Well, frumps, you might have missed it if you blinked but the Capitol hosted yet another Tea Party on Tuesday. Numbers are decidedly down – could be the holiday season, the perma-recession or a scarcity of free bus rides provided by Fat PACs – Tea Party bloggers pegged the number at “a couple thousand;” other news sources mentioned “hundreds.”
This crowd loves a Theme Party so this one was dubbed “Code Red” (suitably scary) and called for a piece of political theater known as a “Die-In” (which actually failed to materialize). The idea was that protestors would lie down and “die” in the Senate hallways outside Senators’ offices (from lack of health care?). Joe Lieberman’s staffers chased his new Tea Party fan club away and threatened to arrest them so I suppose that might have dampened the “Die-In” enthusiasm a bit.
Still, many in the crowd were festively dressed in red, carried American flags and their signature “artwork.” Some chanted “kill the bill” and others called for the impeachment of President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (in no particular order). Your usual tea party fare.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) compared the crowd to the earliest American protesters:
“It’s the charge of the light brigade.”
In case you’ve forgotten that pivotal moment in early American history, it was from way back when the Crimea was one of the Thirteen Original Colonies . . . and the “light brigade” was notable for losing their battle, but I guess it all makes sense somehow to Bachmann and her merry band.
Radio talk show host Laura Ingraham (who is “drop dead gorgeous,” according to Bachmann’s intro) signed autographs before getting on stage and joining other speakers who warned senators that a vote in favor of the bill might mean being voted out of office in the 2010 elections. In the spirit of the season, Ingraham said:
“We are voters who are making our list and checking it twice,”
Ingraham also called for a moment of silence to honor the unborn children who would be aborted and the elderly who might not receive life-saving treatment, if the Senate bill becomes law.
Hail to the Chief
Dick Armey, chairman of FreedomWorks, and unofficial “King of Astroturf” was expected to announce the formation of his new political action committee at a lunch meeting at the National Press Club. That event, like the “Die-In” failed to materialize – due to lack of reporters, or interest, or something . . .
Perhaps it was the Press Club snub, or the fact that Armey had to play “Ed McMahon” for the tardy Sen. Coburn (whom Armey referred to several times as Sen. Colbin??) that made Armey a little cranky. Whatever the reason, he decided that as long as he had the microphone it was a great time to do a little Rachel Maddow bashing.
Witness:
Of course, Rachel and Dick do have a little “history” behind them. When FreedomWorks went full-tilt against health care reform, it was Maddow’s investigation into Armey’s other endeavors that forced his resignation from DLA Piper over conflict of interest. And it was Rachel Maddow that talked circles around Armey on Meet the Press, shortly after his resignation.
My guess is that Armey was planning to put “Ms. Smartypants” in her place on Meet the Press but that didn’t happen. Armey, Maddow and Sen. Colbin Coburn were the guests on that program; which is probably what reminded Armey that he still owed Maddow a “comeuppance.”
Rachel, of course, does a great job of defending herself. She needs no help:
Nevertheless, the entire incident reminded me of how long we have been suffering this smug blowhard. Dick Armey has been crude, ignorant, bigoted and flat out wrong so many times that it’s hard to imagine that there is an American alive that values his opinion. I guess one of the downsides of increased longevity is that we have to deal with legions of political has-beens who can’t stand to step aside.
Dick Armey Hall of Shame
Maybe I’m biased – here are a collection of Armey contributions – you decide:
During President Bill Clinton’s first term, then-House Minority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX), declared to Democrats on the House floor that “your president is just not important to us.”
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In 1995 Armey referred to openly homosexual Congressman Barney Frank, as “Barney Fag.” Armey said it was a slip of the tongue.
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In 1998, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a reporter asked Armey what he would do if he were in President Bill Clinton’s position. He replied:
“If I were in the President’s place I would not have gotten a chance to resign. I would be lying in a pool of my own blood, hearing Mrs. Armey standing over me saying, ‘How do I reload this damn thing?”
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After the Joan Walsh affair, there was little doubt about Armey’s thinly disguised misogyny. There are hundreds of reports on that event but this little blurb from Huffington Post summed it up rather well:
“In a heated debate over the state of politics and the economy on Wednesday night, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey almost certainly crossed the line of acceptable banter, telling his fellow panelist Joan Walsh that he was glad she could never be his wife because of her “prattle.”
“Appearing on Hardball, the two guests went back and forth over the contours of the current debate on the stimulus package being passed through Congress. Towards the end, however, the conversation devolved into gender-infused insults.”
“I’m so damn glad you can never be my wife because I surely wouldn’t have to listen to that prattle from you every day,” Armey told Walsh, editor-in-chief of Salon.com. “That’s what I’m talking about — she’s making a political malarkey here.”
“Boy…that makes two of us sir,” Walsh replied. “That was really an outstanding comment.”
“You’re talking like a paid political hack here,” Armey interjected, “trying to score political points.”
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According to a book entitled Glass Houses: Shocking Profiles of Congressional Sex Scandals and Other Unofficial Misconduct by Stanley G. Hilton and Anne-Renee Testa, when Armey was an economics professor at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), several of his former female economics students went public with stories of his sexually harassing them — harassment allegedly so severe that at least one student transferred to another school. Armey later divorced his wife and married one of his students.
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In May of 2002, House Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey ( R-TX) appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball where he called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories and endorsed Israel’s conquests of those lands.
Armey said that he “is content to have a Palestinian state” but is “not content to give up any part of Israel for the purpose of a Palestinian state.” He defined the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel-East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip-as Israel. He also said he has “thought this through for a lot of years” and believes that Palestinians living in the West Bank should be removed.
Armey stated that “there are many Arab nations that have many hundreds of thousands of acres of land, soil, and property and opportunity to create a Palestinian state.”
An incredulous Chris Mathews, host of Hardball, repeatedly gave Armey the opportunity to clarify that he was not calling for the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Palestine, but the House Republican chief refused to do so:
MATTHEWS: Well, just to repeat, you believe that the Palestinians who are now living on the West Bank should get out of there?
Rep. ARMEY: Yes.
Go here for the complete transcript.
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Apropos of absolutely nothing, Armey threw this one out one day:
“Spike Lee is obviously more stupid than anyone can be by accident.”
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Or there’s this thinkprogress.org report on health care reform:
“Today on CNN, FreedomWorks head Dick Armey defended the industry’s discriminatory practices by saying that if you have diabetes because you “eat like a pig,” you don’t deserve coverage:”
“ARMEY: But now, they [government officials] come along and they say, irrespective of the fact they’ve gone 20, 30, 40 years of their adult life without ever having bought insurance prior to getting a liver inflammation due to their excessive drinking habits or diabetes because they eat like a pig, you must now insure them.”
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Here’s Armey on climate change, from Daily Kos:
“Yesterday, the newly formed Western Caucus convened for a bicameral hearing on proposed cap-and-trade climate legislation. The witnesses attending included representatives of a variety of polluters, right wing think tanks, and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX).”
“Armey’s testimony at the hearing was nothing short of bizarre:”
“DICK ARMEY: What I’m suggesting is we have a sort of an eco-evangelical hysteria going on and it leads me to almost wonder if we are becoming a nation of environmental hypochondriacs that are willing to use the power of the state to impose enormous restrictions on the rights and the comforts of, and incomes of individuals who serve essentially a paranoia, a phobia, that has very little fact evidence in fact. Now these are observations that are popular to make because right now its almost taken as an article of faith that this crisis is real. Let me say I take it as an article of faith if the lord God almighty made the heavens and the Earth, and he made them to his satisfaction and it is quite pretentious of we little weaklings here on earth to think that, that we are going to destroy God’s creation. [...]“
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The Financial Times was lucky enough to get this exclusive Armey pronouncement on the Swine Flu Epidemic:
“In September or October, there will be a hyped-up outbreak of the swine flu which they’ll say is as bad as the bubonic plague to scare the bed-wetters to vote for healthcare reform,” Armey told the Financial Times.”
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Before President Obama was elected, Armey weighed in with this homespun wisdom on the American voter:
“The “Bubba vote” and underlying racism will hurt Democrat Barack Obama in key battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, former House majority leader Dick Armey said Wednesday.”
“The Bubba vote is there, and it’s very real, and it is everywhere,” Armey told USA TODAY and Gannett News Service. “There’s an awful lot of people in America, bless their heart, who simply are not emotionally prepared to vote for a black man.”
“Armey said Obama’s “funny name” — a phrase the Illinois senator uses himself — could “give people concerns that he could be or has been too much influenced by Muslims, which is a great threat now.” Obama is Christian.”
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In November, thinkprogress.org reported on Armey’s “expert testimony” on the Economic Recovery Act:
“Yesterday, the House Oversight and Government Reform committee held a hearing on the implementation of the Recovery Act, also known as the stimulus. Republican members invited former GOP Majority Leader Dick Armey, who now leads the corporate front group FreedomWorks, to testify as their expert witness.”
“After listening to Armey argue at length about the merits of even having any government intervention in the economy, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) asked him if he supported the unemployment compensation provisions of the bill. Armey said he might, but conceded that he had not read that portion of the bill. Van Hollen then extracted a confession that Armey had not even read the bill at all, even though he was appearing as an expert and repeatedly goes before the press to criticize the stimulus.”
“Ironically, as part of an effort to obstruct and derail the bill, Armey launched an online petition called “ReadTheStimulus.org.” In another bit of irony, although he postures as a fierce ideological opponent of the stimulus, Armey actually worked as a lobbyist to help businesses gain from the stimulus. According to disclosures, he was paid to lobby on behalf of Cape Wind Associates and the Medicines Company on the stimulus. His son, Scott Armey, who runs his own lobbying shop, has also worked with businesses to gain stimulus funds.”
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Of course Armey threw his “coveted” endorsement to Doug Hoffman in the historic NY-23 election in which conservatives pushed out the Republican running in favor of a more conservative third-party candidate. Ultimately, a Democrat carried the district, the first time in more than 125 years the party has won there. Armey managed to draw local headlines himself in that race after blasting an editorial board’s questions on upstate New York issues – questions Hoffman had struggled to answer – as “parochial.”
When his man lost, Armey had this to say:
“The Conservative Party nominated the small government conservative, he got in the race late and he caught and passed her. She (Dede Scozzafava) dropped out, endorsed the Democrat. If the Republican Party or if the Conservative candidate had a little more time, he might have won that.”
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I rest my case. And in my opinion, Rachel Maddow adds more value to American political discourse during a commercial break than Dick Armey has in all of the hours that he has spent gasbagging in front of a microphone. Besides, I’ll bet Dick Cheney could never have hoodwinked Rachel into voting to attack Iraq with that fairy tale about Saddam’s mini-nukes factories . . . .
Technorati Tags: Rachel Maddow, Dick Armey, FreedomWorks, Code Red, Die-In, Tea Party, Joan Walsh, MSNBC, Hardball, Chris Matthews, Michelle Bachmann, Sen. Tom Coburn, health care reform
