A nice little Flash cartoon that has been running on TV can be seen at the DNC site. Not Democrats.com. The DNC site.

The site is running slow, so it may be hard to get through. The actual movie, which I dumped onto my hard disk for posterity, can be found on its archived storage location here.

This is the level of political discussion on this subject from the Democratic Party.

I suppose it would be futile to point out that the ad--not surprisingly--is based on a flatout lie: that Bush is proposing placing all of Social Security "trust funds" in the stock market*. The actual proposal, that workers could voluntarily choose to place some small fraction of their Social Security taxes into private investments, doesn't play quite as well.

I suppose it would be futile to also point out that if I had placed my Social Security taxes in the stock market over my entire working life, that I would probably have a couple of million dollars in the kitty by now (which I could leave to my kids) even after the current stock dive.

The entitlement programs are the Left's strongest stranglehold on the elderly voters of this country, historically the most likely to vote. Tugging hard on the financial choke chain ("The Republicans will get you if you don't watch out!") to frighten the elderly into voting Democratic is their strongest tactic, and anything that threatens this is violently attacked, and it's going to get a lot worse than this little cartoon cheap shot.

The fact that alternatives may actually provide a better and more comfortable retirement for the elderly of the future is totally irrelevant to the issue, much as is whether or not the public school system actually educates anyone.

*As opposed to T-Bills (government IOUs) which is where they are dumped now so that the government can immediately spend the money.