For some strange reason, someone decided to invite The Green Miles to tonight's "premiere" of Not Evil Just Wrong, a new global warming denial movie. I say "premiere" because the film has already been screened regularly this year at conservative political conferences.
So why stage a phony "premiere"? The Washington Independent reports, "Some conservative films like last year's An American Carol have been given mass releases that backfired when audiences failed to show up." Ah. Makes sense now.
Anyway, I come here not to slam the documentary, which richly deserves the complete indifference it's received from the non-teabagging world. I come to slam the hosts: The Heritage Foundation.
It's certainly not surprising that Heritage would host these filmmakers. After all, their last movie was a mining "documentary" funded by the mining industry. Now they're screening their pro-fossil fuels "documentary" at Heritage, which has received at least $530,000 from ExxonMobil in just the last decade.
But a line in the invitation caught my eye: "Terms and Conditions of Attendance are posted online at www.heritage.org/Press/Events/terms.cfm".
Here's an excerpt from that page:
DECORUM
This event is open to the public as part of The Heritage Foundation’s commitment to promote reasoned discussion and understanding of important public policy issues. In support of these goals, The Heritage Foundation expects that all attendees will conduct themselves with courtesy and respect for every speaker and those in the audience, regardless of agreement or disagreement with any speaker or member of the audience. Accordingly, The Heritage Foundation reserves the right to deny admission to, and to remove, anyone who, while our guest, does not conduct themselves with courtesy and respect for the speakers and the audience.
All that would be totally fine -- it fits most every public standard for decorum -- if not for one thing. The Heritage Foundation spent all summer defending that very behavior.
The Heritage Foundation blog defended teabaggers as "upset citizens" and decried any attempt to maintain decorum as an effort to "silence" protesters and "stage manage" events.
So if a Democrat tries to maintain civility at an event, it's cause for revolution. But if anyone tries to revolt at a Heritage Foundation event, they could be arrested.
Here's the thing -- it's one thing for the Republican party's corrupt elected officials to be intellectually dishonest. They just care about keeping the corporate dollars coming in and getting re-elected. And no one expects ideological coherence from the "Obama's a socialist, fascist, communist, Muslim!" teabaggers.
But the Republican party's strength is supposed to come from its think tanks. Every book on recent politics says the GOP built its foundation by dumping boatloads of corporate cash into think tanks that honed messaging and ensured every conservative in DC could count on a steady paycheck for writing bogus pro-industry "studies."
And when its base starts to wise up that they're being played for fools to line the pockets of the ultra-rich, it's the think tanks that jump in. They come up with big new ways of repackaging the same old BS -- Reaganonomics, the Contract with America -- to convince the rank & file to re-up for another generation.
For all the talk of a 2010 comeback, today's leaders of movement conservatism are less ideologically coherent than Corey Haim. And their eagerness to dupe voters on behalf of their corporate benefactors is more transparent than ever.
But don't worry! Help is on the way! Sarah Palin's book is due out any day now! (And it's already in the bargain bin at 70% off on Amazon.com.) Instead of coming back, looks like the GOP is committed to going even further rogue -- and dissenters are not welcome.
Cross-posted from The Green Miles