Posted on 08/07/2014 2:26:34 PM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
This week, ProPublica released a report on the financial (and moral) corruption of a Tea Party group operating under the name Move America Forward, which was founded by one Sal Russo. Russo also helped start the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, aka the Tea Party Express. Move America Forward has run fake drives to give care packages to troops, stolen images of other charitable campaigns and passed them off as its own, and trumpeted a nonexistent partnership with Walter Reed Hospital — all while funneling very real millions to itself. The group is an industry leader at taking your Tea Party sentiments (if you have them) and turning them into profits.
Unfortunately, the continuing success of Sal Russo and the Tea Party Express is emblematic of a larger failure of the American right — and perhaps the larger project of American self-governance.
Earlier this year, The Daily Caller's Alexis Levinson reported that other Tea Party groups that had raised millions spent up to 80 percent of their money on operating expenditures, salaries, consultants, and mailing list companies, which were often owned by the people who ran the groups themselves. The Tea Party is essentially a landlord class; its fiefdom is the truly felt convictions of others.
There is nothing new about this. The Tea Party gained traction in an environment defined by massive resentment and fear directed at the Obama presidency, disgust at the bailouts of the Bush and Obama eras, and the wreckage of a Republican electoral defeat, all of which was especially conducive to the growth of parasite groups like the Tea Party Express.
In February of 2010, I reported a story from a "Tea Party Convention" in Nashville, hosted by the for-profit group Tea Party Nation. Leader Juddson Phillips left his job as a lawyer to draw a salary. Tickets for this grassroots uprising cost more than $500. The great motive behind it was transforming the organizers into richer men and political kingmakers in their state.
This gross profiteering is not unique to right-wingers. Political consultants do hilariously weird things. John Weaver, a consultant who advises prominent Republican candidates to enact his own distaste for conservatives, pulled an all-timer when he convinced his candidate's campaign to pay him, partly, through a corporation that shared the exact same name as that of another consultant's business. That helped to hide how well he was doing — until it didn't.
People who give themselves to full-time political activism deserve some recompense for their work and expertise. And of course, even the most populist of political movements will attract, and even require, professional leadership from without. After all, even punk rock bands require "the suits" to handle business and arrange for the to-be-destroyed hotel room. Even St. Paul demanded payment for his services.
But there was something especially galling about the level of self-dealing enrichment and deception at the head of the Tea Party movement, particularly because the movement started as a disgusted response to the self-dealing enrichment and deception in Washington.
Profiteering has been an acute problem almost right from the beginning for the Tea Party. It is like the reverse mortgage industry of politics: making money by giving an awful deal to an older, whiter customer base, then leaving town just as the fools realize it leaves them with nothing.
It's easy to write them off as just another bunch of opportunists. But the endemic corruption of this movement should trouble the American right, if not the American conscience. The conservative diagnosis of Washington's brokenness is that Americans have outsourced the task of self-government to a managerial class in Washington, a corruption that has transformed our nation's capital into "the Beltway," a shorthand for D.C.'s toxic culture of cronyism.
The populist right's instinctive response — the Tea Party — immediately became just another added layer of cronyism. A grassroots corruption. Really, a weed. If the American people have outsourced their self-government to Washington, the conservative movement made another dirty deal, allowing itself to be entertained in outrage carnivals run by for-profit activists. Excepting the exceptions, the populist right's response to dishonesty and graft was to generate another set of swindlers who wear flag-lapel pins, lie to their faces, and help themselves to the cash.
Yes, we built that. And H.L. Mencken laughs. Self-government is just another product, and no one can be bothered to read the fine print.
I can't quite bring myself to say that...I voted AGAINST Obama. I'm sorry I called you a Lofo Mofo, and Obola supporter.
I watched the various debates and state primaries and saw one by one, the conservatives fall away. I liked Perry and Herman Cain. Newt should have been behind the scenes wreaking havok and writing zingers for the conservative candidates. Unfortunately, Romney was the last one standing.
I'm sure the GOPe had lots to do with that, but so did the voters. Of course the obvious efforts of the RATs and RATagandists, goes without saying.
I still fail to see how teaching the RINOs a lesson by destroying the economy and the demographics of this country...fixes anything.
Isn't that exactly like the domestic savages rioting and burning down their own neighborhoods?
>> “I still fail to see how teaching the RINOs a lesson by destroying the economy and the demographics of this country...fixes anything.” <<
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See how blind you are! /s
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That’s an ‘easy fix’:
1) all States vote on the same day; there’s no ‘pandering’ that can be done ahead-of-time. There’s no reason in this day and age this cannot be accomplished.
2) Rotating lots of 10 States. Still allows for pandering, but will be harder to square the msg. of NE ‘anti-gun’ and Southern ‘pro-gun’ messages/etc.
“All states voting on the same day”
I have said that many times but I don’t know how to make it happen, do you?
It’s obvious you have no idea what the word friend means.
I’m not going to give your hateful rant credibility by responding to it.
You have some issues you need to deal with, and hate is on the top of the list.
That’s the ultimate goal. Liberals will march us to the gas chambers in the name of atheism. Mark. My. Words.
People like yourself don’t understand the mortal peril we are in. You think it’s politics and it will all sway back to the right. Not this time FRiend, not if Obama gets his way, 20 million illegals is enough to ensure a communist majority for a hundred years. He is getting his way too.
You would rather have a Kenyan born communist with ties to the muslim brotherhood who was groomed to destroy America in the White House than an American with real world experience.
You’ll say that isn’t true, but it is, because you know there wasn’t a snowballs chance in hell that your write in, or your third party could possibly win.
We had two options then, and one now.
1.) Vote Romney and remove Obama at all costs.
2.) You know what option 2 is, and it isn’t pretty.
So basically you are saying to me that you are okay with the wholesale bloodshed of thousands of American citizens as long as you get to stick it to the GOP.
You picked option 2 when we still had option 1.
That basically says it all, and I am done with this conversation. You can throw the word LOSER around all you want, but I’d rather have a LOSER than Obama.
Syncro, I get your point, and I agree with it.
I’m kind of jumping in on the conversation here, sort of. But I ask you this.
Do you believe any of these three percent you speak of are willing to go even 25 percent of the distance the Founders did? In regard to: Knowing what would happen to them had they lost, and what they had to do to win.
If your answer is no, then there is no point in even asking the question.
I’m not even sure about that 3% figure, I was told it by a self described 3 percenter at a stop-the-criminal-insurgent-aliens rally a few weeks ago.
I thought it was a larger percentage back in the day, and think it is now too but...
I did not research it.
Looked at your post earlier:
“It is either fight or die”
So you are in?
And when we 'all' crash; we'll be dead.
And, after we're dead; the Judgement will come.
And at that judgement would be perhaps THOUSANDS or MILLIONS that decided to follow Mormonism just because their President was one, and it seemed like such a NICE way to live your life.
You see; I'm looking a little farther down the road than this country's future.
And; I'm looking BACK at this country's past; too...
Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620.
Indiana is like this as well. I had no CHANCE to vote AGAINST Romney; because he'd already out-spent the other candidates so well earlier, most had dropped out.
You may not have; but I included you with the 'guys' comment.
Many here on FR have been VERY vicious in the name calling department to us who decided NOT to vote for Romney.
HMMMmmm...
I seem to recall...
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Office of First President & Living Prophet®: November 8, 2012
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LOT's of people don't!
Thinking is HARD!
After having come up with a conclusion to a matter, we tend to hold onto it unless some VERY good reason appears to change our view.
This is why FR is SO valuable: the ability for other viewpoints to be actually SHOWN and discussed that we'd NEVER get most anywhere else in society!
Possibly...
What is the average length of time an Empire exists on the world stage?
The bible says that such a person WILL appear on the world's stage and we'll just LOVE him: for a while...
I just got a call from the vet.
Lab tests have indicated that yes; the horse IS dead, and we can stop beating it now.
Works for me!
People like yourself don’t understand the ETERNAL peril we are in.
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