Re: Shades Of Germany - 1938!

There are a number of firms in Washington whose
business it is to orchestrate phony letter writing campaigns
on behalf of pricey clients.

Usually, the gig works something like this. Say you’re the
hot dog makers lobby and congress is fixing to hit you
with some new regs about hot dog making. Let’s say it’s
something truly outlandish like requiring you to include
some meat in the product.

If you go up to the hill with your gripes as the National
Hot Dog Makers Association you might not do so well.
And your ideological compatriots in the media might not
be able to get up much of a head of steam banging the
table for a bunch of hot dog magnates. So you call up one
of the phony letter writing firms --- let’s call one
hypothetical outfit The Former Republican
Communications Staffers and Speechwriters Group of
Washington.

So you go to FRCSSGW. They find out what your beef is
and they write up a letter to the editor. Then they go out
and find some guy who runs a hot dog stand downtown in
some major city and ask him if he’ll sign it for a few
hundred bucks. Maybe money changes hands; maybe it
doesn’t. It depends on the circumstances. Then they take
that letter and find some newspaper to print it.

Local newspapers are usually easier to bamboozle than
the big national ones --- though at least one major national
paper is known to be an easy mark for phony letters with
an appealing ideological tilt.

The letter usually has the nominal author of the letter telling
congress that those woeful new regulations will make it
impossible for an independent hot dog vendor to stay in
business, etc., etc., etc.

Voila! Suddenly those new hot dogs regs aren’t just an
annoyance to the hot dog makers. They’re a new burden
to some struggling immigrant entrepreneur who’s trying to
build his American dream one dog at a time.

I’d be curious to find out whether some outfit like our
hypothetical Former Republican Communications Staffers
and Speechwriters Group of Washington is doing some of
their letter-campaign consulting for the White House or
the Pentagon as part of the Great Push-Back.

-- Josh Marshall Tweet