We're Putting The Band Back Together

Dennis over at Balloon Juice examines the folks behind the "Mt. Vernon Statement" and discovers Jack Abramoff's greasy fingerprints all over it.



Like Jake and Elwood Blues, even after you've been in prison you can always get the band back together.  Abramoff's boys are awaiting the Return of the King.

A few weeks ago the Washington Post took a look at the people in DC that are actually doing the work to drive the Tea Party Movement.

Not surprisingly, it was a list of grifters.


Because of my years researching Jack Abramoff and his activities since 1978 quite a few of these names jumped out at me. They also caught the eye of another scholar of the modern conservative movement, Thomas Frank.

Tom is the author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas” and more recently, “The Wrecking Crew“. It was in the Wrecking Crew that Tom took a deep dive into the long history of conservative corruption. In 2008 Tom excerpted The Wrecking Crew in Harper’s Magazine and it is an important tutorial for anybody who wants to understand how corruption works in Washington.

And the list of band members is long and storied:  Dick Armey, Patrick Pizzella, Tome DeLay you've probably heard of.  But there are more.

Take Matt Kibbe, the President of Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks—he was one of Abramoff’s junketeers to Saipan and a reliable think tank defender of sweatshops and human trafficking upon his return. Or then there is the reliable grifter-for-hire, Brent Bozell, who runs the Media Research Center—a conservative PR spin shop designed to extrude press releases and commentary on command. Bozell was another traveler to the Marianas Islands and a reliable media voice to defend the abuse ever since. And the there is Horace Cooper who has been indicted in the Abramoff scandal and is awaiting trial for his crimes. Cooper is a former long-time Dick Armey staffer who connects Dick to Jack in a tight and dirty way.


There are more connections as well in the list of names behind the resurgence of the converative movement. Some of these grifters go back to the sixties, some the seventies, some the eighties, nineties and some come from the zeros. Regardless where they come from, the Tea Party movement is becoming a full employment movement for the Republican grifters who drove up the debt, stole from tax payers and got rich during the Gingrich/DeLay/Bush era actively destroying the Government of the United States. To call the movement these grifters are promoting “grassroots” is an insult to astroturf.

All these guys have one goal:  to use the Tea Party movement to annihilate the last 80 years of liberalism and concentrate all the remaining power in the hands of conservatives. They've sewn a mistrust of government so pervasive and mendacious that this populist backlash is going to be the battering ram that knocks down not just Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, but every liberal social advancement since the New Deal.

And in the process, they just happen to end up running the country as a result.  The cynical GOP knows a gravy train when they see it, and they're all on board for the ride along with their Village buddies.

Because when this band gets put back together, they'll play the funeral march for America.