The GOP's New Parachute Pants

Hey, do you remember just a few years ago when the corporate sponsors of the Fake Tea Party paid Dick Armey $8 million to shut up and go away? Right after he staged an armed coup at Fake Tea Party HQ?

No?

Maybe this will refresh your memory (from ABC News with emphasis added as a festive touch):

Dick Armey Defends His $8 Million Deal to Leave FreedomWorks

By SHUSHANNAH WALSHE Dec. 29, 2012

Former House majority leader Dick Armey says he took an $8 million consulting deal in return for leaving the conservative organization FreedomWorks because the group was "dishonest" and because he "couldn't leave with empty pockets."

The arrangement, he says, will allow him to "never have to work again forever."

In an interview with ABC News as he was winding down his Wii Fit workout, Armey spoke frankly and at length about his dispute with FreedomWorks, his eyebrow raising consulting contract, and the strategy of the Republican Party.

"Wii Fit workout" is apparently Beltway street lingo for "fifth of Bombay gin", but whatever.

...

The Washington Post this week detailed what it called a coup Armey tried to pull off at FreedomWorks in September with the help of gun carrying aide after his relationship with FreedomWorks' president, Matt Kibbe, became hostile.

While Armey disputes the description of using an armed aide to conduct a coup, he admits that he agreed to leave FreedomWorks as part of a deal with Richard Stephenson, president of the for-profit Cancer Treatment Centers of America.

Under the terms of the deal, Armey will receive $400,000 a year until he is 92 – a total of $8 million – to be a consultant for Stephenson.

"I can talk about economics because I am an economist," Armey said. "I can talk about what's going on on the Hill, in politics, who's a winner, who's a loser, things of that nature."

Stephenson stepped in, Armey says, because he "was concerned I was going to resign (from FreedomWorks) and sue them before the (presidential) election. He didn't want an uproar. We all understood if I take any action that made it at all public it would be a press nightmare and we didn't want that before the election…

"So Dick was saying, 'You know, Armey, my family and I have heard your story, about how you can't afford to retire and we want to help with your retirement,'" Armey said.

The former leader of the House Republicans said it was a deal he just couldn't refuse.

"I can't stay here (FreedomWorks), I can't work with people like this, and I can't afford to leave with empty pockets," Armey said.

...

Because there is always money in the banana stand for these monsters.  Always.

But what was my point?

Oh yeah.  I remember.

Way back in the Year of our Lord 2006 I wrote this:

...

This is the Pogrom against Competence that has gone on in virtually every Agency by the Bushies and has lead directly to the signal disasters of 9/11, Katrina, Iraq and all the rest because the Dubya and the rest of the GOP slavishly follow the Evil CEO model in every single thing they do.

And once the Administration – be they Bush/Cheney or Lay/Skilling [Enron] -- has weeded out all of those who have committed the heresy of telling the truth, in come the Brownies and the Chertoffs and the Rummys. The hacks whose sole job is to carry out the Dear Leader’s overall mandate, whether it is to loot a company or liquidate and privatize the entire government, and to protect the Leader from criticism, oversight and responsibility . Especially when hurricanes or IEDs or nosy auditors and reporters blow yawning holes in the onion-skin thin shield behind which these evil men work diligently on their real projects.

Reality, in the end, is the eternal enemy of GOP and the Huckster-in-Chief, and the radicals, bigots and Dominionists who still support him. And because reality is pole star of those who believe in a “measure twice/cut once” approach to the world, it is unavoidable that a delusion-drive CEO like George Bush would find himself on a collision course with a data-driven organization, as elements of the CIA still are.

What is disastrous, of course, is that Reality -- “The Anthill (see Part 1)” -- cannot be breached and conquered, and we can only come to grief over and over and over again as long as we are in the hands of liars and lunatics who insist that it can be.

The good news, bittersweet though it is, is that… “The Anthill” cannot be breached and conquered, and those who insist that it can are fated to fail.

The tangible consequence of that failure is what we see every day in Iraq, in New Orleans and across the face of our warming, wounded planet...

And now, courtesy of the same bigoted, imbecile mob who visited the Bush Administration on us. those days have returned with a vengeance -- ten times bigger this time and no longer even pretending to have an agenda beyond looting the place and handing us over, bound and and foot, to our enemies.

But more to the point, 11 years ago here is what I predicted would follow the collapse of Bush Administration:

...

In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade. 

It will become the “Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?” shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, “well, he did good after 9/11” as schoolchildren are taught what a disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh and laugh.

Turns out I was far too optimistic about the moral salvageability of the depraved and brainwashed mob that squats in the ruins where the Party of Lincoln once stood -- an error I will never repeat again.  Because rather than being forced to laugh uncomfortably and change the subject whenever conversation turned to the Dumbass Dauphin, the Pig People were let off the hook entirely for their support of the Bush Administration by a vast and concerted Conservative and Mainsteam Media campaign to pretend that the previous eight years had simply never happened.

It took less than two years, millions of FreedomWorks dollars and a big assist from Fox News for the Republican Denial of Bush campaign to achieve escape velocity and it has never looked back since. In fact, before the Kenyan Usurper had even finished appointing his cabinet, the leadership of the Republican Party had met in secret agreed on a plan of total denial and obstruction...

...while deceased rage-baiter, Andrew Breitbart (among many, many others), leaped into action, making it crystal clear exactly how the Pig People were going to behave every minute of every day until President Barack Obama was driven from office.

By the Fall of 2009, the GOP base had all but vanished completely, and no less an authority on All Things Conservative than David Fucking Brooks was writing exciting columns about the appearance of millions of "independents" who were suddenly materializing right out of thin air.  

The disappearance of the GOP base was greatest missing persons case in American history, and yet nobody in the media seemed particularly alarmed by it.  They just cranked out story after story after story about The Brand New Tea Party while fringe nuts on the Left kept cranking out post after post after post pointing out that There. Is. No. Tea. Party.

Eventually no less an authority on All Things Conservative than David Fucking Brooks Joe Fucking Scarborough admitted that the whole thing had been a scam, but no one cared.   

And then, two years later, no less an authority on All Things Conservative Joe Fucking Scarborough also admitted that the whole thing had been a scam, and still no one cared.   

The important thing was that no The Pig People weaseled their way out of being blamed for all the filthy, treasonous shit they cheered on during the Age of Bush so that they could get on with the important business of sabotaging the black guy.  The other, equally important thing was that none of the Beltway hacks of former Bush speechwriters who so energetically enabled the catastrophes of the previous eight years lost a day of work, a dime of revenue.

While the Pig People rode the Bush-Off Express to ouchless salvation and Republican control of Congress, the lords and ladies of the Beltway media protected each other's asses by selling the rest of us out.

And just like that, the entire Age of Bush was bulldozed right down the memory hole.

And even though the Right and the Both Siderists each made it perfectly clear over and over again that their co-dependent cults depended entirely on mass-scale reality denial, back when I was making predictions in 2006, I was not yet battle-hardened and imaginative enough to believe the Beltway media and the Right had the collective power to simply "unperson" an entire era, especially one which was only a few years ago.  Which was so thoroughly well-documented.  And which left behind so much visible rubble and ruin.  

But I was wrong.  They did.  And in doing so they opened the door for a lying, racist demagogue like Trump to walk right in and take over.

And so my new prediction is that once the regime of The Bastard President impodes with either a bang or a whimper, the same well-funded army of mass reality-denial that manufactured the Tea Party will regroup for one more battle.  

All the usual suspects will blame all the usual scapegoats.  

The same old, bigoted imbecile Pig People will be provided by with alibis by the same old wingnut welfare media clowns.  

No one you know will ever have supported Trump.  

No one will lose their job. 

The lords and ladies of the Beltway media will scramble to cover each other's asses.  

And more quickly than you will believe it will become accepted Beltway wisdom that Both Sides were to blame.