Roadmap of Hell -- guide to right-wing scammers and dirty tricksters [View All]

[starroute]

Recently a series of threads was started by DU poster Bozos for Bush. His 83 year old mother had received a letter from an organization called the American Federation of Senior Citizens, warning that her Social Security benefits were at risk unless she sent them money to lobby Congress for Social Security privatization. DU'ers soon discovered that this group was run by Gary Jarmin, a long-time fixture on the right who has been a disciple of Reverend Moon for thirty years or more. Jarmin is the founder of Christian Voice, is a member of the Council for National Policy, and is close enough to George H.W. Bush to get him to do favors on behalf of Moon operations.

Jarmin's connections led to a great deal of interesting discussion -- but ultimately even more revealing was the direct-mail solicitation firm named in the fine print at the bottom of the letter. Googling on Response Dynamics opened a window into the heart of a network of right-wing scammers, smear artists, and dirty tricksters that touches on every anti-Democratic dirty campaign trick from the Willie Horton ad of 1988, to the anti-Clinton jihad of the 90's, to the present attacks on John Kerry.

The chart below lays out what we have learned about this network. This is not a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon deal, where people and organizations are linked merely because they once appeared on a panel together or co-signed a letter. The individuals on this chart have been intimately related to one another, often over many years, have worked together on common projects, and are connected by a dense web of overlapping connections.

I am going to follow this chart with a response #1 giving links to the various DU research threads from which it is drawn, and then attach narrative descriptions of the main sareas of interest. If you post on this thread, please leave those narratives in an uninterrupted block by not replying to them directly. Instead, reply to this original post or to other people's responses. Thank you.