How Ted Cruz Became The Rhoda Penmark Of The U.S. Senate

While I was researching this morning's lesbian piece, I saw how, in 1997, ambitious Buffalo closet case Bill Paxon used the power position Speaker Newt Gingrich had appointed him to, chair of the NRCC, to attempt a coup against Gingrich. Paxon plotted with House Republican power brokers Dick Armey, Tom DeLay and John Boehner to oust Gingrich, whose bizarre behavior had become a drag on Republican election prospects. However, each of the plotters saw himself as the next Speaker and when Armey sensed the plum was falling into Paxon's gay lap, he snitched to Gingrich. Gingrich forced Paxon to end his congressional career and, rather gratuitously, had Armey-- a real sleaze ball-- out his lover, Sandy Hume (Brit's son, a 28 year old journalist who committed suicide). The night before shooting himself with a hunting rifle, Hume had been jailed for drunk driving and tried to hang himself with a shoelace. (Joe Scarborough, who was a Republican congressman at the time and hadn't yet been implicated in the death of a young female staffer, included the ugly incident about the coup and the suicide in his book, Rome Wasn't Burnt In A Day.)

According to Scarborough, Armey was bereft of common decency, a shameless liar who betrayed his colleagues. Armey worked hard to destroy the career of a young reporter. After that reporter's suicide, Armey helped spread rumors about a gay affair between the reporter and Bill Paxon, a congressman who angled to replace Armey as House Leader. Paxon immediately retired from politics, while Armey stayed on.

…Sandy Hume's career seemed to be thriving. He specialized in "the juicy inside stuff" as he described it to the New York Times. "I can spend all day on the Hill and not know what a single vote is about… Almost everything they vote on is irrelevant to our mission.'" The son of Fox News anchorman Brit Hume was going places. On February 21, 1998, he accepted an offer to join U.S. News & World Report. "He seemed very well connected on a workaday level with the GOP power structure," U.S. News editor James Fallows told the Village Voice, "and for the foreseeable future that was going to be an important story."Later that same evening, according to reporter Andy Humm, Hume showed up at a Republican fundraiser, also attended by Bill Paxon.

But then, writes Scarborough, "Sandy passed away on February 22, 1998, at the age of twenty-eight." The Village Voice reported the details of on Sandy's "passing." At 2:20 a.m. on February 22, 1998, in Bethesda, Maryland, Sandy Hume's BMW was stopped for going 75 mph on a 45 mph zone. Hume was drunk and taken to a police station, where, in a holding cell, he was caught trying to choke himself with a shoelace. At 9:30 a.m., Hume was admitted to the city mental health clinic for psychiatric evaluation. Hume was released later that day, and he returned home, where he shot himself in the head.

"Hume's death represented an opportunity for revenge for some in the Armey camp," writes Scarborough, who recounted a phone inquiry from a Wall Street Journal reporter. "Someone in Dick Armey's office just told me that Sandy got the coup story by having a gay affair with Bill Paxon. Both knew the story was coming out and that's why Paxon resigned and why Sandy killed himself," said the reporter.

The obvious insinuation was that Sandy Hume killed himself because he was mortified at suffering the kind of fate borne by Monica Lewinsky, whose affair with Bill Clinton had been first reported one month earlier. Hume frequently appeared on Fox News, an outfit obsessed with the politics of personal destruction.

Two days before Hume's suicide, Bill Paxon contacted dozens of members to prepare a bid to oust Armey as Majority Leader. "House Republican renegades have issued a stern warning to Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) about influencing leadership elections: Fight for Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) at your own risk," wrote Sandy Hume in The Hill just before Paxon started calling. George magazine had commissioned a lengthy profile on Paxon, written by Sandy Hume.

Two days after Hume's death, Paxon, 44, retired from politics. He announced, "I will never run for office again. Never. Not even for dog warden."

Paxon was hardly the first ambitious congressman looking to displace a party leader. Even today, another young Republican, Ted Cruz, still a freshman, is working to accrew as much naked power as he can grab. Most Republican staffers see him as the kind of narcisistic personality type who will stop at nothing to get to the top. I've never heard any contemporary American politician compared to Hitler as much as Cruz-- and not just because they are both right-wing extremists. It's all about the sociopathic behavior. Cruz is the Rhoda Penmark of the U.S. Senate.



Yesterday, Cameron Joseph, reporting for The Hill, looked into Cruz's refusal to play nice with his GOP colleagues. "The defiant Republican’s brutal criticism of Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-Miss.) reelection campaign on Tuesday-- and the involvement of a group he is technically a vice chairman of, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC)-- is just the latest example of the Tea Party hero refusing to play nice," he wrote.

That brazen approach has exacerbated already fragile relations with establishment Republicans, who believe the freshman senator is intentionally undercutting them for no reason other than furthering his own political career.

Meanwhile, his conservative base is rejoicing that he’s refusing to be cowed.

…National Republicans hoped they could tame Cruz when they gave him the NRSC position. But he officially took a hiatus from the group earlier this year when it became clear that it would be involved in helping incumbents win against Tea Party challengers.

But Cruz still remains vice chairman, and reiterated he won’t resign.

“It was unfortunate to see the D.C. political machine spending substantial money to urge 30,000 to 40,000 Democrats to vote in a Republican primary. And they did not do so in an effort to grow the party, to attract their support substantively on ideas. Rather the ads that were run made false racial charges and made no effort to secure those votes in the general election,” Cruz told reporters Tuesday, echoing comments he’d made the night before to conservative radio host Mark Levin.

He went on to criticize the Senate GOP campaign arm’s involvement specifically.

“When I signed on as vice-chair of the NRSC it was based upon an explicit commitment from leadership that the NRSC was going to stay out of primaries. Had they not made that commitment I would not have taken on that role,” he said.

“I participated in the NRSC early on as long as they honored that commitment, and when the decision was made for them to do otherwise I stopped participating because I think Washington insiders are notoriously poor at picking winners and losers in primaries. And indeed the Mississippi primary is Exhibit A for why the NRSC should stay out of primaries.”

…This is far from the first time Cruz has antagonized the GOP establishment by intentionally bucking its members to grab big headlines. He led the charge to defund ObamaCare that shut down the government last fall, which badly damaged Republicans’ poll numbers. Cruz has also pointedly refused to endorse his GOP colleagues in many races-- even those without serious challengers, like former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, who’d backed him in his own race.

…[N]ational Republicans privately say Cruz did almost nothing to help the NRSC even before they started getting involved in primaries.

“He’s a VINO, he’s a vice chairman in name only,” said one national Republican. “I’m not sure what the alternative is. Should we strip him of his vice chairmanship that he doesn’t actually do anything with? The hope is judging by his own words he’ll be helpful in the general election.”

But not everyone is so optimistic he’ll come around.

“Senator Cruz has every right to express himself,” said GOP strategist Ron Bonjean, a onetime leadership aide to former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).

“But does it make any sense to have a vice chairman of the NRSC dispute the certification of the Mississippi Senate election in favor of a sitting Republican incumbent?”

Some Republicans are plotting to get rid of Cruz by pushing him to run for president against Hillary Clinton, knowing he will lose-- lose humiliatingly-- and be gone from the Senate. The problem with that scenario is that the kind of landslide defeat outside the South that Cruz would engender for the GOP could result in Senate losses in 9 states, Arizona (McCain), Florida (Rubio), Illinois (Kirk), Iowa (Grassley), New Hampshire (Ayotte), North Carolina (Burr), Ohio (Portman), Pennsylvania (Toomey) and Wisconsin (Johnson) and possibly even Kentucky (Paul) and Missouri (Blunt). If Hillary has any kind of coattails-- and if Israel has been removed as DCCC chair-- a Cruz presidential run would almost surely take back the House for the Democrats as well. Little Rhoda is bad news-- a lot of bad news.

Tea Party Civil War

We all love watching the Republican civil war between the greed and selfishness wing and the hate and bigotry wing as it unfolds. In the radio interview above, Palin declares war, again, on Marco Rubio and Kelly Ayotte. But how about the civil war that's tearing apart the Tea party itself... a civil war within a civil war? Those are always the most fun.

Over the weekend Luke Mullins covered an aspect of that for the Washingtonian: Armey In Exile. A month before Romney went down in flames, Dick Armey had agreed to resign as chairman of FreedomWorks, one of the big-money Tea Party fronts, forced out by Matt Kibbe with an $8 million payoff to just go away. Mullins asks and answers the question about what had turned Armey and Kibbe into bitter enemies and ripped FreedomWorks apart just as-- in their deranged minds-- Romney was sweeping into the White House and Republicans were taking over the Senate?

Though Armey rose to political prominence during the Gingrich Revolution, congressional staffers saw that he lacked political instincts-- "forgetting people’s names and arriving late to votes because he was chatting with his staff. 'He was a Mr. Magoo type of character,' says a former GOP leadership aide. 'Everyone knew that he didn’t know what was going on.' Armey also talked himself into controversy. He referred to Hillary Clinton as 'Marxist' and to Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank-- an openly gay congressman-- as 'Barney Fag.'" After resigning from Congress, Armey joined Matt Kibbe's radical right Citizens for a Sound Economy, an early version of the Tea Party, funded by the John Birch Society's Koch family. Armey's starting salary was $430,000 a year and he was able to keep his $750,000 a year job as a slimy K Street lobbyist at DLA Piper. The Kochs soon left in a huff over something or other and started their own teabagger front, Americans for Prosperity, and the Kibbe-Armey rump renamed itself FreedomWorks. They struggled for a while before glomming on to Rick Santelli's anti-Obama rant on CNBC, at which time Kibbe started quietly paying off Hate Talk Radio hosts Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to endorse the organization on the air.

Despite being Beltway elites, Armey and Kibbe emerged as emissaries for the populist, anti-Washington revolution. The New Yorker described Armey-- who flew first class and had a chauffeur-- as “the de-facto leader of the Tea Party movement.” Newsweek called Kibbe-- a former chief of staff to a Republican congressman-- a Tea Party “mastermind.”

As FreedomWorks’ profile expanded, contributions doubled from $7 million to $14 million between 2008 and 2010. Its number of volunteers jumped from 500,000 to 1.2 million. FreedomWorks fired up a long-dormant political-action committee and supported hard-line conservatives-- such as Republicans Marco Rubio in Florida and Mike Lee in Utah-- in Senate primary campaigns against more moderate GOP opponents for the 2010 midterms.

Fueled by Tea Party enthusiasm, the GOP picked up 63 seats in the House-- enough for control of the chamber-- six seats in the Senate, six new governorships, and nearly 700 seats in state legislatures.

It was finally happening-- Armey and Kibbe were at the center of the most powerful conservative movement in a generation. Together they wrote a bestselling book, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, and appeared on NBC’s Today show. Driving to Tea Party rallies around the country, Kibbe played his Grateful Dead tapes for Armey, hoping to convert the country-music lover.

But Armey was lame and considered, at 70, too old. His public comments made right-wing operatives at FreedomWorks cringe, often insulting people on TV-- echoes of "Barney Fag"-- and more often screwing up details of anything he talked about, including the names and work of right-wing heroes. He clearly needed to be kept away from live microphones. The go-go wingnuts saw him as a liability that could destroy their whole mission-- and the big salaries they were drawing. Kibbe's wife, an ugly stereotype of a catty, overly ambitious wife, wanted to push Armey out and make Kibbe the sole head of FreedomWorks. She was jealous of Armey's wife and made fun of her for being a devout Christian. Mrs. Kibbe is an atheist filled with contempt for Christians. Meanwhile Mr. Kibbe's priorities were changing. He went from being obsessed with elections and campaigns and grassroots and public-policy fights to his own image and selling books and doing Glenn Beck TV. Armey was pushed out of the media spotlight and media requests for him were given to Kibbe.

The ostensible break came over Kibbe's new book. Profits from the book he and Armey had written belonged to FreedomWorks. Kibbe insisted that the profits from the new book were his personally, even though the book had been written by FreedomWorks staffers on company time. "Diverting nonprofit resources for personal use is a violation of federal tax code," writes Mullins. "If Kibbe had used 'significant staff resources' to produce his book, he would have put FreedomWorks’ tax-exempt status at risk. Kibbe, Armey says, 'had put the organization in jeopardy, and he had done it to line his own pockets.'”

Kibbe has mutton chops-- and a childish impulse to insult Hillary Clinton

Furious, Armey and his wife flew to Maine to show the document to FreedomWorks’ third trustee: C. Boyden Gray, a former White House counsel.

Armey and Gray called a special meeting of the board for Tuesday, September 4, 2012. Kibbe arrived at Gray’s DC law office without knowing why he’d been summoned. When they were around a conference table, Armey argued that Kibbe had pilfered his media requests and used FreedomWorks’ resources to profit personally.

The trustees voted two to one-- Armey and Gray for, Kibbe against-- to remove Kibbe from the board, and then put Kibbe and Brandon [FreedomWork's press secretary] on administrative leave.

Before Kibbe left, the trustees asked him to sign a document preventing him from launching an organization similar to FreedomWorks for the next four years, a FreedomWorks executive says, adding that the agreement came with a $100 signing bonus: “It was meant to be insulting.” (Armey denies that there was a signing bonus and says that the document was just a confidentiality agreement.)

Kibbe refused to sign.

Armey worried that Kibbe might instruct his allies to destroy documents related to the book deal, so he telephoned Jean Campbell, who was waiting outside FreedomWorks’ Capitol Hill headquarters.

“Go ahead,” Armey told her.

She secured the office, marshaling employees away from their computers and into the conference room. An armed former Capitol Police officer accompanied her-- in case there was any trouble.

“Dick Armey will be here soon with an announcement,” Campbell told the staff.

Some 30 anxious staffers surrounded the rectangular table when Armey and his wife marched in. Armey announced that Kibbe and Brandon had been put on leave, but he didn’t explain why.

FreedomWorks staff divided into two camps. While some senior employees respected Armey’s authority, many newer ones weren’t old enough to remember his days in Congress and-- because Armey worked from Texas-- didn’t really know him. In Kibbe, they found a hip libertarian who went on television and hosted parties at his home. Younger staffers developed a “cultish admiration” for Kibbe, a former official says. Some even wore their chops you can believe in T-shirt at the office.

To the young staffers, Armey seemed ill suited to run the organization. He put three additional FreedomWorks employees on administrative leave but-- when they broke down in tears-- immediately reinstated them. Staffers say he referred to a Japanese employee with a ponytail as “that Indian fella.” (Armey denies this.) And when Armey kicked his cowboy boots up on a table in Kibbe’s office, that was it. “It was kind of like, ‘Well, I’ll be damned if this is going to happen,’ ” a young employee says.

Kibbe and Brandon had retreated to Kibbe’s Capitol Hill home, where they contacted FreedomWorks donors, activists, and board directors to establish support outside of headquarters. Directors were angry that Armey hadn’t consulted them before taking action. Glenn Beck and members of Congress called Kibbe to offer encouragement.

Soon after Armey’s takeover, a group of young Kibbe loyalists arrived at Kibbe’s house for pizza and wine. They told Kibbe about Armey’s office management. Among Armey’s first moves was ordering the removal of all references to Kibbe from the FreedomWorks website. (Armey says he only asked for the removal of references to Kibbe’s book.)

“In our limited experience dealing with Armey, [we] saw him as this lovable grandpa,” says a young staffer. “To see him tailspin into this power-hungry, totally out-of-touch person was really frightening.”

The younger staffers used their cell phones to record conversations with Armey or Campbell. They disregarded Armey’s instructions, refusing, for example, to provide him with Kibbe’s schedule of upcoming donor meetings. Says Armey: “They started trying to sabotage things right from day one.”

...Armey and his wife stopped at the Chicago home of Richard Stephenson on their way back to Washington. A reclusive millionaire who had founded the for-profit Cancer Treatment Centers of America, Stephenson was a big FreedomWorks donor and Kibbe’s strongest ally on the board of directors.

When Armey arrived, Stephenson introduced a therapist who he suggested could mediate Armey and Kibbe’s dispute. Armey didn’t know it, but Kibbe had flown in from Washington and was waiting in another room. “If you think you’re going to therapize me into working with Matt Kibbe again, you’re kidding yourself,” Armey told the therapist.

He had previously told Stephenson that the allegedly rerouted media requests gave him a legal case against FreedomWorks for tortuous interference. He calculated damages at $8 million-- the potential earnings Armey felt he’d sacrificed by staying at FredeeomWorks. (The figure is based mostly on Armey’s $750,000 annual contract with DLA Piper, which his position at FreedomWorks forced him to give up.)

Either Kibbe goes or I go, Armey said. “And if I go, I’m going to have to sue. I can’t go away with empty pockets.”

As Armey left, he saw Kibbe sitting on a couch in an adjacent room. Neither said a word.

The next afternoon, C. Boyden Gray summoned Armey to his Washington office: Stephenson was willing to pay Armey $8 million to retire. The deal would be arranged as a consulting contract between Armey and Stephenson, payable in annual installments of $400,000 over 20 years. In return, the trustees would reinstate Kibbe as FreedomWorks president and Armey would leave the organization after the election.

Armey accepted.

Kibbe and Brandon were back in the office by the end of the day and spent the next few weeks settling scores, former staffers say. They labeled employees who had been helpful to Armey as “collaborators” and stripped them of authority. Kibbe promoted two young staffers who had remained loyal to him during the crisis, and he donated his $50,000 book advance to FreedomWorks. (Brandon denies punishing employees and says all promotions were merit-based.)

...Meanwhile, FreedomWorks is struggling. Key staffers and board members have fled, and first-quarter fundraising has slipped. Things may get even worse. Two watchdog groups have asked federal authorities to examine $12 million in suspicious donations that FreedomWorks received right before the election.

...Following the disastrous 2012 election, public support for the Tea Party has crumbled, and establishment GOP figures such as Karl Rove have launched initiatives to prevent less electable Tea Party candidates from winning primary campaigns. At its most recent tax-day rally at the Capitol, the crowd numbered in the dozens-- a turnout that recalled FreedomWorks’ early days.

Tobacco Industry Lobbyists And P.R. Hacks Reinvented The Tea Party-- All They Needed Were Some Angry, Lo-Info Kooks Willing To Wear "Attention-Drawing Accouterments"

Howie with a crackpot happily wearing attention-drawing accouterments, Pasadena, 2009 

Many Republicans will tell you former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) invented the TEA Party-- Taxed Enough Already-- to help popularize the Republican scheme to eliminate progressive taxation, which they feel puts too much burden on the wealthy-- and replace it with a flat tax that would force the burden down the income scale. But, as Lee Fang points out in his new book, The Machine-- A Field Guide To The Resurgent Right, that's not exactly what happened. The tobacco industry's expensive p.r. firms and lobbyists came up with the idea, fumbled it and watched Armey grab the ball and run with it. It was never grassroots at any time, though-- and always strictly astroturf.

[T]he roots of the modern antigovernment, antitax Tea Party can be traced to carefully formulated plans concocted by the tobacco industry. In the late eighties and throughout the nineties, the tobacco industry faced an assault from all sides. Legislators, litigators, and ballot initiatives alike sought to prohibit tobacco advertising to children, ban indoor smoking, tax tobacco products, place warning labels on tobacco products, and fine the industry for intentionally misleading consumers about the health effects of its products. The tobacco industry’s efforts to win the battle of public opinion by funding fake citizens’ groups sympathetic to the tobacco industry, such as “smokers’ rights” leagues, are well documented. It has also been reported that the industry made huge investments in conservative think tanks and bought off academics to produce junk studies casting doubt on the health effects of smoking. A less well-known tactic, however, was the attempt to create a “Tea Party” movement against government as a shield to protect the tobacco industry. Tobacco lobbyists, needing to win over public opinion-- and perhaps inspired by antitax political operatives like Norquist, who was on the tobacco industry payroll-- thought they could instigate a backlash against government regulation and taxes, and in doing so, stop government and consumer intrusion into the tobacco industry’s business.

Memos from the American Tobacco Company, Philip Morris, and R.J. Reynolds detail a broad array of strategies to engineer an antigovernment backlash, using a “Boston Tea Party” theme. A campaign advertisement from tobacco giant Philip Morris sought to use former Republican Senator Howard Baker to compare curbs on tobacco products to infringements on freedom tantamount to the British repression that led to the Tea Parties. A document, dated 1989 and archived at the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the university of California, San Francisco, outlined an advertisement with the following script: “British policies of minority rule, increased government intervention, unfair taxation... Ironically, those same issues face us again today. Excise taxes, advertising restrictions, franchise legislation, price supports, and smoking bans make it necessary to act to protect our rights as citizens of the united States.” After a movie clip of colonists casting tea into the harbor, the advertisement proposal indicated that Senator Baker was supposed to say, “The Boston Tea Party was one of the sparks that ignited the Revolution.” A call to resist government regulation of tobacco closed the video.

One attempt to create a national Tea Party phenomenon was defused when O’Dwyer’s Washington Report, a trade publication for the public relations industry, exposed the plan. O’Dwyer’s revealed a proposal from a tobacco industry group, Coalition Against Regressive Taxation (CART), to contract the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to create a citizens’ protest against a proposal to eliminate deductions on excise taxes on products such as tobacco. Burson-Marsteller said it would create a “Boston Tea Party theme” that included a “guerrilla campaign after Labor Day” aimed at the 1992 presidential candidates. Burson-Marsteller's agents would hand out signs while wearing “attention-drawing accouterments” to create political buzz for the cause. One of the fake citizens’ groups suggested in this campaign was Citizens for a Sound Economy, a corporate front group that would later play a dominant role in the anti-Obama Tea Parties (subsequent documents from the late nineties, naming the tobacco industry’s “3rd party allies,” showed that Philip Morris had budgeted up to $2 million a year for Citizens for a Sound Economy).

The exposure of the CART document killed the Tea Party idea in 1992, but Tea Party themes from tobacco lobbyists continued to emerge in later years. When President Clinton proposed taxing cigarettes to fund his health reform plan, the tobacco industry needed citizen outrage. In June of 1994, the New York Times reported that “about 3,000 tobacco farmers mounted what was billed as a modern-day ‘Boston Tea Party’ today, cheering as bales of tobacco were tossed into the Kentucky River to protest proposals to increase taxes on tobacco products to help finance health care.” The Times reporter, as well as dozens of other media outlets which carried the story, did not realize that the event was orchestrated by political operatives working for big tobacco. In an October 5, 1995, memo to Philip Morris, the PR firm Jack Guthrie and Associates of the Worldcom Group took credit for the event. The lobbyists at Jack Guthrie and Associates saw the Kentucky River protest as just a start. The memo outlined that a broad antigovernment Tea Party movement could be orchestrated as a political maneuver to kill proposed Food and Drug Administration regulations on tobacco products as well:

It is conceivable that tens of thousands of people from the six states-- representing hundreds of industries and interests-- could carry a powerful message to the President, Congress and the FDA. JGA (Jack Guthrie and Associates) will explore possible “themes” that could be associated with such rallies. (In June 1994, for example, JGA organized a reenactment of the Boston Tea Party, where 6,000 farmers converged at the Kentucky state capitol to hurl stalks of tobacco into the Kentucky River-- in protest to President Clinton’s proposed tax increases on cigarettes to pay for health care reform. The event, organized on behalf of the Council for Burley Tobacco, was covered by nearly every national print and broadcast outlet.)

Ultimately, the anti-FDA Tea Party never took place. But the David vs. Goliath ethos of the Tea Party clearly took hold within the executive suites of the tobacco industry. “The government’s plan to influence personal behavior through higher taxes is reminiscent of colonial times,” wrote Philip Morris CEO Michael Miles in a letter to shareholders. He added, “back then” the people responded with the “Boston Tea Party.”

And then along came Armey and his big money sugar daddies, the Koch brothers, with their plans to slash government functions-- like privatizing Social Security and e and shift more of the tax burden onto the middle class. How ironic that by trying to cheat the IRS by setting up phony social welfare organizations and triggering a badly handled series of investigations, the Establishment has played right into their hands.

Looks Like Boehner Booted Justin Amash And Tim Huelskamp Off Their Committees As Part Of A Policy Of Payback Against A FreedomWorks Faction

Battling right-wing sociopaths Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe are both stealing from FreedomWorks

In a new exposé on the shenanigans inside one of the most well-funded arms of the Tea Party, FreedomWorks, Mother Jones ace reporter David Corn has uncovered the genesis of Boehner's decision to kick several Republican members off key committee positions-- part of "a purge aimed at tea party lawmakers." The corrupt Beltway GOP Establishment made a move to infiltrate and take over FreedomWorks but when thwarted reacted against Justin Amash (R-MI), Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) and other independent-minded GOP congressmen. There's a vicious and desperate civil war raging inside FreedomWorks and the bulk of contributions to the group is going right into the pockets of high-priced, white shoe legal firms as the battle moves towards expensive law suits and counter suits.

When the news broke in early December that former GOP Rep. Dick Armey had abruptly resigned as chairman of FreedomWorks, a powerhouse of the conservative movement and an instrumental force within the tea party, Armey maintained that the nasty split was due to differences he had with the top management of FreedomWorks about the group's operations and future. Immediately, media reports disclosed that Armey had been concerned that Matt Kibbe, the group's president, had used FreedomWorks resources to promote a book he had written (which was released in June) and that Armey himself had received an $8 million payout from a FreedomWorks board member to ease his departure. But internal documents obtained by Mother Jones show that the bitter war inside FreedomWorks has also resulted in allegations of staff wrongdoing (prompting an investigation by lawyers) and counter-allegations that Armey and his allies tried to turn FreedomWorks into a partisan outfit backing establishment Republicans over tea party insurgents.

On December 12, James Burnley IV and C. Boyden Gray, two FreedomWorks board members (and allies of Armey), sent Kibbe a letter informing him that they had received "allegations of wrongdoing by the organization or its employees." They notified Kibbe that the group's board of trustees had retained two attorneys, Alfred Regnery and David Martin, to conduct an independent investigation of the allegations. Burnley and Gray ordered Kibbe to cooperate with the lawyers, to make sure no records were "destroyed, deleted, modified or otherwise tampered with," and to send Regnery a check for $25,000 to cover his initial fees. (Regnery, a prominent conservative, is the past president of Regnery Publishing, a right-wing firm that has put out books by Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Pat Buchanan, and other notable conservatives.) The letter did not specify the allegations being investigated. In an interview with Mother Jones, Burnley declined to discuss the alleged wrongdoing at FreedomWorks. "The letter speaks for itself," he says. Gray, Kibbe, and a spokeswoman for FreedomWorks did not respond to requests for comment.

Shortly after receiving the December 12 letter, Kibbe wrote a memo outlining his beef with Armey, Burnley, and Gray. In the document-- titled Republican Insiders Attempt Hostile Takeover of FreedomWorks-- Kibbe accused the three of being shills for the Republican establishment and undercutting the group's standing as an independent, non-partisan, conservative organization. (FreedomWorks has at times endorsed tea party candidates in primary elections against mainstream or incumbent Republicans, drawing the ire of mainline Republicans.) Kibbe charged that the three men were trying to punish him for defying their effort to steer FreedomWorks into the conventional Republican fold. He contended that the divisive fight within FreedomWorks was not really about his book contract or other organizational matters; it was a grand ideological clash pitting those fully loyal to the tea party cause (such as Kibbe) against backroom, Washington-centric pols attempting to wield their influence to benefit their pals.

Noting Armey's habit of coining maxims-- and Armey's complaint that Kibbe had hijacked media requests for Armey-- Kibbe began his memo with a blast referencing a September 4 meeting at which Armey and Gray had voted Kibbe off the board of trustees and replaced him with Burnley, a secretary of transportation in the Reagan administration:

Our favorite "Armey's Axiom" goes something like this: "Every argument in Washington, like in a marriage, is really about something else." So it goes with the attempted hostile takeover of FreedomWorks by three Republican insiders from the old guard. Is it about a book contract, or a pilfered appearance on CNBC? No, it is not. As it turns out, the fight for lower taxes, less government and more freedom is all well and good until it is Republicans-- "old friends"-- that are the ones needing to be held to account. It is our sense that the irresponsible acts of the so-called Trustees of FreedomWorks-- Dick Armey, C. Boyden Gray, and James C. Burnley-- on September 4th, and their continued hostile acts today, are all about retribution for our willingness to take a strictly nonpartisan approach to politics, our willingness to hold both Republicans and Democrats to the standards set out by our freedom philosophy and the clear limits on government power delineated in our U.S. Constitution.

Kibbe then presented a timeline seeking to demonstrate that Armey, Gray, and Burnley had sold out the tea party cause to help less conservative Republicans.

His first example: the Republican primary contest earlier this year pitting Rep. Ben Quayle against Rep. David Schweikert, two House freshmen thrown into the same congressional district after redistricting in Arizona. In May, FreedomWorks endorsed Schweikert, who, Kibbe wrote, "had been willing to stand on principle even under tremendous pressure" from the GOP top brass. Quayle, according to Kibbe, had been too "reliable" a vote for the House Republican leadership, which FreedomWorks occasionally has opposed from the right. Yet Gray, the memo noted, was sending donations to Quayle, the son of former Vice President Dan Quayle. (Gray was White House counsel during the Bush-Quayle administration.) And Gray, Kibbe wrote, called him several times last summer "wondering why we were engaged in this primary fight."

In the memo, Kibbe pointed out other conflicts as well. When Rep. John Mica, the Republican chair of the House transportation and infrastructure committee, was challenged by tea party freshman Rep. Sandy Adams in Florida in another primary race caused by redistricting, Kibbe wrote, Burnley, a transportation lobbyist, called Kibbe and "made it very clear…that he had a dog in this race." And on June 16, when FreedomWorks announced its "Retire Hatch" campaign against Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Gray endorsed Hatch. A month later, Gray held a fundraiser for Wisconsin senatorial candidate Tommy Thompson-- two days before FreedomWorks endorsed tea party favorite Eric Hovde, who was challenging Thompson in the GOP primary.

All of these conflicts, Kibbe maintained in the memo, led to that September meeting when he was booted off the board. Referring to himself in the third person, Kibbe described that confrontation: "It is eight weeks out from the most important election in our lifetime. 'Do you have any idea,' Kibbe asks, 'how much your actions will damage FreedomWorks efforts?' No answer is given."

The memo went on, with Kibbe taking Armey to task for having urged FreedomWorks to assist Thompson, who won the primary but whom the group had declined to endorse in the general election due to his "full-throated advocacy of ObamaCare," and Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican Senate candidate in Missouri who had come under fire for his "legitimate rape" remarks:

One of the first actions taken by Dick Armey [after the September meeting] is his attempt to reassess our political priorities. "We have to help my friend Tommy Thompson," he tells the staff in his first meeting with them. He later tells the staff that he has discussed the Missouri Senate race with "my friend [Senator] Roy Blunt, and he says they really need grassroots cover for Todd Akin." FreedomWorks PAC had endorsed John Brunner, who barely lost to Akin [in the GOP primary]. We had declined to endorse Akin, even before "legitimate rape" became a late night punch line.

At the conclusion of his memo, Kibbe linked Mother Jones’ December 3 disclosure of Armey's departure from FreedomWorks-- one of several media reports supposedly featuring Armey "trashing the senior management of FreedomWorks"-- to House Speaker John Boehner stripping FreedomWorks-backed legislators of key committee assignments in what conservative pundits denounced as a purge aimed at tea party lawmakers. And Kibbe ended with this broad swipe:

Bottom Line: The Actions of the Trustees Put FreedomWorks Values and Mission at Risk. They have put personal and political agendas above the agenda of freedom.

No wonder all the big shots on the conservative cruise of a lifetime were so despondent! And it's no wonder so many House Republicans are feeling out opportunities to defeat Boehner's bid for another term as Speaker!

Please... Give Us Liberty/Give Us Dick

John Amato and Dave Neiwert wrote a totally cool book, Over The Cliff-- How Obama's Election Drove The American Right Insane. I'm old fashioned and love reading books and this is definitely one I'm enjoying to the max and definitely recommend. BUT... if you're new fashioned and don't read books, this ad for another book is like the Cliff Notes version of Over the Cliff. You'll certainly get many of the insane parts. Take a look:

Clearly, What America Needs Now Is Another Deregulatory Binge-- After All The Multimillionaires Who Would Benefit Create The Jobs And Wealth, Right?

There are some good people in Congress-- at least 10. For the most part, though, it is a grubby place filled with self-serving hacks like Ken Calvert, Jerry Lewis and Gary Miller, three southern California real estate swindlers who have enriched themselves mightily while "serving." Yesterday's NY Times editorialized about the need to not allow crooks like these three to weaken-- effectively eliminate-- the "quasi-independent" and relatively effective Office of Congressional Ethics. It's already recommended action against 13 lawmakers and pressure is building in the House to shut it down. We all like being the final arbiter of our own behavior, but only Congress gets away with it-- Congress and the Big Businesses that pay Congress enough to extend the same courtesy to them (i.e., deregulation).

Reading the Times editorial and thinking about how Members of Congress stack the deck for themselves and those who bribe them, helped me recall a page in Thom Hartmann's edifying book, Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture and how he tried reminding readers that the economy is here to serve society as a whole, not just the owners who are able to manipulate society and it's rules for their own selfish purposes.

The Reagan-era "greed is good" mantra so corrupted us that we celebrated moments like June 3, 2006, when representatives of five of the Bush Administration regulatory agencies held a press conference in which they brought pruning shears to "cut regulations" from the federal code on banks that issue mortgages. [Do you need Hartmann or I to tell you where they led-- and quite directly?] One, James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision, as Paul Krugman pointed out in a December 21, 2007, New York Times column, brought a chainsaw to the party. [And, no, Gilleran hasn't been asked to face up to the responsibility for the billions of dollars in household wealth he destroyed or the millions of lives he impoverished by serving the goals of his corporate masters. Who would ever even think of such a thing?]

The cultural assumption underlying this behavior was that greed, rather than community, was the ultimate regulator.

As Krugman notes, Ayn Rand devotee Alan Greenspan was in charge of the Fed at the time, and:

In a 1963 essay for Ms. Rand’s newsletter, Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.”

It’s no wonder, then, that he brushed off warnings about deceptive lending practices, including those of Edward M. Gramlich, a member of the Federal Reserve board. In Mr. Greenspan’s world, predatory lending-- like attempts to sell consumers poison toys and tainted seafood-- just doesn’t happen.

As a result of a twenty-eight-long deregulatory spree, we've reached the point where it's painfully difficult for government to undo the damage done to our economic infrastructure by a few thousand millionaires and billionaires playing Monopoly.

It's why Krugman's warnings about the siren call (for even more radical Randian deregulation) of another dangerous Ayn Rand disciple, an even more clueless one than Greenspan-- and one Wall Street is determined to eventually install in the White House-- Paul Ryan are so important to pay close attention to.

DeLay got a lot of blame for the era of corruption that marked the time he was in control of the House-- Denny Hastert always just a front man-- and he deserved it. But it certainly wasn't all DeLay. His predecessor, Dick Armey, may have been less concerned about graft and corruption for it's own sake and more caught up in ideological fanaticism-- while Armey was screaming about privatization of Social Security and how to engineer the extermination of the Palestinian people, DeLay was figuring out how to line his own pockets-- but that doesn't mean Armey was exactly a model for ethical probity. Armey was a severe hypocrite and sex pervert who routinely sexually harassed his female students when he was a teacher and any woman unfortunate enough to have worked for him. Although he was in line for the Speakership, Republicans passed over both he and his deputy dawg, DeLay-- neither being ethically plausible-- for a political nonentity and intellectual lightweight, Denny Hastert.

Today Armey is the ghastly figure behind the curtain of the Tea Party movement, Mr. Astroturf himself. Few of the teabaggers-- who almost have to be a moron and historically ignorant to be admitted to teabaggery-- know that Armey's political career was largely built around pushing for cheap imported labor for his corporate backers. "Illegal immigration," one of the biggest deals in Teabag World, was always something Armey tried to protect. Yesterday he was lecturing mainstream conservative Republicans to get behind Paul Ryan's radical privatization schemes and implying that if they don't, he can turn the Teabaggers loose on them!

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), now the chairman of Freedomworks, a major backer of the Tea Party movement, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the modern Republican Party's lack of courage is a "big reason" for widespread frustration with both Democrats and Republicans.

Armey cited the GOP's distance from a controversial budget plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) as a prime example of what is behind the grass-roots uprising known as the Tea Party movement, and how that movement could spell trouble for both parties come November.

Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, has called for the partial privatization of Social Security and for health insurance vouchers instead of traditional Medicare benefits for Americans over 55 as a way to reduce the long-term deficit.

But Ryan's plan has been slow to pick up steam, as GOP leaders have kept their distance and only 13 Republicans in total have signed on as cosponsors.

"The fact that he has only 13 cosponsors is a big reason why our folks are agitated against the Republicans as well as the Democrats," said Armey, who called Ryan "probably the most creative-thinking and most courageous guy in Washington."

"The difference between being a cosponsor of Ryan and not is a thing called courage," Armey said. "And we have watched American public policy dominated by Democrats that don't care and Republicans that don't dare for a long time."

That, Armey said, could result in significant losses for Republicans as well as Democrats during the midterm elections.

"We're saying to the Republican Party, get some courage to stand up for the things that are right for this country. Don't stand there and hide from the issue because you're afraid of the politics," Armey said. "The issue of public policy that governs the future of my children is more important than your politics, and if you can't see that we'll replace you."

Info Nation

A few weeks ago Ken and then Tom Tomorrow tried putting into context and perspective the latest right-wing obsession with re-writing history to fit their demented, even pathological, ideology. I can't imagine we're the only ones to recall Winston Smith's old job at George Orwell's drafty Ministry of Truth. In fact, last week McClatchy posted a video and feature that reminded me of Winston's former employee again-- with a jowlly Dick Armey in the role of O'Brien! [Armey, a former Texas congressman, now a lobbyist directing the Tea Party movement on behalf of the GOP, has decided that the Jamestown colony in Virginia was nothing but a bunch of doomed socialists.] Rightists from Ann Coulter, Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck to Armey think history should be a vehicle for their harebrained schemes and bizarre ideologies.

The right is rewriting history.

The most ballyhooed effort is under way in Texas, where conservatives have pushed the state school board to rewrite guidelines, downplaying Thomas Jefferson in one high school course, playing up such conservatives as Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation and challenging the idea that the Founding Fathers wanted to separate church and state.

The effort reaches far beyond one state, however.

In articles and speeches, on radio and TV, conservatives are working to redefine major turning points and influential figures in American history, often to slam liberals, promote Republicans and reinforce their positions in today's politics.

...Theodore Roosevelt was long an icon of the Republican Party, a dynamic leader who ushered in the Progressive era, busting trusts, regulating robber barons, building the Panama Canal and sending the U.S. fleet around the world announcing ascendant American power.

Fox TV commentator Glenn Beck, however, says that Roosevelt was a socialist whose legacy is destroying America. It started, Beck said, with Roosevelt's admonition to the wealthy of his day to spend their riches for the good of society.

"We judge no man a fortune in civil life if it's honorably obtained and well spent," Roosevelt said, according to Beck. "It's not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it only to be gained so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community."

Actually, Roosevelt said, "We GRUDGE no man a fortune ... if it's honorably obtained and well USED." But either way, Beck saw the threat.

"Oh? Well, thank you," Beck said with scorn during his keynote speech to the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. The presidential suggestion that the wealthy of the Gilded Age should contribute to the good of society was a clear danger that must be condemned, Beck said.

"Is this what the Republican Party stands for? Well, you should ask members of the Republican Party, because this is not our founders' idea of America. And this is the cancer that's eating at America. It is big government; it's a socialist utopia," Beck said.

"And we need to address it as if it is a cancer. It must be cut out of the system because they cannot coexist. ... You must eradicate it. It cannot coexist."

There's no doubt that Roosevelt was a domestic policy liberal by today's standards. In a 1910 speech in Kansas, he acknowledged that his "New Nationalism" meant "far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had."

The 26th president insisted, however, that he wanted the government to guarantee opportunity, not a handout.

"The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare," he said.

"Give him a chance, not push him up if he will not be pushed. ... Help any man who stumbles; if he lies down, it is a poor job to try to carry him; but if he is a worthy man, try your best to see that he gets a chance to show the worth that is in him."

In his autobiography three years later, Roosevelt went on to dismiss the tenets of socialism as taught by Karl Marx as "an exploded theory."

"Too many thoroughly well-meaning men and women in the America of today glibly repeat and accept," he wrote, "various assumptions and speculations by Marx and others which by the lapse of time and by actual experiment have been shown to possess not one shred of value."

In addition, Roosevelt didn't advocate government ownership of the means of production, the definition of socialism.

Orwell was an ardent socialist and was appalled when right-wingers tried interpreting-- as they still do-- his own attack on fascism as an attack against socialism. Now, back to poor Winston struggling away as an apparatchik of the authoritarian regime, rewriting history (old newspapers, if memory serves) in much the same way as Dick Armey and the Texan book revisers are attempting to do now-- to change solid facts to fit party doctrine, pushing ideology and the propaganda du jour. And since the right has worked incessantly to destroy public education and dumb down the population, particularly concentrating on the discouragement of critical thinking, they have quite the receptive audience. The teabaggers are the tip of the arrow of ignorance. See if any of this looks vaguely familiar to you:

Beyond The GOP Lies-- Slurs And Insults From The Right-Roots

Ever talk to a teabagger? I did-- lots of them. They're overwhelmingly racists and overwhelmingly angry and overwhelmingly... brainwashed. Few teabaggers seem capable of critical thought-- just the way conservatives want the people to be. As we mentioned this morning, over-fed, angry white teabaggers in DC yesterday were running wild, threatening gun violence, and yelling racial and homophobic epithets at Members of Congress they don't agree with on healthcare reform.

I spoke to several House staffers yesterday and today who told me crazed, frothing teabaggers were running around House office buildings screaming and banging on doors, working themselves into a frenzy. Lunatic fringe right-wing blogger Ann Althouse reacted to the vicious racist and homophobic attacks on members by saying "So what?" The White House is working overtime to debunk the lies being willfully spread by ratings-motivated right-wing propagandists to receptive modern day Know Nothings. It's hardly new that conservatives use divisive strategies to divide working people. Racism has always been key to them and Right Wing Watch doesn't mince any words in exposing them:

Right-wing pundits and political leaders committed to the destruction of the Obama presidency have been openly fomenting racial resentment or tolerating those who do. In one breath, they accuse President Obama of being racist and in the next they and their media allies howl with indignation if their own racial rhetoric is challenged. Among their charges: that President Obama hates "white culture" and that his health care reform efforts are a backdoor means to reparations for slavery that will "enslave" doctors and put the "racial grievance industry" in charge of emergency rooms.

Race-baiting pundits try to insulate themselves by falsely claiming that liberals play the "race card" to equate any criticism of the Obama administration with racism. In fact, this charge is itself an example of inflaming racial resentments for political gain. In other words, crying "You can't even criticize Obama without being called a racist" is just one more way to suggest that white conservatives are being oppressed.

Nancy Pelosi's blog laid out the big five lies-- she politely calls them myths-- that the GOP is expected to regurgitate endlessly on the House floor today:

MYTH #1: Health insurance reform is a “government takeover.”

FACT: The health insurance reform legislation expands private health insurance in America, and is based on increasing choice and competition-- providing for new marketplaces (called “Insurance Exchanges”) where the uninsured, small business employees, and the self-employed will be able to choose among a variety of private insurance plans.

MYTH #2: Health insurance reform slashes Medicare and hurts seniors.

FACT: Nothing in the health insurance reform reduces Medicare benefits for seniors. The reform achieves savings by cracking down on inefficiency, fraud and waste in Medicare-- targeted at private insurance companies and providers, not beneficiaries. These savings include cutting large and unnecessary overpayments to private insurance companies that offer Medicare Advantage plans.

Rather than undermining Medicare, this bill strengthens Medicare. Much of the cost savings achieved are reinvested into Medicare-- improving benefits. In fact, the legislation lowers prescription drug costs for seniors by closing the prescription drug donut hole, ensures free preventive care, and extends the life of the Medicare Trust Fund by nine years.

MYTH #3: Health insurance reform will cost businesses too much.

FACT: The status quo is unsustainable for the small business community-- 60 percent of America’s uninsured, or 28 million people-- are small business owners, workers, and their families. Insurance costs for small businesses have increased 129% since 2000.

The health insurance reform legislation before Congress provides $40 billion in tax credits for small businesses to help them offer coverage to their employees and exempts 96 percent of all businesses from the shared responsibility requirement.

MYTH #4: Health insurance reform is bad for the economy.

FACT: The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the legislation will dramatically reduce the deficit-- by $143 billion in the first 10 years and $1.2 trillion in the second ten years-- reins in costs for most Americans, and is fully paid for.

MYTH #5: Health insurance reform includes a marriage penalty which will mean higher costs for those who get married.

FACT: This myth has nothing to do with health insurance reform-- it is a new criticism of how the federal poverty level has been calculated for decades-- under Republican and Democratic leadership alike.

Under all federal income-related assistance programs, total assistance provided to two single people is greater than the total assistance provided to a married couple for the simple fact that two people living together have lower expenses than two people living separately. (And the federal government assumes that single people are living separately and a married couple is living together.) It is considered good stewardship of tax dollars to reflect actual costs.

This morning on C-Span I watched backward California backbencher, Devin Nunes, actually excusing teabaggers calling John Lewis, one of the most heroic living political figures in America, a "nigger." It sickened me. Watch this disgrace to the people of Tulare and Fresno counties:



Other Republicans are actually claiming that the teabaggers-- basically a media construct for the Republican grassroots-- were not actually the ones who cursed and spat on African-American congressmen and at Barney Frank (who they called a "faggot"). Watch this:



This morning I spoke with Barney on the phone. He seemed to take the cursing and threats in stride although he felt badly for others who were having to experience this. A friend of Barney's who was with him told him the teabaggers seemed like the witch hunters of yore, all worked up over nonsense and ready to commit mayhem in the service of that insanity. "Of course," Barney told me emphatically, "we should have a rational debate on the issues-- and there are critiques of this legislation from the left and from the right, pro and con. But the conservative leadership seem to prefer this kind of exploitation of bigotry, hatred and personal abuse and none of them are repudiating these ugly mob tactics."

He suspects that some of them-- he pointed out Michele Bachmann and Steve King-- actually stir it up. “Any movement in which Steve King and Michele Bachmann are among the leaders is probably not going to meet high standards for civility or coherence," he told Roll Call. King, meanwhile was commiserating with Glenn Beck that the healthcare vote today is an affront to God. Texas anti-gay fanatic John Culberson, who closeted Republican David Dreier introduced today as "soft spoken," defending the bigots that make up the GOP grassroots by claiming they are polite and respectful. And King says the kinds of personal attacks on Members is no big deal. Dick Armey, one of the major financiers of the teabaggers once called Barney a "fag" on the House floor, so it's no wonder his followers think it's perfectly appropriate behavior. Unlike Bachmann or King, Armey apologized, albeit insincerely.

Of course, there isn't one single African-American federal elected official anywhere in America but we haven't been able to get a comment out of any of the dozen or so prominent Republican closet queens. We tried Patrick McHenry (R-NC), David Dreier (R-CA) and Trent Franks (R-AZ) but couldn't get them to discuss what they think of their colleagues inciting mobs of racists and homophobic bigots. If you disagree with Steve King and think it is a big deal, take a look at the Replacing Homophobes In Congress ActBlue page and see if you can give a hand to helping Democratic challengers to anti-gay zealots Virginia Foxx, Trent Franks, Michele Bachmann, Wally Herger and Dan Lungren.

Having an entire political movement "liberated" from reality is, really and truly, bad for America

(Don't forget to click on the cartoon to enlarge it.)

by Ken

The other night I was talking to Howie trying to explain what I mean, and to me what it's a crucial distinction, maybe the most crucial one to be made in today's cultural environment, when I say that the Modern Right-Wing Republican-slash-Conservative Movement now conisders that it has blanket permission to lie.

This is something I've been saying since the thick of the presidential campaign, when I was transfixed by astonishment that with maybe an exception here and there every single word out of every single Republican-slash-Conservative was a flat-out, bare-faced, unmitigated lie. And since there were no referees to say, "Sorry, you've got to take a timeout for flat-out, bare-faced, unmitigated lying," the result was that it's now officially okay. We are now officially off the reality standard.

I've been saying this at intervals ever since, and nobody bats an eyelash, which I take to mean that either it's obvious to everyone else or people just aren't grasping what I'm saying. Maybe it will help if I try to make clear what I'm not saying.

* I'm not saying that nobody ever lied before in politics. Gimme a break! As it happens, after a long hiatus, I've only just resumed my reading of Rick Perlstein's monumental historical reconstruction, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, having left off -- for personal reasons (too painful to relive) with the elder Mayor Richard Daley's 1968 Chicago convention-jamboree-riot -- and going through the ensuing campaign and coronation, er, inauguration -- I was forcefully and nauseatingly reminded just how sick and crazy Nixon was. The difference, though, is that Nixon not only knew but was perhaps the greatest master in history of the difference between reality and appearances. While Rick acknowledges the RMN did actually sometimes believe his own bullshit, for the most part he knew perfectly well when he was lying, and why he was lying, and above all how to make it look as if he wasn't lying, because he understood that there was a steep price to be paid if you were caught telling whoppers in the public arena.

NIXON SIDEBAR: PARANOIA IN OVERDRIVE

Singularly brilliant is Rick's re-creation of Nixon's state of mind on Election Night, when he made clear to the people around him that the calm confidence of victory he had been projecting was just make-believe, that in fact he was quite sure that he might lose. Rick really mines the guy's paranoia, suggesting that Nixon deep down was convinced that once again something that was rightfully his was going to be stolen from him. His deepest paranoia related to the hopelessly stalled Paris peace talks, and the possibility that somehow the Hated Others would bring peace, damn their souls -- even though he knew this was impossible, because as we now knew Nixon himself had rigged the peace talks. He was responsible for the hopeless stalling of the peace talks, having deployed the loathsome opportunist Anna Chenault, the Dragon Lady, to whisper in the South Vietnamese negotiators' ears that they would get a better deal by holding out.

On the other hand, maybe this wasn't so much paranoia on Nixon's part as his sheer crookedness. After all, if he could rig the peace talks to ensure more war, who's to say that somebody equally nefarious couldn't rerig, or counterrig, or outrig his rigging?)

* Nor am I saying that the suspension of all conditions for belief on the Right is brand-new, something just invented for the convention. The obvious fact is that the Bush regime spent eight years test-driving the new model of reality, where reality is some combination of (a) what you think it is, (b) what you wish it was, and (c) what the loudest- and vilest-mouthed right-wing sociopath says it is. You remember, I'm sure, how those of us who persisted in insisting that there was a standard for truth were derided by the acolytes of the regime as "the reality-based community." Clearly, in order to make such a distinction, those people had to be aware that they couldn't actually change reality. They simply followed the opening left for them by the patron saint of Right-Wing Unreality, Ronald Reagan, who preached that reality doesn't matter, all that matters is how you feel about stuff.

I know some people understand what I mean. I think of the Daily Show correspondent several years back who categorically rejected an argument based on "facts," on the ground that "the facts are biased."

What I'm saying is that the Right has become so far unmoored from reality that (a) it no longer feels any obligation, or even the slightest tug, in the direction of any piece of data that interferes with its ideological fantasy, not to mention its daily talking points, and (b) society gives every indication of having accepted this state of affairs. So they're not necessarily more dishonest than Nixon (how would you go about being more dishonest than Nixon?); they're just freed from the shackles of having to pretend otherwise.

TO ILLUSTRATE:
TAKE DICK ARMEY (PLEASE!)

Paul Krugman offered this tidbit on his blog today:

Armey of ignorance

In the midst of a seriously disgusting interview with Dick Armey, the former House majority leader offers his analysis of the financial crisis:

But at what point do we allow the government to order people that you must sell your product to this person or that person, irrespective of any good judgment? We saw what happened in housing when they ordered banks to make loans to people who weren’t qualified. Are we now going to have the same destructive influences in health care because we’re going to order doctors to provide services and so forth?

There’s a persistent delusion, on the part of many pundits, to the effect that we’re actually having a rational political discussion in this country. But we aren’t. The proposition that the Community Reinvestment Act caused all the bad stuff, because government forced helpless bankers into lending to Those People, has been refuted up, down, and sideways. The vast bulk of subprime lending came from institutions not subject to the CRA. Commercial real estate lending, which was mainly lending to rich white developers, not you-know-who, is in much worse shape than subprime home lending. Etc., etc.

But in Dick Armey’s world, in fact on the right as a whole, the affirmative-action-made-them-do-it doctrine isn’t even seen as a hypothesis. It’s just a fact, something everyone knows.

Truly, sometimes I despair.

AND SPEAKING OF PROF. KRUGMAN DESPAIRING

Yesterday's column struck me as an important one. Now that the Republicans-slash-Conservatives have established their untrammeled right to define their own version of substitute reality, we should perhaps concern ourselves with the question of what their build their fake reality out of. After all, Shangri-La was a fantasy too, but that isn't at all the kind being peddled these days by the loons of the Right. Clearly one of the most heavily represented sources for their delusions is paranoia. And yesterday the good professor took as his subject Paranoia Strikes Deep, arguing "that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit," and relating the teabaggers to Richard Hofstadter's famous 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." He concluded:

[T]he party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

Thank you, professor, these are the words I've been groping for: This business of an entire political faction openly divorced from reality, it's very bad for America.

#

Bill Moyers Asks Just Who Is Dick Armey?

Gone, but... not gone enough

This week Bill Moyers unmasked the real welfare queen Ronald Reagan only conjured up from his active imagination for his speeches. Meet Dick Armey, leader of FreedomWorks, the astroturf outfit that helped sucker the 60,000 people who took part in the Million Moron March last week. Moyers seems to think it is ironic that the marchers didn't know that Armey himself is a huge recipient of the kinds of benefits he has them marching to deny... themselves:

For most of his adult life their leader has benefited from just the kind of government, tax-supported health care he's fighting to keep them from having too. When Dick Armey taught economics at the University of North Texas, for 13 years, his health insurance was administered by the state and supplemented by the taxpayers. When he was elected to Congress, he was covered by the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan. And when he retired from Congress 18 years later he was ensured by that plan until he turned 66 and Medicare, another government program, kicked in. All the time he's been making some half a million dollars a year working for FreedomWorks and raking in lobbyist fees amounting to what he recently called 'a darn handsome pile of sough.'

You can't blame him for keeping his government health plan; it's great. It gave him a lot of options, dozens of private insurers to choose from and, with 8 million members in it, the federal government's got the muscle to negotiate some of the best premiums and drug prices in the country. That's not all. Taxpayers subsidize the federal health insurance plans by as much as 75% of the premium cost. Beneficiaries, including members-- and retired members-- of Congress, like Dick Armey, pay their share of the premiums with pre-tax dollars. Not bad!

Now get this: Dick Armey, thought so much of that federal health plan, the Cadillac of coverage, that he tried to keep it as his primary carrier instead of that other federal program, Medicare. Mr. Armey wanted an option, a government option, How about that? But he couldn't get out of Medicare without losing his Social Security. They're hitched together; you give up one, you give up both. So he's suing to divide the two. Now he says he's happy to buy his health insurance on his own. Why not? He's got that pile of dough. And there's the rub: Dick Armey is the epitome of those people with power and privilege who are insured against the vicissitudes of life and want no government assistance for any suffering-- except their own.

And all those members of Congress sitting their during the president's speech last week, Joe Wilson included, they too have Cadillac federal coverage subsidized by tax dollars. That's no lie,

Yesterday 6 conservative, anti-health care Democrats, Mark Pryor (AR), Evan Bayh (IN), Amy Klobuchar (MN), Claire McCaskill (MO), Herb Kohl (WI), and Mark Begich (AK), put their collective weight behind a push by Republicans and other reactionaries-- from insurance and health care industry financed Blanche Lincoln and Joe Lieberman to former Insurance Industry executive Ben Nelson (still adamantly refusing to recuse himself from voting)-- to get Baucus to actually make his lobbyist-written bill, generally panned by everyone who's read it, even worse than it already is! They want him to cut costs further, but none of them favor the public option that would do just that-- and that is favored by 90% of their Senate Democratic colleagues. They think Baucus' bill, which is already too stingy to consumers, too generous to his (and their) campaign contributors and too harsh on the taxpayers, can be made even stingier.

Isn't it time to tie the health care reform legislation directly and indelibly to the health care that members of Congress and their families receive. That should have been step one all along-- either than or just having made the bill really, really simple-- simple enough even for the 60 haters and bigots in the Million Moron March: Medicare is now open to all Americans who decide that that is the best option to them. Now let's handle climate and energy legislation.