Comments

1
8 million golden parachute?!?! How the hell can they even claim to be grass roots when they can give out that kind of scratch to to people leaving
2
That's $400,000 a year for the next 20 years.

Remind me again who the Tea Party is supposed to represent?
3
I'm at a loss why you think this is a minus for the Tea Party/Astroturf Austerity crowd. No one knows or cares who Dick Armey is anymore. The stars now are the people kicked out of office this cycle.
4
A fucking CEO of a grassroots organization?!?

It's a plot worthy of Orwell, except for real.
5
That's too bad. "Dick Armey's Dick Army" was such a good moniker for the Tea Party.
6
I'd not mind if there was a tea party resurgence provided they made a concerted effort to suppress (or much better, just outright exclude) the goofball religious element.
7
Tea Party needs to get out of the GOP's basement and find a job.
8
@6, yeah, they have such a good platform otherwise. I really like what they bring to the table in terms of racism and violent nationalism and "fuck you, I got mine" anarcho-libertarianism.
9
Dick Armey helped turn the sweetest little old lady of my childhood, friend of my grandmother and fellow-teacher, hostess of my parents' wedding, charity-maven with the voice of Jean Redpath, and purveyor of arch good humor, into a paranoid racist pinchpenny at the end of her life.

Fuck you forever, Dick, for being the spider who enrobed her dementia in a silken mental straitjacket.
10
These assholes and their fucking money...
11
Huh. Heh heh. You said "Dick Armey".
12
Another GOP welfare queen.
13
Shoot. And they were only halfway done with making the Republican party irrelevant.
14
What can I tell you? They didn't just lose. They lost everything, and they lost big. And when that happens, the losers turn on each other.
15
It never seemed grassroots to me but rather Republican assholery that, with a couple minor successes, failed completely. I can only hope they continue to nauseate the electorate.
16
Contrary view here.

The interests that have traditionally backed Republicans didn't lose, and the Tea Party astroturf movement wasn't a failure. They enabled a Democratic Party that is the most plutocratic, most corporatist, most sold-out, and furthest to the right it has been since before the Great Depression to come off as the more attractive choice.

In the first Obama Administration, the plutocracy got virtually all of the big-money wins it wanted: continued bailout of the perpetrators of the financial crash and abandonment of its victims; the Heritage Foundation health-care plan; continued super-low taxes on the rich; more race-to-the-bottom "free trade" agreements with weak labor and environmental provisions; ever-weakening unions; falling real wages; weak financial regulations and bigger-than-ever banks; exceptionally weak antitrust and consumer protection enforcement; and endless war, fear, and paranoia. They even got cuts to food stamps in a time of high unemployment! (Real plutocrats don't care about social wedge issues, like sexuality and religion. They just use them tactically to manipulate the hoi polloi.)

So a few genuinely progressive Democrats got elected last November, and Elizabeth Warren will be getting a junior seat on the Senate Banking Committee. And a number of genuinely bad apples will be gone. But thanks to gerrymandering, Republicans still control the House, and if the Democratic majority in the Senate doesn't eliminate or greatly weaken the filibuster and personal hold on the first day of the 113th Congress -- as they could have done on the first day of the 112th, but "inexplicably" failed to do -- you'll know that they want to retain a procedural excuse for continuing to capitulate to the Republicans while pretending to object. And if the budget "compromises" the Democrats agree to don't start putting a significant dent in the country's grossly unequal distribution of wealth and income, you'll know that the Republicans are continuing to win the war, despite having "lost the battle."

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