Jim DeMint is destroying the Heritage Foundation.
"No, Lefty, he's just making it over in his own image, it's like he is turning it into another FreedomWorks or American Crossroads. Just one with a very dated logo."
Exactly.
Jim DeMint is destroying the Heritage Foundation.
Or, at least, he is destroying the very thing about Heritage that makes it useful, and so dangerous, to people who care about having a functioning as well as ideologically diverse US government. By making it another FreedomWorks, he is making it fundamentally UnSerious. The Heritage Foundation is useless for what it was created for if it is treated by Chuck Todd and his ilk as if what it has to say is sandwiched between the latest from WorldNetDaily and bathroom stall sharpie scrawls and car keys scratchitti by default.
Sarah Palin could work at the Heritage Foundation that exists right now. Ollie North could too. That is supposed to be the sort of notion you would propose and people inside the beltway would roll their eyes at. By design.
Non-Conservatives working in the Village, and low-information voters who have no idea what the man in the suit is actually saying are supposed to be impressed, and or grudgingly intimidated enough, by default by some 'Very Serious" somebody from Heritage being on stage. The idea is that they put a patina of gravitas and academic scholarly weight behind the same old blow the rich bash the poor bullshit, and they have done so for decades.
Now, Sarah Palin could work there.
That is a Grade A rusty brillo pad assisted reach-around handfuck of the goat, people.
At first, what was amazing to me was the idea that the big money establishment of Movement Conservatism would allow Heritage to fall from useful tool of beltway bamboozlement to easily discredited hack house. You cannot do much about the freakshow hoard taking over the primaries in the current GOP. But the money men could have shut Jim DeMint out. They need Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute and the CATO Institute for the hustle. Surely, they could see that?
Long before the Fox News era, the RW Think Tanks were the masters of tossing up the blizzard of shit that makes so many people think the arsonists are the firefighters and the firefighters are the arsonists.
Only unlike the Foxy Bunch, back then the Heritage could flim-flam smart non-Conservatives and usually skeptical journalists and pundits. They knew that it was their being Very Serious People was important to the scam.
If you, from an activist to a sitting Democratic office-holder, fiercely challenged a bad RW policy idea, inevitably a hack from Heritage, somebody who looked like the man who taught your math class or did your parents taxes, would show up like a mob lawyer to whisper into the ears of the foamy mouths or to talk to news anchors like they were seven and sign and talk to you like you were four years old.
The damage that the Heritage Foundation has done over the years, largely due to its having credibility as "the" conservative "think tank" can't really be understated.
Imagine my shock when I realized that it was the money class of the Movement who had gotten the stupids about the importance of the Very Serious People part of the scam. The Koch Brothers Obama Derangement Syndrome. It was so great that they were funding the very moves that would scourge the Very Serious out of the RW's Very Serious People scam.
The CATO grab.
In 2009, after Barack Obama’s Democrats passed health care legislation and tried to pass a cap-and-trade energy tax, the Kochs stepped up their political activism. Americans for Prosperity, a grass-roots organizing group chaired by David Koch, helped build the Tea Party movement with conferences, bus tours, and punditry; its budget grew from $7 million pre-Obama to $40 million in 2010.
The Cato Institute had never been so directly involved in politics. Its scholars had criticized Republicans when they were in power; they criticized Democrats when they started ruining things their own way. But if other Koch-connected organizations were at war with Obama, Cato largely sat it out. When the Occupy Wall Street movement began, Americans for Prosperity denounced its “violent rhetoric.” Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at Cato, blogged a Venn diagram and wrote that “to the extent the substance of [Occupy Wall Street’s] grievance is, or can be turned to, corporations’ use of government power to win unjust power and profits for themselves, that’s a grievance I can sit in a drum circle for.” In 2011, according to Cato chairman of the board Bob Levy, the think tank got no money whatsoever from the Kochs.
On Oct. 26, 2011, Niskanen passed away. Within days, Crane learned that the Kochs would be coming after the Cato shares held by Niskansen’s widow, arguing that they were not hers to hold. A win would give them complete control of the think tank, with a supermajority to make key hiring decisions; that, Crane was led to believe, would end his 35-year tenure as president.
From 'Cato Goes to War' By Dave Weigel Slate
At the time, the CATO grab seemed to be about ego, pique, and control.
The Kochs have a magic checkbook. They say "jump" and you say "how high" shit.
No. Actually it's a lot more than that.
The CATO grab gave up the game. The super rich of the GOP, especially the Koch Brothers, fundamentally misunderstand the value of the Think Tanks. If they aren't boring, and position paper toting, and people who make the Sunday Morning Gasbaggers sit up and take notice, their value is tremendously diminished.
They cannot be Tea Party ditto boxes.
Not if they want to be as damaging and effective as they have been since they were founded.
You have to swallow your pride, and see the big picture for the scam to work properly.
They are going to shit on your shoes every once in a while.
That is the price that you pay for them being taken seriously by the Village, the Pols, and the very people who keep voting against their best interests because, thanks to outfits like Heritage, they really have no fucking idea or clue who is really to blame and why for the reasons they can't get ahead. But the man from Heritage wrote the paper that Limbaugh used to say Democrats are the real racists and the real rip-off artists and the real polluters. So. Vote GOP. And, vote GOP. And, vote GOP. Nothing ever gets better, but Vote GOP.
Every shitty idea or plan that required position papers, "this is what smart people sound like to stupid people" talking points tailor made for Villagers, very serious looking men in grey suits to spout them on C-Span and on basic cable, virtually everything more complicated than screaming "race hustlers" and "quotas" and "bon-bon eating welfare queens" and "big black bucks with steaks and congac" came from Heritage or the American Enterprise Institute. And the thugs screaming those racist, homophobic, and sexist talking points were hooked up with studies and reports and data to muddy the water to make it harder to just call a racist a racist on outlets from CNN to PBS News Hour.
They hate the first black President so much, it is making them burn things down that smarter rich people spent years building up to be the anti-Base for a reason.
The Con in Conservative needs the David Broder Bunch to stroke their chins and nod as the Very Serious Suits blathered on.
If the various varieties of what are hamfisted and nakedly shameless Voter Disenfranchisement atrocities of the current GOP shitbags were a much more sly sort of malignant married to Very Serious sort of Op from the OG GOP shitbags of 1983, the ones the current freakshow scream "RINOS!" at, when they aren't calling them secret liberals, the way they would sell the scam would be the Very Serious Heritage Foundation Resident Scholar as faux intellectual Amway salesman.
It would be the Very Serious People of the Heritage Foundation who would be churning out dense position papers that nobody would actually read to wave around and get people who read the news into the camera for a living to question anyone suggesting this racist purge of non-Republican voters was a racist purge of non-Republican voters at all.
The Jim DeMint era Heritage Foundation has no ability to run that "actually, Professor Bumpendorf T. Floomberts ground-breaking Theories of Systemic Voter Fraud Among Non-Caucasian Individuals of Transient Dwelling and Marginal and Sub-Marginal Incomes published in Berlin before the new year clearly bears that the polyvertic invert of the median black voter times the height of C-3PO from Star Wars indicates a pattern of...." scam as effectively.
Cheer on Jim DeMint. Hope and pray he keeps on keeping on, and double downs on everything that the Heritage Foundation in the Hamas Wing of the GOP's hands has been doing.
He's doing everyone outside of the Movement Conservative Right a major solid here.