Faith And Freedom Hitmen
by digby
Dave Wiegel is at the Faith and Freedom Conference and caught James O’Keefe holding court. That’s right. This James O’Keefe:
The latest bizzaro hidden camera stunt orchestrated by conservative filmmakers James O’Keefe and Ben Wetmore has, by all accounts, epically failed.
According to CNN, O’Keefe planned to lure correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat riddled with all sorts of romantic props — dildos, condoms, handcuffs — and make sexual passes in an attempt to embarrass her. If gone as planned, the whole incident would have been secretly video-taped.
Of course this whole “faith and freedom” conference is a bit of joke considering that the organizer is none other than Ralph Reed, most recently famous for behaving more like a Spanish Conquistador than a 20th century Christian.
It’s worth considering Reed’s resurgence as we go into the 2012 campaign. He lost his bid for elective office in Georgia because voters were disgusted to find out about his corrupt dealings as a lobbyist:
For a high-profile religious conservative like Reed, the stories of being paid millions by one Indian tribe to run a religious-based antigambling campaign to prevent another tribe from opening a rival casino made him look like something worse than a criminal–a hypocrite. He had once called gambling a “cancer” on the body politic. And the e-mails to Abramoff didn’t help, especially those that seemed to suggest that the man who had deplored in print Washington’s system of “honest graft” was eager to be part of it. “I need to start humping in corporate accounts!” he wrote Abramoff a few days after the 1998 election.
To Reed, it sometimes appeared, Christian voters were pawns in a game of power swapping. The Journal-Constitution reported that the man who had once condemned China for its one-child policy and its persecution of Christians had created a “grass-roots” Christian group to lobby for freer trade with the superpower–an effort quietly financed by major U.S. corporations like Boeing that were the Georgian’s true clients. The profits Reed collected from such dealings were not, by any indication, the wages of illegal behavior. But to some they were the wages of sin. “He got nailed for being a phony,” says a fellow G.O.P. operative in Washington, with more than a little schadenfreude.
Old corporate sponsored GOP operatives never die, they just lay low for a little while and let media amnesia do its work. He’s back because he does good work for the power structure. As does O’Keefe. That they are also looked upon favorably by the Christian Right says everything you need to know about this whole corrupt scheme.
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