Tea partying billionaires buy another seat
by digby
Amidst all the breathless Villager adoration for the new (Ivy league) “Tea Party” Senator from Texas, it’s a good idea for less romantic types to step back and look at what really happened. Here’s Adele Stan with the bracing splash of cold water:
During the presidential primary, on the national political stage, Texas Gov. Rick Perry often looked like a Tea Party dupe. But in his home state he’s not quite Tea Party enough; his anointment of Dewhurst as the next U.S. senator from the Lone Star State didn’t stick, once FreedomWorks came to town.
You remember FreedomWorks, right? The neo-libertarian outfit led by Dick Armey that spent the summer of 2009 encouraging Tea Partiers to go thuggy at town-hall meetings led by Democratic members of Congress? The organization that showed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who’s boss when it supplanted McConnell’s prodigy, Trey Grayson, with Rand Paul for the G.O.P. slot on the 2010 U.S. senate ballot is the majority leader’s own state of Kentucy?
Yeah, that FreedomWorks.
Texas is a big, important state in Right-Wing-World, and it’s the land from whence Armey hails. No way was Perry going to be allowed to make some namby-pamby G.O.P. establishment pick for U.S. Senate, for God’s sake — not when Armey has laid claim to the U.S. Senate as his own little electoral playground, where he’s hard at work, as FreedomWorks spokesperson Adam Brandon once told me, building “a power center around Jim DeMint,” the senator from South Carolina. Since the Rand Paul coup in Kentucky, the DeMint cabal has essentially set the Republican agenda — and, through strong-arm use of the arcane rules of the deliberative body, that of the entire Senate.
Just imagine what DeMint will do with even more like him in the Senate.
As much as everyone would like to believe this bus is being driven by a bunch of rubes who will (naturally) get their comeuppance, it just isn’t. There’s a boatload of money behind all these guys. But they aren’t just craven corporatists, although they are that. They are hardcore ideologues as well.
It’s fun to pretend, (as “The Fix” did last night on twitter) that this is the result of a grassroots uprising. But unless you think that the billionaires who are funding Freedomworks are just good ole boys down to the townhall speakin’ their minds, you’re on the wrong track.
.