitting me up for money. But NOTHING like his deluge, which quickly runs to get-rich-quick schemes (which he ALSO falls for). It’s been written about here:
http://thebaffler.com/past/the_long_con
mendel is partially right in that you can’t really blame “legitimate” conservative causes for this. However, it’s a symptom of what the GOP base has become in this country that the scammers choose overwhelmingly to “aim to the Right”, so to speak. If I wanted to be generous, I might say it’s because conservatives tend to include a lot of older people. If I wanted to be more frank, I might say it’s because the modern conservative movement in America is fucking batshit crazy.