Following the money
"Let me be blunt: charging people $500.00 plus the costs of travel and lodging to go to a “National Tea Party Convention” run by a for profit group no one has ever heard of sounds as credible as an email from Nigeria promising me a million bucks if I fork over my bank account number."
Erickson is no liberal; he's a right-winger who blogs at RedState. But it's not difficult for anyone perceptive to notice that a lot of what's going on on the right these days has more than a slight whiff of lucrative exploitation about it.
Frank Rich (found via Liberal Values) fingers not only the dubious Tea Party Convention but also Republican party chairman Michael Steele, who has acquired a reputation as a buffoon but has proven remarkably adept at making money from various side activities while neglecting his duties to the party. Openly daring the party to fire him if they don't like how he's handling the job, Steele knows he's got his employers over a barrel; as Rich says, "Steele knows better than anyone that his party can’t afford what Clarence Thomas might call a “high-tech lynching” of the only visible black guy it has in even a second-tier office."
Sarah Palin, too, has a track record of quitting projects half-way through while diligently sniffing out opportunities to exploit her popularity on the right for cash.
As for the Tea Party Convention, well, the teabagger movement has been characterized by both deep passion and deep naïveté, and that's a combination which is bound to attract scam artists the way blood in the water attracts sharks.
A big part of the right's de facto agenda has been to defend the ability of the already wealthy to get even wealthier at the expense of the masses. Why should we be surprised if the same mentality operates within the movement itself?
The problem is, the broad masses of people are never as dumb as the elites like to believe they are. If this kind of thing continues, sooner or later the teabaggers are going to figure out that they're being exploited and ripped off by "leaders" they trust, at which point they may turn against the Republican establishment. The question is when this will happen. Late October would be good.
Erickson is no liberal; he's a right-winger who blogs at RedState. But it's not difficult for anyone perceptive to notice that a lot of what's going on on the right these days has more than a slight whiff of lucrative exploitation about it.
Frank Rich (found via Liberal Values) fingers not only the dubious Tea Party Convention but also Republican party chairman Michael Steele, who has acquired a reputation as a buffoon but has proven remarkably adept at making money from various side activities while neglecting his duties to the party. Openly daring the party to fire him if they don't like how he's handling the job, Steele knows he's got his employers over a barrel; as Rich says, "Steele knows better than anyone that his party can’t afford what Clarence Thomas might call a “high-tech lynching” of the only visible black guy it has in even a second-tier office."
Sarah Palin, too, has a track record of quitting projects half-way through while diligently sniffing out opportunities to exploit her popularity on the right for cash.
As for the Tea Party Convention, well, the teabagger movement has been characterized by both deep passion and deep naïveté, and that's a combination which is bound to attract scam artists the way blood in the water attracts sharks.
A big part of the right's de facto agenda has been to defend the ability of the already wealthy to get even wealthier at the expense of the masses. Why should we be surprised if the same mentality operates within the movement itself?
The problem is, the broad masses of people are never as dumb as the elites like to believe they are. If this kind of thing continues, sooner or later the teabaggers are going to figure out that they're being exploited and ripped off by "leaders" they trust, at which point they may turn against the Republican establishment. The question is when this will happen. Late October would be good.
posted by Infidel753 at 12:22 AM
1 Comments:
nice post. thanks.
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