The Republican party, mindful of its role as a supplicant before the voting public, issued a “Pledge to America.” Not to be outdone, the presumably more militant St. Louis and Jefferson County Tea Party groups are offering potential allies a “Treaty,” which, one assumes, affirms the Tea Party’s deepest, most profound principles. Needless to say, it’s a very simple document.

The first of the three provisions, calling for the repeal of The Affordable Care Act (ACA), is the most specific, which is not surprising since the Tea Party’s first raison d’etre was squashing health care reform:

1) I believe that the Health Care Reform bill (Affordable Care Act) should be immediately repealed as an un-Constitutional extension of governmental powers according to Article I of the US Constitution, and thus a burden on the people’s rights as recognized by the 9th Amendment.

While we are all sick and tired of pointing out that attacking the ACA on constitutional grounds is spurious, the Tea Party is not likely to cease and desist anytime soon. Such claims lend a veneer of legitimacy to the whole corporate-orchestrated cacophony. Besides, who knows whether or not the efforts of the Roberts Court to, as TAP puts it, “repeal the 20th century” may yet bear the intended rotten fruit.

The language of the provision, though, is not especially artful. To say that extending health insurance to millions of people is a “burden” on our constitutional rights is akin to saying that dying untreated because one lacks the means to pay is an inalienable right.

Just why are these crusaders so worked up about the ACA? The answer is easy – they’ve got that old time pocketbook religion – which brings us to the second provision:

2) I believe the government should reduce taxes and cut spending, as a rejection of the Keynesian model of economics.  Government should be fiscally responsible with the people’s dime.

A quasi-religious manifesto, which is what the “Treaty” is, need not justify assumptions shared by those to whom it is directed. So, if you ask why we should reject Keynesian economics, which have arguably served us well during the past century, expect to get uncomprehending stares and a few indignant, conservative economic cliches, along with lots of poorly-digested babble about “freedom.”

The concept of “fiscally responsible,”  though, really does need to be reclaimed by the linguistically responsible. It does not necessarily mean gutting progressive taxation and cutting social spending. It could just as eaily mean right-sizing taxes and spending in order to meet goals approved by the majority. And by majority I don’t mean the loudest, which would be the Tea Party, but the plurality that voted for Obama, the same majority that, for example, either aproves of the ACA, or disapproves because  it hasn’t gone far enough.

The final provision brings up the last article of faith in the trinitarian Tea Party theology:

3) I believe that we should reduce the federal bureaucracy.  The size and scope of federal regulation endangers all liberty, and hinders accountability to the public.

Does this mean repealing regulations that affect food safety? Or drilling regulations that, if they had been place, would have prevented the Gulf oil spill?  How about financial regulations that would have prevented the crisis in 2007? There are endless examples of beneficial regulation; what kind of fool signs a blanket proviso to scrap them? If you answer seriously deluded industry dupe, you might be on to something. And, while we’re on the topic, do the authors of this document even know what “accountability” means?

In short, which it mercifully is, the “Treaty” confirms the suspicion that the Tea Party is nothing more than lots of “sound and furry, signifying nothing.” However, the propensity of the media to treat their antics with a civility that Tea Partiers themselves rarely exhibit might help boost an essentially empty exercise into a useful tool for rallying the dessicated (as in middle aged and older) right arm of the GOP. We’ll learn in November just how effective gimmicks like the “Treaty” have been.

Those of you who read national political blogs and newsletters, have heard by now about the total craziness of Christine O’Donnell, the anti-sex crusader turned Tea Party candidate who won the Delaware GOP senatorial primary last night. It struck me that this would be the same thing as the Missouri GOP selecting  dim-witted, God-Squadie Cynthia Davis as their candidate for national office. It seems, though, that Missouri Republicans aren’t quite as addled as those in Delaware since they decided that they didn’t even think Davis was ready for the state senate.

But wait, you say, the Missouri GOP still has time to prove that they are as over-the-bend in thrall to the Tea Party craziness as the good folk in Delaware (and Nevada, Alaska, and New York). Isn’t nutty Ed Martin running on Tea Party gas? To which I respond that that might be true, but  Ed Martin actually strikes me as slipperier than he is crazy – a opportunist who sees how the Republican party is beginning to roll and thinks Tea Party might be the way to the goodies if he plays his cards right.

Then, of course, you could pull out your pièce de résistance, super-looney Todd Akin who dreams of an overtly Christian state. Conservative but quite sane Republicans in the 2nd district keep sending him to Washington time and again. The usual response is that Todd keeps a low profile with his craziness – although you could also point out, if you were so inclined, that the Missouri Democratic party also seems content to write the 2nd district off.

You could probably say similar things about many of the Missouri Republican pols – I just picked my favorites. And in point of fact, Tea Party bassackwardness* may just be current GOP politics as usual in Missouri – certainly evidence exists that the Tea Party in general is no more than that part of the the hard right Republican base that likes to dress up in eighteenth century costumes. Certainly, for all their populist blather, the TP “patriots” here don’t seem to have strong objections to corporate go-to boys like Roy Blunt.

However, I wonder if these primaries might not embolden folks like Akin to crawl out a little further into the light, while the rest of our GOP contingent gets just a little bit more shrill. Speaking about the impact on the GOP that the electoral success of the likes of O’Donnell might have, Ezra Klein seems right on the money:

Politicians are, by nature, a fearful species. But their nightmares became a lot more specific last night. The Tea Party, for all its unexpected successes, cannot topple every incumbent Republican in the country. But by toppling the right ones, it can make every incumbent Republican vote and speak and act with the Tea Party in mind. So though the Te Party isn’t likely to send all that many of its own Republicans to Washington, the likely outcome of last night’s primaries is that the Tea Party takes over the Republicans who are already in Washington, and don’t want to be sent home.

I would add that Democrats aren’t immune. I would suggest that we are already seeing the effect of the Tea Party on conservadems like Claire McCaskill who last summer, in spite of her town hall efforts at rationality, seems to have been roundly schooled by the Tea Party, and now runs away fast whenever confronted by real Democratic principles.

* Bassackward: The art and science of hurtling blindly in the wrong direction with no sense of the impending doom about to be inflicted on one’s sorry ass. Usually applied to procedures, processes, or theories based on faulty logic, or faulty personnel. From the Urban Dictionary  

In spite of the claims of grass-roots angst bubbling up unassisted, it’s old news that the Tea Party was brought into being through the ministrations of a few corporate front organizations, prominent among them Americans for Prosperity (AFP). The AFP’s ties to the billionaire Koch brothers have been well documented, most recently in Jane Mayer’s excellent New Yorker article.  Mayer quotes conservative think tanker, Bruce Bartlet, to the effect that the Kochs, one-time John Birchers, have invested in the Tea Party as a vehicle for creating an ostensibly libertarian movement that, incidentally, also serves the Kochs bottom line:

… With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there-people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.

The Kochs’ man in Missouri, the State Diretor of the Missouri branch of Americans for Prosperity (AFP-MO) until his resignation in July, has been none other than one-time speaker Pro Tem of the Missouri House, Carl Bearden. The term-limited Bearden resigned prematurely from the House shortly after being accused of ethical lapses. He immediately joined the lobbying firm Pelopidas LLC, or as Bearden put it, an “influence management firm” in which he would play a “main role.”

When Bearden joined Pelopidas, he also he also “officially became the lobbyist for retired billionaire Rex Sinquefield,” a major Pelopidas client whose hobby is trying to buy Missouri’s government. Sinquefield, via Pelopidas, has focused on gutting public education and cutting taxes for the wealthy in Missouri, goals not incompatible with the Kochs’. Consequently, it’s not surprising that the AFP-MO, under the leadership of Pelopidas’ Bearden,  has used Pelopidas’ “grassroots and coalition building” services. One cannot be blamed for concluding that Carl Bearden unites the wider goals of the Kochs with Sinquefield’s specifically Missouri focus.

One offspring of that union is the Missouri Tea Party. It’s no secret that Bearden was instrumental in organizing and publicizing Tea Party rallies, as well as promoting the Tea Party presence at Town-Halls held by Democratic congress people – complete with astroturf talking points and strategies for how to “artificially inflate your numbers.” Last spring, when Claire McCaskill, looking at what she took to be the writing on the wall, declared “I absolutely empathize with the Tea Party,” the grafitti that got her so flustered was put there by Carl Bearden.

So what, conservatives chime at this point, don’t liberal advocacy groups like MoveOn.org promote progressive events. Don’t they take money from unions, wealthy liberals, even – gasp – from financier George Soros? And haven’t they played a big part in organizing progressives around issues? Unfortunately, for the “balanced” presentation favored by trad media types, the parallels aren’t really that parallel:

–One would be hard-put to find many liberal advocacy group whose raison d’etre can be linked to their donors’ bottom line as is demonstrably the case with the Koch brothers and the AFP. (See also the Mayer article and here.)

—Contrary to groups funded by the Kochs, for example, the lines between donors and liberal advocacy groups are usually highly transparent.

–Finally, although folks may disagree with progressive positions, no liberal advocacy groups have, to my knowledge, tried to pawn off false information in order to whip up their membership. I know of no liberal equivalence to last summer’s “death panels” (the claim made here at an AFP sponsored meeting), or no spurious science intended to plant doubt about proven anthropogenic climate change. Just listing all the lies promulgated by conservative “think tanks, etc. could serve as the focus of a very long post all by itself.

Manufactured though the Tea Party phenomena may be, it is undeniable that many of the participants are totally genuine. These are the angry and frightened individuals who see a changing world and cannot deal with the anxiety and insecurity it generates, as well as those generally unstable individuals who populate any fringe movement. Those recruited to the Tea Party are ripe for exploitation, and in Carl Bearden, the AFP found the right guy to to take advantage of the situation.  

If you travel often, by plane, or are older than 25, you’re probably familiar with having developed a personal set of ritual routines making for the most painless and least stressful airline-going experience.

I know I have.

I’ve learned that getting to the airport early with ample time allows for the unexpected while still preserving one’s peace of mind. Checklists help, after all, you are picking up in one place and contemplating having it all together in another.

With all that time on my hands at the airport–providing no unforeseen circumstances emerge–there are a limited set of activities from which to occupy oneself.

People watching: always fun at the airport. Random traveler rushing late running to the gate (of course confirming the infinite wisdom of diligent pre-planning, don’t we always like to be right?). Overheard banter shared between airport workers speeding the hourly clock along. Or, a mile tall flock of college b-ball players floating through the concourse.

One thing I do find myself repeatedly doing with my extra moments is a reconnoiter to the airport newsstand or gift & snack shop. I’m looking to survey the latest book offerings the limited shelf space allows: left and right politics, dominate in business and get rich, romance novels, a little fantasy and sci-fi thrown in for good measure.

There are always the ‘poll positions’ in a marketplace-premium product placement locations. One particular book caught my eye, “The Overton Window” by Glenn Beck. Hmmm. I picked it up and was surprised to learn it was a work of fiction; a novel.

The first thought that came to mind was, ‘there’s no way Glenn Beck has had the time to crank out a novel’. He’s daily on radio, on TV, doing public appearances and events, what gives?

Can anyone say ghostwriter?

Apparently, “The Overton Window” has a plot nearly identical to an earlier work by one of the novel’s “contributing authors”, Jack Henderson.

Chris Kelly, a writer for Bill Maher writes in Huff Post,

“So why — except for the completely inverted politics — does The Overton Window read so much like Circumference of Darkness? Because they were written by the same guy, a 52-year-old computer programmer named Jack Henderson. He gets sole credit on Circumference. (And why shouldn’t he? He published it himself.) On Overton, he gets thanked by Beck for “pouring his heart and soul into this project.” And, apparently, his leftover plot.”

My second thought at seeing Beck’s tome for sale at LAX, was he is shamelessly cashing-in, hoarding every buck he can get a hold of. He’s just a profiteering demagogue masquerading as populist prophet.

For example, at Beck’s Restoring Honor rally, to his credit he preached a message of inclusion and for the need to heed divine guidance. Only problem is, in most of Beck’s broadcasting he has been divisive, widening the chasm between constituencies of Americans. Such inconsistencies in other venues have been called hypocritical and obsequious. Money, power, fame seem to be the operative source code for Beck.

On one hand, the phrase ‘white privilege’ was actually sounded on the Restoring Honor stage (Alveda King said, “white privilege will become human privilege and that America will soon repent of the sin of racism and return itself to honor.”)– on the other hand, Beck has made his mark with Tea Party activists by stating such ridiculosities as President Obama having ‘hatred of white people’, or that America’s on the verge of a Marxist-Communist-Fascist takeover, at the same time waving swastikas and hammer-and-sickle flags.

Beck can only have it both ways here if the jokes are on us as he laughs all the way to the bank. Very Palin-esque, wouldn’t you say?

What we have in the form of Glenn Beck is a shill for top-down power structures under the disguise of his timely and convenient Libertarian limited government policies.

On Fox News, he recently stated, “I’m not anti-government. I’m anti-big government. Suddenly, now, I’m looking for a religious takeover of the government?”

The bottom line is, there is a form of tyranny and top-down power, but it’s not the false choice between government on one hand and multi-nationals on the other — it’s a bed shared by the unholy alliance between big business and their paid-for political operatives: lobbyists, politicians, appointed officials, public employees.

As I wrote in a Dobbs and Palin for President speculation,

“What’s an interesting dynamic in all this, are the right wing rabble-rousing cheerleaders like Limbaugh and Beck, et al. They don’t have to articulate a message that communicates an inclusive political mindset, in fact, most of their rhetoric sensationalizes — because its show biz — stereotypes — because its show biz — stokes fear — because its show biz, you get the point. Their model is entertainment parked in a political vehicle, ministering to a minority of folks verging on xenophobic affliction, deathly afraid their conception of “homeland” has been stolen away; they are losing their country, and are freaked out about it.”

And so the demagogues come out, play the people like a fiddle, and consequently, are getting very rich. If this behavior on the part of Beck and Palin is just explained away as a normal expression of the American way of life — quit and cash in, throw away propriety to make a buck — in some respects, rewards such as these have alot more in common with the Donner Party, than making an honest living.  

At a time like this, American democracy could sure use a better natured Angel, don’t you think?

I not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.

One of the side-effects of right wing rhetorical excess is the debasement of political language. During the past two years, as the political and media arms of the right wing have attempted to whip up the base, we have seen concepts such as “socialism” and “facism” used in such twisted ways that they no longer have meaning outside the community of political scholars who still share common definitions. Other words, like “racism,” are becoming sadly chipped away as they are up-ended by the right wing effort to feed white racial resentment. Particularly galling is the usurpation of the refrain, “We the people,” once an evocation of our pluralistic democracy, but now devolving into code for Tea Partiers and their sympathizers.

Glenn Beck’s black magic can perhaps be held responsible for helping to spread this aberration although it cropped up earlier among right-wing libertarians. Locally there is now a “We the People” group in Chesterfield, presumably a group organized in response to Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, that  pushes Tea Party events and organizes “We the People” meet-ups and discussion groups with the goal of training “citizen leaders.”

If you search the term on google, you will find a myriad of examples that show that Tea Partiers rarely speak of themselves collectively in the first person plural, but with growing frequency as “we the people.” Just a couple of examples: a tea party member from Branson, Missouri talks about attendance at Tea Parties as “When we the people gather together … .” In their Mission statement, the Eureka Tea Party  purports to speak for “we, the people of Eureka, Missouri and citizens of the United States.”

Which leaves the rest of “we the people,” the majority that voted for Barack Obama, with our mouths gaping in amazement. How dare they speak for us! A recent CBS poll finds that:

… 29 percent of those asked considered themselves Tea Party supporters and 54 percent did not. Fully 17 percent had no opinion either way.

“We the people” is 29 percent of the people?

It’s the same tactic used by GOP obstructionist pols who claim to be speaking for “the American people” –  who, incidentally, voted their party out of the legislative majority in 2006. It reminds me of the way that back country hikers are often told never to run from predators like bears and cougars, but stand their ground and try look bigger than they are. Sometimes, I’m told it actually works. In this case, however, the strategy has had the effect of rendering a venerable phrase risible.

One of the side-effects of right wing rhetorical excess is the debasement of political language. During the past two years, as the political and media arms of the right wing have attempted to whip up the base, we have seen concepts such as “socialism” and “facism” used in such twisted ways that they no longer have meaning outside the community of political scholars who still share common definitions. Other words, like “racism,” are becoming sadly chipped away as they are up-ended by the right wing effort to feed white racial resentment. Particularly galling is the usurpation of the refrain, “We the people,” once an evocation of our pluralistic democracy, but now devolving into code for Tea Partiers and their sympathizers.

Glenn Beck’s black magic can perhaps be held responsible for helping to spread this aberration although it cropped up earlier among right-wing libertarians. Locally there is now a “We the People” group in Chesterfield, presumably a group organized in response to Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, that  pushes Tea Party events and organizes “We the People” meet-ups and discussion groups with the goal of training “citizen leaders.”

If you search the term on google, you will find a myriad of examples that show that Tea Partiers rarely speak of themselves collectively in the first person plural, but with growing frequency as “we the people.” Just a couple of examples: a tea party member from Branson, Missouri talks about attendance at Tea Parties as “When we the people gather together … .” In their Mission statement, the Eureka Tea Party  purports to speak for “we, the people of Eureka, Missouri and citizens of the United States.”

Which leaves the rest of “we the people,” the majority that voted for Barack Obama, with our mouths gaping in amazement. How dare they speak for us! A recent CBS poll finds that:

… 29 percent of those asked considered themselves Tea Party supporters and 54 percent did not. Fully 17 percent had no opinion either way.

“We the people” is 29 percent of the people?

It’s the same tactic used by GOP obstructionist pols who claim to be speaking for “the American people” –  who, incidentally, voted their party out of the legislative majority in 2006. It reminds me of the way that back country hikers are often told never to run from predators like bears and cougars, but stand their ground and try look bigger than they are. Sometimes, I’m told it actually works. In this case, however, the strategy has had the effect of rendering a venerable phrase risible.

Steve Benen, in an excellent analysis of the sloganeering that characterized Glenn Beck’s Besmirch MLK Rally yesterday, exposes the lack of substance behind the boiling Tea Party paranoia. Benen’s post, definitely worth reading in it its entirety, concludes:

The folks who gathered in D.C. today were awfully excited about something. The fact that it’s not altogether obvious what that might be probably isn’t a good sign.

According to Bill Lambrecht at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s “Political Fix,” St. Louisians who traveled to Washington D.C. to bask in the light of Beck, the self-anointed prophet, and his acolyte, Saint Palin, are equally worked up and just as vague about what it is that’s got them twitching.

One gentleman whom Lambrecht quotes melodramatically declares that “This is to wake up the people. The politicians don’t listen.” We should doubtless overlook the tang of sour grapes in this cri d’coeur – the outraged tone of those who thought that the Bush years, with their indulgence of the full range of right wing fanasy, would truly go on forever. That particular speaker though does seem to have awakened – albeit a few years too late.  He is concerned, Lambrecht reports, because he has “never seen the economy so bad”:

It’s time to stop Congress from all this overspending and these frivolous earmarks. I think we’re headed for a collapse of the economy if it doesn’t stop

Similarly, an equally clueless St. Louisian is quoted as saying:

I’m scared that where we’re going is not a good place,” … There is no good ending to this story unless we make a U-turn,” he added.

The fact that the economy collapsed some time ago – two years ago to be exact – due to the ministrations of those applying just the panacea of deregulation and tax cuts that folks like these gentlemen advocate, doesn’t seem to have much penetration among this segment of the population. Instead they seem to derive intense, almost palpable satisfaction out of railing against the very measures that have kept us from the deepest and darkest of economic pits. How could any thinking person want to make a U-turn right back to the Bush policies that put us in the very bad place we were in at the end of 2008?

What is really going on when you have a wildly energized group whose raison d’etre dissolves when examined closely? Several observers noted that the tone of the Beck rally was essentially religious. However, the St. Louis  attendees who were quoted in the Lambrecht article almost all seemed to locate their worries in the political sphere, And, although they might justify themselves by reference to religious beliefs, I strongly suspect that most of those attending expect to find solutions to their complaints in retrograde political action.

Am I the only person who finds this blending worrisome? On the one hand, you have easily led, poorly informed people, seething with discontent, expressing real fear and anxiety about something that doesn’t ever seem to quite materialize in an intellectually viable form. On the other hand, you have numerous interested parties feeding the group’s sense of self-importance with visions of super-patriotism, heroic defiance, and now, with the Glenn Beck crusade, a sense of religious mission. Am I the only one reminded of Father Coughlin’s incendiary radio broadcasts and his depression era Christian Front brown shirt wannabes?  

Last month, when Michele Bachmann put out the list of the first members of her new congressional Tea Party Caucus, I noted the predictable presence of Teetotaler Todd Akin (R-2nd), and asked where the rest of the Missouri Republican delegation was. The answer is that, with one exception, Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-9th), they are still missing.

It might be that Roy Blunt (R-7th), Jo Ann Emerson (R-8th), and Sam Graves(R-6th) still have some capacity for embarrassment. Or that, lacking the sincere conviction that practically oozes from, say, Todd Akin, they want more wiggle room. They may well be worrying about constituents who would think twice about a congressperson whose goal is to “serve as a listening ear to tea parties.” (Are you, like me, wondering what kind of ears aren’t “listening” ears?)

However, a report from the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) suggests that those who haven’t yet joined the Tea Party Caucus membership might want to reconsider in the future since:

… analysis shows that the top contributors to the 50 members of a newly-established congressional Tea Party caucus — which so far includes only Republicans — are health professionals, retirees, the real estate industry and oil and gas interests.

Furthermore, donations from health professionals, oil and gas interests and Republican and conservative groups are, on average, higher for Tea Party caucus members than for members of the House of Representatives in general and even their fellow House Republicans.

I have to admit my first reaction was so what? These are exactly the groups I would expect to be lavishing funds on legislators on the Tea Party bandwagon – and many of the Missouri politicians that haven’t joined the caucus get plenty of moola from those groups as well (you can check out their totals by industrial and other donor groups on CPR’s OpenSecrets.org).

However, I began to get the point when I read further:

Tea Party activists have already established political action committees to fund favored candidates. But the formation of the caucus may make it easier to track which industries’ interests are aligned with the movement.

If the pattern of giving that CRP has described becomes more marked, perhaps we’ll see more movement toward the Tea Party caucus from the rest of the Missouri GOP in the future. Political scientist, Jim Hensen, claims that “The guys that are forming the caucus in Congress are trying to, you know, ride the train …”. Could that be the gravy train he’s talking about?

By now most Missourians have probably read about Rep. Brian Nieves (R-Washington), Republican candidate for the the 26th District Senate Seat, who allegedly assaulted Shawn Bell, a campaign aide for his primary rival, Republican Richard Stratman. According to Bell, Nieves held him at gunpoint, forcing him to undress and humiliate himself while Nieves raved about his putative misdeeds during the primary.

Now Nieves has gone off again – this time blasting the state GOP at a “prayer vigil” held by supporters Monday night. He used the opportunity to  blame his legal troubles on  the “kingmakers and the powerbrokers in the state of Missouri” who want to keep him out of government because he “”won’t be a lap dog. … There is no way they will ever control Brian Nieves.”

As in his earlier emails to supporters concerning the Bell affair, he employed grandiose, self-inflating rhetoric to make the case that he is being persecuted by vague, corrupt powers – unnamed state GOP powerbrokers who want to halt his “ascension” to the Senate seat, although Nieves knows that he will prevail because no less than “God has his hand all over this situation.” Compare this to the over-the-top tone of one of the emails he has been sending out:

We all know that the ‘Old Guard’ is very much threatened by all of us who will NOT bow down to The Machine and they are willing to literally destroy a man’s life to make sure nobody else gets the bright idea of standing up to them!

The Machine! Really! Is he saying that the Machine manufactured the Shawn Bell ruckus? And as long as we’re talking about troubling behavior, both FiredUp! and the St. Louis Activist Hub have noted that Nieves rhetoric has shown disturbing tendencies in the past. There is also, if we want to stroll down memory lane in search of portents of trouble ahead, the incident between Nieves and Trent Skaggs (D-North Kansas City) on the House floor, which escalated into a physical tussle in which they had to be separated by other House members.

Doesn’t all this hair-trigger rage, paranoia and overblown bombast strike you as an almost incomprehensible overreaction – on the part of the winner yet – a primary winner with big margins who will probably dance all over the Democratic opponent, “Boots” Webber – if he doesn’t blow it with his extreme behavior? Nieves is a politician after all; how can he continue to function if he is so easily aggravated by the “politics ain’t beanbag” facts of a tiny, little state political campaign? It’s difficult not to conclude that somebody ought to be looking out for this guy.

And it is clear that that somebody won’t be the Missouri Republican party which seems to have drawn a rather oblique lesson from the Bell affair. Instead of expressing concern about Nieves, they are instead calling for new intra-Party, primary only campaign rules that will proscribe the dirty tricks that seems to characterize their particular brand of go-for-the jugular campaigning. Which would, of course, be laudatory in a more neutral situation, but in this instance it does seem to be a case of blaming the victim – no matter how sleazy the victim may be.

As for the Tea Party? Certainly we know that there is no real concern for Nieves health in the rantings of Tea Party publicity hound Dana Loesch.  Loesch’s only contribution so far is to declare that Shawn Bell, a well-established Republican political figure, is a “dishonest Democratic operative,” coupled with a little of the usual entertaining dreck that she is so good at manufacturing. However it’s difficult not to worry be disturbed by Nieves’ rank-and-file Tea Party supporters who respond to his ravings with applause, and have no hesitation in cheering his over-the-top assertions, and even in naming the names he hesitates to mention:

Nieves declined to identify who the state “kingmakers” were, but asserted, “I know who they are, and they probably know I’m about to ‘out’ them.”

The emcee of the event, Cindy McGee — chairwoman of Show-Me Patriots, a conservative group aligned with the Tea Party movement — was not so reticent.

“James Harris and Jeff Roe are going down!” shouted McGee, referring to two top Republican consultants who had worked for Stratman… .

These are the people that the GOP is trying to keep worked up so that they will turn out and sweep them back into power – people who seem ready to haul out the torches and pitchforks on cue – anybody’s cue*. One has to ask, how is that responsible politics?

One can only feel sympathy for Nieves when we learn that the main reaction on the part of the above-mentioned James Harris was to remark that he and Nieves share the same goal – to keep the seat in Republican hands.  Apparently, Harris and the other malevolent “kingmakers”  don’t care just how shaky those hands are as long as they carry the same partisan banner.

* Edited to clarify meaning in the next to last paragraph; two typos elsewhere were corrected.



 

An editorial in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch quite sensibly observed that Proposition C was a very poor tool for amplifying the anti-Obamacare message nationally:

The megaphone is muffled when the message is “One in every six registered Missouri voters (71 percent of the 23 percent who turned out) sent a message to Washington.”

On the other side of the state, the Kansas City Star struck the same deflationary note:

…a light turnout made clear what the vote wasn’t: a sweeping referendum on health reform. An electorate seriously riled up about an issue sends more than roughly a fourth of registered voters to the polls.

The silliness of all the conservative celebratory braying is recognized even outside the state. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post put the matter very succinctly:

I’m really not sure why conservatives are so excited that an electorate primarily made of Republican primary voters passed  an anti-individual mandate ballot initiative in Missouri. I don’t even understand why conservatives would be excited if it passed during a normal election. For one thing, states can’t invalidate federal laws. … . Moreover the focus on the individual mandate speaks to how weak the conservative case against the bill is. The individual mandate can be replaced. That wouldn’t be a good thing, but you could substitute automatic enrollment, or some form of lock-out..

All very rational – however, if we were living in a rational political world, there would never have been a proposition C. If you want to gauge the effect of Proposition C in our current political Bizarro World, look no further than the first page of today’s Post Dispatch.

Despite the excellent editorial,  the cover story on Proposition C gave State Senator and Proposition C cheerleader, Jane Cunningham (R-Dist.7), full bragging rights. The reporter evidently felt that bringing up real, verifiable facts like the small turnout was not necessary when he could manufacture a story about how Missouri voters “overwhelmingly rejected a federal mandate to purchase health insurance.” I am afraid that this reporting path will prove to be that most traveled before this is all over.

Nor do we have to wait too long to see just how an orgy of Proposition C triumphalism is going to encourage the crazies to go even further. FiredUp! reported yesterday that State Senator Jim Lembke (R-Dist. 1) is so emboldened by the Prop C victory that he proclaimed his support for having Missouri defy the federal mandate that requires emergency rooms to treat the uninsured – which does, at least, have the virtue that it tells anyone who is interested just how mean-minded Proposition C-loving GOP fringers really are.