Going Rogue From K Street

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

"Combine the DNA of a flash mob, a news addict and a con­servative who feels betrayed by the spending excesses of George W. Bush, sprinkle in some anxiety and you’ve got my people." - Anonymous Tea Party Lobbyist

We've seen confessionals told from the inside. We're addicted to them like sin. And they will always sell provided the insider making a clean breast is either famous enough or well-placed enough to at least give the appearance of credibility and greedy literary agents will always flock to them like well-heeled dodo birds. Baseball had Jose Canseco. The world of finance gave us John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman. And of course, politics has given us scores of scorned insiders whom one can plausibly suspect of wanting revenge and/or a quick buck moreso than a clear conscience.

What we haven't seen too much are tellalls from the Land of Lobbyists. Until now. Playboy Magazine recently published a seven page article by "Anonymous", a guy who, by all rights, ought to be chased through the streets of Boston or Philadelphia, tarred, feathered, then drawn and quartered. He is a lobbyist from K Street and also bills himself as a "A Tea Party consultant." In fact, that's the subtitle of the article, "The Rogues of K Street."

Before one gets to page three or maybe even two, one will become aware of one startling fact: The thing missing from this revelatory tellall, something that distinguishes so many others, is remorse. Furthermore, when one spelunks further into the fetid sewer of this understandably anonymous douchebag's brain pan, one sees the unmistakable sneer of arrogance and hubris. This man is actually proud of the political terrorism that he's caused.

No mere mercenary willing to side with whomever waves the most number of greenbacks under his pig snout, this piece of shit openly admires the likes of Andrew Breitbart, the right wing smearmeister who to this day is still wiping yolk off his face months after the Shirley Sherrod incident. In fact, here's what he has to say about Breitbart:

Although it’s mostly uncoordinated, Andrew Breitbart is pursuing a similar mission through his new-media empire. He described himself in a 2007 interview as "Matt Drudge’s bitch," but he’s no intern. I met him at a Dupont Circle Starbucks in early 2009, where he couldn’t shake an entourage of well-wishers. The man is intense. Angry. My one-year-old has a longer attention span. But he’s so sharp you feel smarter just being in the same room with him. The best part about Breitbart is that he has a knack for making others—whether it’s the president, the press or others in power—sound like douches.

When Breitbart gestured to the print reporters at a Tea Party event in Nashville and said, "It’s not your business model that sucks; it’s you that sucks," he whipped Tea Party members into a frenzy unlike anything I’d ever seen. Breitbart is one of them, except smarter, better connected and angrier; compared with him, Palin is Las Vegas dinner theater. That’s why he is loved by Tea Partyers in a way Palin can never hope to be loved.

What Anonymous fails to mention is that Breitbart doesn't get out the racist lunatics and help candidates get elected and win primaries: Palin does. Give the bubble-brained bimbo from the Klondike her due: She brings out the parishioners and gets them to give her millions even though she's politically unemployed and is not officially running for office. Not loved?

The Nashville Tea Bagger convention, he also chooses to omit, went down in history for two things: Not attracting more than a couple of thousand people and Sarah Palin's palm notes.

Long before this amazing pronouncement, however, one is struck by his other disconnects from reality not to mention his bald-faced admission in his opening paragraphs to throwing the political and electoral process into disarray:

That’s when I realized (the Tea Party) isn’t an average fringe movement. This one is credible, legit and—for the first time in a decade—scaring the crap out of the left. In my years as a campaign hack and then as a consultant, I’ve created more than my share of fake grassroots organizations. Some were downright evil but effective beyond expectations. Did you get an automated call from the sister of a 9/11 victim asking you to reelect President Bush in 2004? That was me. Did you get a piece of mail with the phrase supports abortion on demand as a means of birth control? That may have been me too.

What he's not saying is that his acts of political faux terrorism is also scaring the shit out of the right wing establishment and is doing more to fragment any actual conservative movement than anything else. The Tea Baggers? We laugh at them and their misspelled signs. They may be the darlings of the mainstream press but the fact remains they are a fringe group, they're more incredible than credible and they're certainly not so much a majority as a serial flash mob. And we'll see how many of them there actually are this Super Tuesday in November, the first election ever held since the "rise" of the Tea Party.

He also holds these "credible" and "legitimate" tea baggers in contempt because he'd referred to their "reptilian brains" and acknowledged they don't have much of a attention span (an attribute, don't forget, that he'd rightly ascribed to Breitbart). This is another direct quote:

The exciting news for me is that the organization still needs someone who can deliver a message to the masses using traditional means. Even the most forward-looking political professionals know blogging and text messaging will get you only so far. That’s where I come in. I’m part of the team prepping to deliver the Tea Party message via traditional means.

A good piece of mail gets its message across in 10 seconds. Television gives you 30 seconds, maybe. We’re playing to the reptilian brain rather than the logic centers, so we look for key words and images to leverage the intense rage and anxiety of white working-class conservatives. In other words, I talk to the same part of your brain that causes road rage...

And when one descends further into the bowels of this man's mind one sees a genuine partisan making a very handsome living disseminating lies and making up grassroots organizations and 9/11 sisters for Bush out of thin air. He's no better than phone jammer James Tobin, Lee Atwater protégé Karl Rove and the pieces of shit working for Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia who stole at least three consecutive elections. Unsurprisingly, our anonymous tipster never once raises the possibility of rationally debating the issues and trying to reach a national consensus. It's a lot more entertaining for him and others such as Jailbird James O'Keefe and Hanna Giles, two scam artists also held up for admiration, to inspire the political equivalent of road rage.

Here's another "teachable moment" from this shit-smeared screed that would be more at home in Hustler's Letters to the Editor or Al Goldstein's Screw Magazine than Playboy:

Our candidate-interview process is pretty simple. The candidate is asked two questions:
(1) Are you a birther?
(2) Are you a truther?
If the answer is anything but "no" or "hell no," the conversation ends right there. If the candidate answers correctly, the conversation continues, looking at viability and whether we can have a worthwhile impact. The reality of this litmus test is as patriotic as practical. Donors don’t contribute to lunatics.

OK, we'll just wave aside for the nonce the absolutely batshit insane belief that "donors don't contribute to lunatics" like Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Michele Bachmann, Tom Tancredo, Christine O'Donnell and Steve King. Let's focus, instead, on this turd's "patriotic" insistence on lumping "birthers" and "truthers" in the same conspiracy theory category. There's absolutely no credible evidence to the contrary nor even a sliver of daylight between the facts of Obama's birth and the official narrative. There are, however, literally hundreds of unanswered questions and at least as many facts that dramatically depart from the official narrative of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

They're willing to lambaste Bush for "his spending excesses" but are forbidden from entertaining the possibility that 9/11 was an inside job. What is an inside job is the runaway spending, the stimulus measure that has created hundreds of thousand of jobs and the bailouts and it's all Obama's fault, don't you know?

What our anonymous lobbyist failed to mention in his cockwanding session in Playboy is that the last Tea Party convention for next month had to be canceled due to lack of warm bodies even though it would've featured his heroes Andrew Breitbart and Sarah Palin as well as Sharron Angle and Lou Dobbs.