The Crooks and Liars website somehow has gotten its hands on what appear to be the scripts for five ads being produced by the Oregon Republican Party, and The Eye couldn't believe our eyes when we read them.
The first ad, titled "Thank You," opens with "A YOUNG MULATTO FEMALE DOCTOR" ("mulatto"?) saying, "Thank you for ending slavery." Then there's "A WOMAN EXECUTIVE STANDING IN FRONT OF HER DESK" saying, "Thank you for giving women the right to vote."
In the following images, people thank the Republican Party for "opening our state beaches to the public" and "passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964."
The big problem with the ad, as the Loaded Orygun blog points out, is that "pretty much every one of those 'Thank You' items that can be pegged to a date is at least 40 years old."
The Emancipation Proclamation? Abe Lincoln issued it in 1863. The 19th Amendment giving women the vote - 1920. The Civil Rights Act - 1964 (and it was two Democratic presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who strong-armed it through Congress). And the Oregon Beach Bill was passed in 1967, back when Tom McCall was governor and a strange species of animal known as the "liberal Republican" still roamed the Earth.
The Republicans didn't mention the annexation of Hawaii by William McKinley in 1898 - an act that ultimately made possible the election of Barack Obama and therefore, in a sense, entitles the Republicans to claim credit for putting the first African-American president in the White House. But maybe that will be covered in a future ad.
"To the extent that a party named the Republican Party deserves any credit for any of these [accomplishments mentioned in the ad], it's certainly not the party of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, and George W. Bush," LoadedOrygun writes. "It's certainly not the Oregon party that's had anti-union and anti-gay rights initiatives on the ballot regularly for the last 20 years. So you'll forgive me if I don't elbow my way to the front of the 'Thank You' line."
John Amato at Crooks and Liars says the Republican Party of Oregon declined to comment when asked about the ad scripts. "The main question about these scripts is whether they were created by someone at the Oregon GOP, or at the Portland advertising agency that it came from," he writes. "We'll be trying to find this out."
