Frank Rich’s Sunday column “The Great Tea Party Rip-Off” told me things I did not know about RNC Chair Michael Steele:
Steele is widely regarded as a clown by observers of all political persuasions, but he is clownish like a fox… though Steele is black, and perhaps the most enthusiastic player of the race card in American politics today, race was a red herring in his Reid vendetta. It threw most everyone off the scent of his real motivation, which had nothing to do with black versus white but everything to do with green, as in money.
A profligate spender, Steele had inaugurated his arrival as party chairman by devoting nearly $20,000 to redecorate his office because he found it “way too male” for his sensitive tastes. In the weeks just before “Game Change” emerged, Steele was in more hot water. Over the holidays, G.O.P. elders were shocked to learn that their front man had a side career as a motivational public speaker at up to $20,000 a gig. The party treasury, which contained $22.8 million upon Steele’s arrival at the end of January 2009, was down to $8.7 million by late November, with 2010 campaign expenditures rapidly arriving. “He needs to raise money for the party, not his wallet,” one Republican leader griped to Politico.
Then, just after New Year, Steele published an unexpected book of his own, “Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda.” He hadn’t told his employers that the book was in the works, and, to add further insult, he attacks unnamed party leaders in its pages for forsaking conservative principles. Since it hit the stores, Steele has pursued a book tour for fun and personal profit, all the while daring his G.O.P. critics to bring it on. “If you don’t want me in the job, fire me,” he taunted them. “But until then, shut up. Get with the program, or get out of the way.”
Fire him? Steele knows better than anyone that his party can’t afford what Clarence Thomas might call a “high-tech lynching” of the only visible black guy it has in even a second-tier office. Steele has said that white Republicans are “scared” of him. They are. He loves to play head games with their racial paranoia and insecurities, whether he’s publicly professing “slum love” for the Indian-American Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal, or starting a blog on the R.N.C. site titled “What Up?,” or announcing that he would use “fried chicken and potato salad” to recruit minority voters. As long as the G.O.P. remains largely a whites-only country club, Steele has job security. But he had real reason to fear some new restraints on the cash box; last year the party was driven to write a rule requiring him to get approval for expenditures over $100,000.
On Jan. 9 The Washington Post ran a front-page article headlined “Frustrations With Steele Leaving G.O.P. in a Bind,” reporting, among other embarrassments, that the party had spent $90 million during Steele’s brief reign while raising just $84 million. Enter “Game Change,” right in the nick of time for Steele to pull off his own cunning game change. On Jan. 10 he stormed “Fox News Sunday” and “Meet the Press” to demand Reid’s head. There has been hardly a mention of Steele’s sins since. He can laugh all the way to the bank.
His behavior is not anomalous. 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.
It would be nice to believe that the scam artists and kleptomaniacs-by-principle of the Republicans, having been temporarily deterred from their full-scale looting of the national Treasury and the global economy, are starting to turn their rapacious appetites upon each other…
Ian
Yesterday as I walked to work I could not help but think how Michael Steele could be in the same political party as Richard Shelby, Jefferson Baeureguard Sessions III, Trent Lott, or Jim Demint. All of these senators win their elections by racially polarizing the electorate and making their own constituents ‘the other’. Michael Steele lived in Maryland, surely he must have seen first hand some ugly racial politics.
The conclusion that I came too was that Mr. Steele was secretly working undercover for the Dems.
Joey Maloney
It would be nice to believe that the scam artists and kleptomaniacs-by-principle of the Republicans, having been temporarily deterred from their full-scale looting of the national Treasury and the global economy, are starting to turn their rapacious appetites upon each other…
I’ll believe that when I see them actually knawing open each others’ abdomens to get at the tasty, tasty entrails inside. Live on Washington Journal.
Now, since I’m 7-10 timezones away from most of you all and never get to post in the pet/open threads until they’ve filled up and died:
Calico tries a prison break, photos and video
Tattoosydney
@asiangrrl
I’m over here now.
asiangrrlMN
@Joey Maloney: Awwwww! Go, Calico, go! (Though, perhaps that is not her name?). She’s a cuuuuutie!
Oh my god! You have a goooorgeous black kitteh, too! I can tell I’m going to be leafing through your photo album!
And, I gotta say, I kinda love the fact that Michael Steele is rolling his own party, in part because of the bind their racial bigotry has put them in. He’s still a clown and a buffoon, but I still giggle a bit at his playing the old white guys in his party.
ETA: @Tattoosydney: Cool. Was wondering about your cryptic message on the last thread. You feeling better?
@Sly: Pish-posh! Nothing is bad for Republicans, didncha know?
Sly
Steele spent millions on the off-year elections in 2009, only to get two governors and lose two congressional seats. While people like Erickson were promoting it as a sweeping victory for conservativisamalism, the elders of the party likely saw it as a disaster.
I have to go back and look for the source, but there was a calculation that showed that the RNC would be out of campaign money before the last ad rush in Oct. 2010 if their current spending and intake stayed on the current course. Meanwhile the SRCC and the NRCC (Senate and House Campaign Committes) have not been getting the donations they need. The NRCC actually generated a third of the money that their Democratic counterpart, the DCCC, did in 2009.
That’s really, really bad. For Republicans.
asiangrrlMN
@Joey Maloney: I am dying from kitty cuteness here. All your cats are squee-worthy, and I especially have my eye on the black honey.
@arguingwithsignposts: Yeah! No kidding! Where’s Smudgey?
arguingwithsignposts
Just an update from Canada – canadians know how to party. I am sooooo jealous. The students here look at our gov’t and wonder what the f**k we are thinking.
arguingwithsignposts
@asiangrrlMN:
Say wha?
looking forward to getting home to my smudge.
asiangrrlMN
@arguingwithsignposts: There’s the darling Smudgey! I bet she misses you, too!
Col. Klink
Steele could hit for the GOP cycle if he worked some Televangelism into his act.
Nethead Jay
Morning everybody. Yikes, you’re up early, Anne Laurie.
Regarding Steele, that really is a cogent piece of analysis. Suddenly a lot of things start making sense, though in a somewhat absurd way. Looking at it this way, I can kinda understand some of the people fulminating angrily his way. But they made their bed and now will have to live with the consequences. Hope he keeps screwing with them, it makes for rnjoyable watching.
@arguingwithsignposts: Awww, that’s such a cute pic.
robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles
I think what bothers me a great deal about Steele is that the country is in a very difficult time right now. His lack of seriousness in everyday goings-on, let alone trying to deal in policy, is awful and embarrassing. His buffoonery has no place in the political landscape with so many disasters at hand.
JSD
It’s actually kind of scary to think that Steele might actually be that smart as well as that manipulative. In Republicans you usually have one or the other, but not both in a single person.
Joey Maloney
Aw, who’s a widdle Smudgie-wudgie? :-)
@asiangrrlMN, there’s actually two black cats in that album, both sadly departed. One was poisoned with antifreeze and had to be euthanized – that was a shitty day, let me tell you – and the other scarpered from my new apartment and has apparently vanished into thin air. I spent a month leafleting and walking the area but he’s nowhere to be found. But there’s a large population of strays, semi-feral, and ferals supported by lots of people who put out food so I have to assume that wherever he is he’s doing fine.
Isadore, the calico, is being much more closely supervised when she goes outside.
geg6
The GOP’s situation with Steele is fucking hilarious. Their cynical choice to make him chairman has really put them in a bind and it gives me a happy to see them squirming.
geg6
Okay, I typed the last comment before reading Rich’s column. It’s truly a tour de force. I’m sure few teabaggers would ever read a Frank Rich column, but they should. They are being manipulated and ripped off and they are simply too stupid and ignorant to see it. It almost makes me sorry for them. Almost.
Joey Maloney
Prison break link corrected. Facebook needs an edit-in-place function.
Batocchio
So, in other words, Steele is doing to the Republicans what the Republicans usually do to everybody else.
Shalimar
@JSD: I’m not sure Steele is really that smart, or he would have figured out a way to manipulate Republicans and keep his job for more than a few years. They really can’t fire their only visible minority this year because of the negative pub before the upcoming elections, but there is also no way they’re going to keep him on for the next cycle given his pathetic fund-raising. I just don’t think it takes that much intelligence to realize that Republican leaders can do anything they want and still fail upwards.
HeartlandLiberal
Since the era of Reagan the Republican party has become the epitome of the party of P.T. Barnum, the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age, combined with the best of the snake oil merchants that roamed the West in the late 19th century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_%28industrialist%29; http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_02/b4016109.htm.
Throw in a healthy serving of diced ‘know-nothing” and good old American “anti-intellectualism”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism.
Top this pie with an icing of the neo-con philosophy of Leo Strauss, a key element of which is the manipulation of the ignorant, gullible masses by pushing into key public offices compliant individuals who can be controlled by the real powers behind the throne, those who “know best” what the future of the American Imperium is (see Project for New American Century). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century.
Bake well for a couple of decades, until the crust turns a rich, well-done color by the end of the Bush/Cheney era.
And what do you have?
The biggest debt in the nation’s history. Ongoing, Orwellian un-ending wars that are destroying our military and economy. Wall Street and investment bankers that now own Congress, and are living high on the hog of tax dollars of the working and middle-class, without which dollars their businesses would have collapsed, leaving them not with millions and millions of “bonus” dollars, but selling apples on the street where they belong.
And we working and middle-class boomers, who were planning to retire starting this year, have watched our retirement funds devastated, and the prospect of a comfortable retirement threatened.
That is the context of RNC chair Steele. Who, by the way, really has no shame whatsoever, considering he heads up a party one of the fundamental tenets of which is pure, un-adulterated racism and classism.
Tattoosydney
@asiangrrlMN:
sorry. Had to go deal with getting a one year old and his mom to the airport. Feeling a little better but I ate something very dodgy, so I suspect the effects will be with me for a while. Still, battling on – not having my holiday spoiled!
ETA: more photos (including Portuguese tart food porn) here: http://m.flickr.com/#/photos/45957530@N02/4281603342/
The Grand Panjandrum
Steele is sly enough to know he can tap into the Christianist audience who regularly send money to the likes of the vile Pat Robertson. A match made in heaven, no? Why not?
Today’s GOP: Proving P.T. Barnum continues to be right in the 21st century.
Ash Can
If Steele can keep playing these guys, more power to him. I can understand robertsdc’s disgust with him, but it’s not as though the Republicans were going to get serious about solving the country’s problems anytime soon anyway.
I do have to wonder, though, whether Steele is doing the Republicans any real good even in the way of optics by staying in his position. Based on the GOP’s lack of popularity among minorities, what good is he actually doing in that respect? If he’s bringing any non-white support to the party, it’s clearly marginal. Shalimar has a good point about the negative publicity involved in forcing Steele out before the elections, but with an electorate already overwhelmingly white and voting accordingly, who that matters to the party is going to care? Add to this a complicit press (I can just hear all the pundits saying, “I think we can all agree that the party had no choice but to get rid of Steele and that they did the right thing,” blah blah blah), and how bad can that bad PR actually end up being?
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy seeing Steele shake these jerks down. Sarah Palin is doing the same thing — I mock her for being an airhead, and in many ways she is, but when it comes to, as Rich calls it, buckraking, she’s unsurpassed. But I have real doubts about the good Steele is doing the GOP even as the window dressing he was designed to be. Not that I want the “GOP elders” to figure this out, mind you…
Napoleon
@Ash Can:
My theory in the past has always been that the Republicans don’t do minority out reach to actually reach out to minorities but to make whites who are uncomfortable with the Republican’s 40 years of race bating feel comfortable with voting Republican. Unfortunately for the Republicans with changing demographics they now need to actually reach out, but they really don’t know how to do that and when you get right down to it they have never done it.
Sly
This gave me a chuckle.
djork
I am seriusly contemplating a career in right wing hucksterism, if my other get rich quick scheme (the lottery) doesn’t pan out.
Keith G
There is of course a delicious irony in all of this. The Boston Tea party was a staged event purely for PR purposes. The American Revolution was, at first, conceptualized by a few wealthy men angered that British policies were in part hurting their bottom line.
Advocates for the common man such as Paine and Henry disowned the results of revolution once they caught a sniff of what the “Founders” were building.
So, the poor ol’ teabaggers – their entire founding image is built on deception. Rubes being used by their betters.
Same as it ever was.
SiubhanDuinne
@Joey Maloney: Is there any way for non-Facebookers to see the kitteh pictures?
SiubhanDuinne
Heh. If my comment at #27 makes it out of the moderation corner, I’d love to know what triggered the filter. No links, no bad words (AFAIK).
kommrade reproductive vigor
I live for the day when Steele starts quoting St. Ron’s 13th Commandment. Just hope I’m not hit by the shrapnel of exploding GOPer skulls.
The GOP is under many delusions. Steele is in his spot because they believe African-Americans REALLY are that stupid. The other GOP delusion at work here is that “White Guilt” drove many Caucasians to vote for Obama.
Steele is supposed to make it OK to vote R by imparting a little bit of Blackness to every GOP candidate (can you say photo op?), no matter how much of a race-baiting bigoted fuck the candidate happens to be.
If the GOP gets nailed during the next election cycle they’ll find some reason to get him out of there and put Palin in his place. That would be a common sense solution to all of those gosh-darned financial problems. Also!
kommrade reproductive vigor
@SiubhanDuinne: Did you mention S O C 1 AL ISM? A while ago someone pointed out s pe c i al ist also sets it off.
soonergrunt
@Sly: The Pat Roberts Voodoo doll is now up to $510.00
WereBear
@kommrade reproductive vigor: Har. Going from Steele to Palin is frying pan to fire in terms of spending.
Besides, she has a comfy gig on FAUX, nodding and looking serious.
Brian J
Doesn’t the fact that, even in this age of supremely trumped up scandals, outrages based on nonsense and lies, and situations where the louder and more unoriginal your thinking is–in other words, where it’s easy to drum up a scandal and make it stick– he’s failed to be even remotely effective indicate his competence? He should have a fairly easy time of trying to do what the Republicans do best, but he can’t. He’s an idiot, sure, but he’s also an example of EPIC FAIL.
Napoleon
@soonergrunt:
Huh, what are you talking about?
SiubhanDuinne
@komrade reproductive vigor: Oh no, I’ve been aware of those internet traditions for a long time. But I did make reference by name to a certain popular social networking site (on which Joey Maloney posted his kitteh pictures). Maybe WP is jealous of FB.
SiubhanDuinne
Test:
Facebook
SiubhanDuinne
Another test:
Non-Facebookers
Brian J
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
I don’t believe Steele is there because Republicans believe Steele is stupid. I think he’s there because, as you said, they are delusion and are under the impression that fixing the party’s issues with minorities as is easy as putting a black man in as heady of the party. Not shedding or marginalizing the racially insensitive members of the party, not tailoring pitches of their current policies to attract minorities nor finding attractive candidates to represent those policies, not moderating some policies in order to expand the tent. No, instead, their solution was to try to change their image in the most superficial way, not because they felt blacks and other minorities were stupid, but because they, themselves, are delusion, or perhaps just stupid.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Heh. It would be easier than the traditional route, which involves getting a BBD (Doctor of Bible Banging). Better hurry though, the field is getting very crowded.
@SiubhanDuinne: Well, it wouldn’t surprise me if the phucking philter bans certain words at random.
Brian J
@Sly:
Which is good news for conservatives?
Seriously though, I hope news of this development stays under the surface until, oh, August or September, or whatever point is late enough for more donations not to make a big difference. Combined with Democratic fund raising efforts staying the course or getting better, along with legislative victories, this should hamper their efforts to make major gains.
SGEW
re: filter word
I’m pretty sure that the word for a talent agent is verboten in WP; i.e., a “b00ker.”
So “Facebook” is ok, but not a “faceb00ker.”
[ETA: Here’s the spam filter list: link]
Matthew Hooper
The Republicans somehow got it into their heads in the past few years that the way to win elections was to behave the way that they thought the Democrats behaved. They assumed that issues of race and gender were just superficial head-count issues used to win over votes… so they did superficial things to try and win those groups over. It’s only now that they’re seeing the difference (or they would, if they gave it a lick of thought, which they won’t).
SiubhanDuinne
@SGEW and krv: Yeah, I tested just that word and it sent me back to moderation.
Shalimar
@Ash Can:
Limbaugh. Beck. etc. They like Steele, because all the racist crap he spews can’t really be racist if a black guy says it, so it must not be racist when the white talk show host says it either. Steele is good for that, and he provides lots of controversy to talk about, so he is good for ratings too. Steele isn’t good for the Republican party, but I don’t think people like Limbaugh and Beck really care about that as long as they are doing well. Ratings are better in the minority anyway.
SiubhanDuinne
@SGEW: BTW, thanks for that link. I had misplaced it. I guess what always has me scratching my head in puzzlement is what they find so offensive about the terms on the list in the first place. We all regularly write much more vulgar or scatological or profane words on this site a few brazilian times a day and WP never blinks. So strange.
SGEW
@SiubhanDuinne: It’s a spam filter, intended to limit commercial intrusions by automatically generated comments; so, therefore, comments mentioning services or products that are commonly pushed by spambots are flagged, while comments mentioning, say, skull-fucking or cock-punching are not.
SiubhanDuinne
@SGEW. Ah, thank you. Duh, I should have figured that out. For some reason I always interpret it as a kind of moral scold.
rob!
I’d like to see a Michael Steele/Sarah Palin Thunderdome kind of thing.
The Republic of Stupidity
Hah!
Now that is funny…
Perchance Mikey can line up a lucrative deal to pitch KY jelly while he’s at it… it would appear he’s a master at using it…
The Republic of Stupidity
@Shalimar:
Indeedy… indeedy…
Some folks just loves themselves some persecution to decry…
As long as it doesn’t get… ya know… tooo real… or actually PAINFUL…
Heresiarch
Allow me to say:
Ha! Ha! Ha!
That is all.
asiangrrlMN
@Joey Maloney: Oh, I haz a sad now. :(. I hope disappearing black cat is living off the hog, and good-bye to the black cat who was poisoned (boo on the poisoner).
@Tattoosydney: YUM! Good thing you threw the word ‘food’ in there, otherwise my mind would have gone in a very different direction. I love your pics.
The Raven
Google’s embeddable Haitian people-finder:
http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/
John, perhaps this would be a good thing to front-page.
Ella in NM
@HeartlandLiberal:
This has to be one of the best summations of Republicanism I have read in a long time.
Catsy
@SGEW: I’m still in awe of the incompetence and laziness of the person who wrote the original spam filter. It really is not that difficult to write a filter in such a way that it doesn’t trap the offending words if they are a substring of another word that is valid. Instead, we get idiocy like this: trapping words such as “specia1ist” or “socia1ist” simply because they contain “cia1is” as a substring.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, the filter traps “sh0es”. Just how retarded was the guy who originally put this together?