The French connection in anti Palin smears

John Rosenthal:

The Jawa Report’s outing of public relations man Ethan Winner as the poster of a professionally-produced anti-Sarah Palin smear video to YouTube has brought the company Publicis to the American public’s attention.

As Rusty Shackleford and his colleagues have shown, Winner and several other members of the Los Angeles-based Winner & Associates public relations firm — including company CEO Chuck Winner — appear to have been involved in a concerted effort to make the anti-Palin video “go viral” on the Internet. Winner & Associates is a 100% owned subsidiary of French giant Publicis.

And what is Publicis? By its own account, Publicis is the fourth-largest communications group in the world, having generated some €4.7 billion (or $6.9 billion) in revenue in 2007. With its distinctive postmodern headquarters on Paris’ Champs-Elysées just a stone’s throw from the Arc de Triomphe, Publicis also happens to be one of those highly politically-connected French firms that are so characteristic of the upper echelons of the French economy.

The principal shareholder in Publicis is Élisabeth Badinter, the daughter of company founder Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet. According to the Publicis 2007 financial data (p. 73), Badinter controls some 10% of the shares in the company and nearly 17% of the voting rights. A joint venture between Badinter and the Japanese Dentsu Corporation controls another 5% of the capital and 7% of the voting rights.

Ms. Badinter is well-known in France as a “feminist” philosopher and the author of numerous books. Her husband is none other than Robert Badinter, a renowned French jurist and Socialist Party politician, whose career is closely intertwined with that of the late French president François Mitterrand.... Mr. Badinter is presently a member of the French Senate.

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As Rusty Shackleford and others have pointed out, the notion that Ethan Winner and his cronies — all of them PR professionals — are just “concerned Americans” who attempted to make the Palin smear video “go viral” out of personal conviction is patently absurd. The obvious question, then, is for whom were Winner and his “associates” working? The most obvious answer is: the Obama campaign. Another and at least equally troubling possibility, however, is that they were working for one of Publicis’s high-powered European clients.

Defying diplomatic custom, European leaders have, after all, made no secret of their preference for Obama....

The Jawa Report expose deserves more media attention. Rosenthal is writing for Pajamas Media which is still in the alternative class. The attempt to influence our election by foreigners is a serious charge and as every Democrat knows, it is the seriousness of the charge that demands an investigation.

I hope that Rush Limbaugh takes a look at how the Obama campaign and a foreign controlled PR agency tried to manipulate US voters with an astroturf operation. It is pretty clear that the NY Times and the other mainstream media want to avoid embarrassing their guy.