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This billboard is currently up in Caldwell, Idaho near Boise in the state's Treasure Valley region. Yeah, I know Idaho is about as red as it gets out west, but even the stoic people of Boise are a bit taken aback by, you know, openly comparing the President to a mass murder suspect.
The group that owns the board, The Ralph Smeed Foundation, says it wants to draw attention to military men and women dying overseas.
"(It's) way over the line, and I am not an Obama supporter," Lynn Davis Hathaway, said on the KBOI 2News Facebook page.
Hmm, the Ralph Smeed Foundation? Seems Idaho's most famous "libertarian" died in 2010.
Smeed, who was 88 years old, served in the Army during World War II, and then returned to his hometown of Caldwell. He became active in Republican politics before starting his newspaper column in the Lewiston Morning Tribune in 1974. He also started a think-tank called the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives in 1976, which published some of his writing.
Rick Coffman, a newspaper editor who became friends with Smeed in the early 1970s, carried Smeed’s columns in the Idaho Press-Tribune each Sunday on the editorial page. “Ralph was all about ideas and principles, that those would sustain the country through good times and bad,” Coffman said.
“Ralph fought all his life for what he believed – the value of a limited government, individuals having the freedom to choose what is best for them, that when government does something ‘for’ someone it does something else ‘to’ another someone.”
Coffman added, “Ralph is the only person I have ever known who I am convinced did exactly what he wanted to do every day of his life. We should all be so lucky.”
Many people learned of Smeed’s views from his reader board that included both policy opinions and partisan jokes, including “I would rather go hunting with Dick Cheney than riding in a car with Ted Kennedy.” Smeed received some notoriety in the past few years for messages questioning President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
The three word slogan at the top of the reader board, “Making Statism Unpopular,” may been the message he was most interested in promoting.
Oh good, he was basically Glenn Greenwald's cranky uncle from the Gem State. And of course he was an Obama-hating birther asshole. All "libertarians" are it seems.
Just call him Hitler already.
Oh wait, the wingers did that too.
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