The Tea Party is a dick army

I’m still not getting it. For $8 million bucks you don’t get Dick Armey exiting in a huff, you get press conferences with everyone saying how much they love each other and cooing over snapshots of each others’ kids.

Maybe it was simply a power struggle between Kibbe and Armey. But this just smells like payoff. The question is, for what.

Good point. Then again, maybe $8 million is not considered that generous when you are bankrolled by billionaires?

But the memo and coverage only points out why Kibbe and Armey hated each other – dueling egos. It does not illuminate why Armey agreed to go.

Why would Armey lose a power contest with Kibbe?

Hmm. Wonder what it will take before someone spills the beans? Or maybe there is a signed agreement not to talk. Grifting just goes with the territory, doesn’t it?

The disclosed salaries are not huge over there, but of course they don’t have to disclose their funders nor the amounts. I see that Armey hopes to recover his official senate portrait from their walls plus also all of his twitter passwords and other such.

Someone, maybe from FDL, did an article explaining how Armey and some others of his consultative ilk co-opted and subsumed the original, genuine tea baggers by pulling them into astroturf orgs and diluting their energies with large doses of professional Republicanism. So, when I saw that Armey was departing FW, I figured his work there was done and he was taking his payoff reward for mission accomplished. No? There’s more to it? Oh, the intrigue.

Armey’s gotten, what, about two million a year for his efforts? Not bad–and probably not all of it. Do you know how many times I’ve wished I didn’t have scruples?

If FreedomWorks has money for the size of that golden parachute- Imagine if they had financed bail-outs for their members whose mortgages underwater and being pulled! Would that have spawned lifelong loyalty for real action, instead of the idiotic fealty spawned by insincere rhetoric? When ill the peons of the right recognize their “leaders” as insatiable con men & women?

Lots of possible hidden secrets, but I don’t recall any whispers of problems (aside from the Barney Frank comment) for Armey during his Congressional days. So I doubt there’s much hidden nowadays.

Armey may have simply wanted some rest and additional financial security. I’m guessing that he’s got 20 years on Kibbe. Plus, with the toobz, barriers to entry in any “movement” are now incredibly low. So he may have some additional funding promised for a new venture… and feel that jumpstarting that would be easy.

Pure speculation though.

The peons of the right aren’t by a long shot the only dupes of emotionalism as political rhetoric. I cheerfully admit to feeling Bill Clinton was a good president. We all have our vulnerabilities. Some of us get past them.

On to the next project. My thought, as well.

The Tea Party is a distraction.

The Tea Party/Teabaggers is not really a movement, but rather a relatively small number of right-wing extremists who have been used by the Democrats as a scapegoat for their own hypocrisies.

It’s an Astroturf movement by such figures like Dick Armey and other Republican and conservative lobbyists who are manufacturing right-wing dissent to distract from the real left-wing dissent that is ignored by the media.

Think about it; what better way of getting the right-wing fascist message out there than giving it media exposure? And indeed, that is what we have.

If you follow the media narrative in America, there is no left-wing dissent. There is only right-wing dissent. This simultaneously legitimatizes the right-wing narrative and gives justification for the Obama administration to crack down on ANY dissent-because a handful of right-wing fanatics are given media exposure.

The point is to get liberals to react, and it keeps working again and again.

No tea bagger or Limbaugh or Fox news nonsense can stand up to a strong left wing narrative for even a minute. How any of us could ever lose a debate with those talking points, or be frustrated or worry about it is a mystery to me.

The worry is the potential for violence from the right wing media, it is not the “ideas” they present that are the worry. Those ideas only have traction because so many are chicken shit scared to be real leftists, for fear of being too radical or something, because they are too weak and confused and cowardly.

Teabaggers et al, are moving into the vacuum created by this timidity and confusion and playing on liberal/progressive identification with the Democrats.

The reason people like Fox news, Glen Beck etc. is because it is entertaining and because they can pick up talking points that will drive liberals crazy. For the ruling class agenda to be advanced, it requires BOTH the right wing media AND the predictable liberal reaction.

That said, it is dangerous. We contribute to the danger by taking it so seriously (the “opinions,” not the pandering to bigotry and hatred – that needs to be taken very seriously) and reacting so predictably.

What better way to “legitimize” the center-right policies of the Obama administration than to contrast them to the full-blown, ultra-right insanity of Sarah Palin-like Teabaggery.

Democrats are using the tea baggers’ antics as a tool to stifle dissent from the Left. How dare we criticize Obama when doing so is to be on the same side as the tea baggers? Obama apologists won’t even listen to any argument from the Left against Obama’s policies, they automatically categorize it in the same category as the crap being spewed by tea baggers.

The tea bagger thing serves the purpose of making sure the intellectual liberals get all worked up about Palin et al and are therefore estranged from and irrelevant to the general public. It works like a charm, every time, to decapitate the working class.

There’s a really interesting story at the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/freedomworks-tea-party-group-nearly-falls-apart-in-fight-between-old-and-new-guard/2012/12/25/dd095b68-4545-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_story.html

It begins:

“The day after Labor Day, just as campaign season was entering its final frenzy, FreedomWorks, the Washington-based tea party organization, went into free fall.

“Richard K. Armey, the group’s chairman and a former House majority leader, walked into the group’s Capitol Hill offices with his wife, Susan, and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist. The aim was to seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/freedomworks-tea-party-group-nearly-falls-apart-in-fight-between-old-and-new-guard/2012/12/25/dd095b68-4545-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_story.html

Grifting just goes with the territory, doesn’t it?

I believe “grifting 101″ is a prerequisite in the GOP.

I’ll never forget watching Chris Mathews’ “Hardball” when he had Dick Armey, Bob Herbert, and Joan Walsh on as guests. Armey suddenly went berserk on Joan Walsh in the worst disgusting rant-attack on a woman that I’ve ever seen on live TV. Mathews did nothing to stop it.

Bob Herbert, being a gentleman not wanting to usurp Mathews’ place as moderator, did remind Mathews, in an extremely well performed response as soon as reasonably possible still on air, that he (Mathews) owed both Joan and his audience an apology for allowing this disgusting display on his watch.

I could not believe Mathews just sat stunned-face with a stupid grin, snickering. He looked like Seinfeld’s Kramer when Kramer was confronted by a clown that got into his face asking “Are you afraid?”

Just the name “Dick Armey” has made me want to throw up ever since and I have never watched that nutless A-hole Mathews again, not that he was ever worth the time anyway.

All I can think of is Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money”.

Well, that’s not really all. I am thinking of how Jane is right — $8 million should have been enough to buy utter and absolute watertight silence from all concerned regarding the various unpleasantnesses. But was it the fact that the gun-toting coup attempt happened so soon after the Family Research Council incident?

“This was two weeks after there had been a shooting at the Family Research Council,” said one junior staff member who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. “So when a man with a gun who didn’t identify himself to me or other people on staff, and a woman I’d never seen before said there was an announcement, my first gut was, ‘Is FreedomWorks in danger?’ It was bizarre.’ ”

Per the WaPo, the $8 million was to keep Armey from suing over Kibbe’s book deal:

Armey appeared out of touch and unsure of how FreedomWorks operated when he took over that Tuesday morning, according to interviews with more than a dozen employees on both sides who witnessed the takeover. Sitting in a glass-walled conference room visible to much of the staff, he placed three young female employees on administrative leave, then reversed himself when they burst into tears; his wife lamented aloud that maybe they had “jumped the gun.”In subsequent meetings, Susan Armey passed her husband notes that several employees assumed contained suggestions on what to say. According to a recording of a staff conference call provided to The Washington Post, Armey bewildered his audience by demanding more FreedomWorks support for Todd Akin, the Missouri Republican whose Senate campaign had already cratered after his comments about “legitimate rape.”

“It was clear that under Armey’s leadership, the organization as we knew it was going to be driven into the ground,” said one junior employee.Enter Stephenson, who agreed to the multimillion-dollar financial incentive to push Armey out and install Kibbe back at the helm.The payments were necessary, several FreedomWorks leaders said, because Armey was threatening to sue over Kibbe’s book deal. “It was very clear to him that I would not work with Matt,” Armey said, referring to Stephenson. “He felt that Matt knew the levers and understood it better than I did and was very urgent to reinstate that.”

If WaPo is correct that Kibbe and Stephenson are serious libertarians, this could presage some welcome shifts in the Tea Party agenda. IIUC, Armey was more of a social conservative. Libertarians, by contrast, tend to antiwar, civil libertarian, isolationist (e.g., opposing one-sided involvement in Mideast conflicts), opposed to excessive militarism, and opposed to crony capitalism. All of which are positions shared by a majority of progressives.

The point of divergence (and it’s a biggie) is their no-government-involvement, everyone-for-themselves approach to the economy.

In the past, Jane has tried to make common cause with libertarians on the points where we agree. There might now be a new opportunity in that regard.

Seems their main benefactor, Richard J. Stephenson’s (Cancer Treatment Centers of America) main concern is fighting against the ACA.

It’s amazing. Simply call something you create a “party” and you get all kinds of people languaging as though it were actually a political party.

We are such sheeple, so easily confused, so easily manipulated.

And we wonder why Americans vote as they do.

Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite.

Joseph de Maistre

Translation: Every country has the government it deserves.

Dick Armey, Phil Gramm, Tom DeLay and George W. Bush are four good reasons for kicking Texas out of the country.

Let’s not forget Louie Gohmert or Dick Cheney. Cheney isn’t a Texas native, but that’s where he spent the eight years of the Clinton era.

. . . and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist.

But everyone should have a personal weapon, right? Jeez, I thought for a minute this was a joke until I clicked through the link.