Frank Rich does a number on Michael Steele. In Rich's catalog of Steele's self promotion, sins, and rip-offs there's nothing new. It's that Rich, being Rich, puts it all together and comes out with something that could be, god willin', the foundering of the Republican party on a big iceberg.
Michael Steele isn't just a major jerk. Michael Steele is the tip of that iceberg.
Steele is representative of a fascinating but little noted development on the right: the rise of buckrakers who are exploiting the party’s anarchic confusion and divisions to cash in for their own private gain. In this cause, Steele is emulating no one if not Sarah Palin, whose hunger for celebrity and money outstrips even his own. As many suspected at the time, her 2008 campaign wardrobe, like the doomed campaign itself, was just a preview of coming attractions: she would surely dump the bother of serving as Alaska’s besieged governor for a lucrative star turn on Fox News. Last week she made it official.
It's about the money! All of this is really just about the money.
Both Steele and Palin claim to be devotees of the tea party movement. “I’m a tea partier, I’m a town-haller, I’m a grass-roots-er” is how Steele put it in a recent radio interview, wet-kissing a market he hopes will buy his book. Palin has far more grandiose ambitions. She recently signed on as a speaker for the first Tea Party Convention, scheduled next month in Nashville — even though she had turned down a speaking invitation from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the traditional meet-and-greet for the right. The conservative conference doesn’t pay. The Tea Party Convention does. A blogger at Nashville Scene reported that Palin’s price for the event was $120,000.
The entire Tea Party Convention is a profit-seeking affair charging $560 a ticket — plus the cost of a room at the Opryland Hotel. Among the convention’s eight listed sponsors is Tea Party Emporium, which gives as its contact address 444 Madison Avenue in New York, also home to the high-fashion brand Burberry. This emporium’s Web site offers a bejeweled tea bag at $89.99 for those furious at “a government hell bent on the largest redistribution of wealth in history.” This is almost as shameless as Glenn Beck, whose own tea party profiteering has included hawking gold coins merchandised by a sponsor of his radio show.
Over here on the left we tend to think that the far right, the fundies, the tea partiers are dumb as dirt. But they're not. Membership in their club requires that they reject everything that the left stands for and one of those things is education and knowledge. That's not intended to be catty anymore than this: the people on the right that I know have gone and educated themselves in a different book. For some it's the Bible. For others it's Bill O'Reilly's books, "Going Rogue" and piles of arcane evidence that Obama isn't American (they have proof, right off the internets). They've invented their own inside dope and they shout it from the rooftops. The facts are of no social use if you want an invitation to the tea party.
Hello, their wallets are screaming, wake up!
Last week a prominent right-wing blogger, Erick Erickson of RedState.com, finally figured out that the Tea Party Convention “smells scammy,” likening it to one of those Nigerian e-mails promising untold millions. Such rumbling about the movement’s being co-opted by hucksters may explain why Palin used her first paid appearance at Fox last Tuesday to tell Bill O’Reilly that she would recycle her own tea party profits in political contributions. But Erickson had it right: the tea party movement is being exploited — and not just by marketers, lobbyists, political consultants and corporate interests but by the Republican Party, as exemplified by Palin and Steele, its most prominent leaders.
When the shit will hit the fan? When will tea partiers from Modesto to Lamesa to Allentown and Bangor realize they're being betrayed every day in every way by leaders making themselves richer and richer?
When Steele and Palin pay lip service to the movement, they are happy to glom on to its anti-tax, anti-Obama, anti-government, anti-big-bank vitriol. But they don’t call for any actual action against the bailed-out perpetrators of the financial crisis. They’d never ask for investments to put ordinary Americans back to work. They have no policies to forestall foreclosures or protect health insurance for the tea partiers who’ve been shafted by hard times. ...Hustlers like Steele and Palin take the money and run.
