You may not have heard of Lance Baxter, aka D.C. Douglas, but you have heard him. Baxter is the voice-over announcer on Geico commercials who tells you you could save money with Geico. To be clear, he is NOT the voice of the gecko or one of the cavemen. And now, he is unemployed.
Actor Lance Baxter, otherwise known as "D.C. Douglas," currently known as the man who informs you how much GEICO can save you on car insurance, left a message last month with FreedomWorks in which he asked the group how many "mentally retarded" people it had on staff and what it would do when a tea partyer "killed someone." On April 14, FreedomWorks put his voicemail online.
Today, Douglas reports he's been dropped from GEICO's campaign.
Dave is being too kind to FreedomWorks. Not only did they put his voicemail online, they put his cell phone number online and encouraged others to call both him and his employer. Breitbart (and you know he would manage to slime his way into this story) has both Douglas's original phone call, but the return call he got from FreedomWorks. I'm not clear how they managed to tie that phone call from Douglas to him and with his gig for Geico, but they did. PRWeb:
Matt Kibbe, President and CEO of FreedomWorks, posted Mr. Douglas' cell phone number in a blog post on biggovernment.com, instructing readers to "Feel free to contact (him)… call his employer too. Let them know that you…are now in the market for car insurance." The next day, GEICO held auditions to replace Mr. Douglas' voice on the campaign.
Mr. Douglas' message hardly warranted the mobilization of the Tea Party Movement. Upset by the recent gay and racial slurs slung by Tea Party members at Congressman Barney Frank and Representative John Lewis during the Health Care Reform Weekend, Mr. Douglas left his opinion of FreedomWorks' staff and followers on their company voicemail and included his phone number.
"I called as a private citizen to make a complaint," explains Mr. Douglas. "Racism and homophobia are my Achilles heal, but unfortunately my message included inappropriate words and I am sorry for that. However, telling their members to harass my employer to get me fired is an egregiously disproportionate response to my actions."
Mr. Douglas believes his connection to GEICO, a company already on FreedomWorks' boycott list for pulling their ads from Glenn Beck's show, is the main reason he was targeted so forcefully. "Even though I left the message during the week of March 23, the harassing calls didn't hit until April 14, the morning after I posted about my GEICO campaign on my Facebook page."
Aha! They were smarting already and decided to go with a campaign of personal destruction. I can see that moving the country in a better direction...not.
So consequence-free Free Speech for me but not for thee, you FreedomWorks teabaggers? Chalk up yet another notch for incredible hypocrisy.
