The conservative clown show - Operation: Blame the Liberals

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Saturday morning at the Capitol started with a bout of déjà vu: House Republicans gathering in a basement, learning that their latest shutdown demands would not be met. Around 10 a.m., when the meeting ended, Republicans had little good to say about the latest offers from the president and the Senate. Most of them avoided the cameras and returned to their offices. A handful of members spun out of the room and headed to the park on the west of the Capitol, just a couple hundred feet away.


They found sanctuary inside a small, triangle-shaped clearing blocked off by portable fences. Tea Party Patriots and FreedomWorks, two of the movement’s oldest organizing forces, had asked activists to help “fix up D.C.” by filling in for the furloughed custodians of the national mall. Glenn Beck, who’s been paid at least $1 million to work with FreedomWorks, had flown in to lead the clean-up. Utah Sen. Mike Lee, one of the capos of the “defund Obamacare” campaign, was his co-star. A hundred or so people gathered around the fences, snapping photos and listening to members of Congress update Lee and Beck.


We were told in conference that the president wants to use the Senate to break Republicans,” Rep. Michele Bachmann told Lee. Lee explained that some silly Republicans were already willing to try to cut a deal with Obama—“trust us this time.” Beck sketched out his speech and smiled for photos with Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, who’d come wearing jeans and a green trucker’s hat that read, “VOLUNTEER.” None of them got any privacy to strategize until FreedomWorks’ outreach director Deneen Borelli stepped up to a microphone to address the crowd, the noise drowning out everything else.








“Today brings back great memories for me,” she said, “because four years ago FreedomWorks had the amazing march on D.C.—9/12. And that event drew over 800,000 freedom-loving Americans. Because of that rally I was launched as a national figure to stand for liberty.”


Anyone not at this rally would have been confused. Was Borelli, the author of Blacklash: How Obama and the Left Are Driving Americans to the Government Plantation, a “national figure?” Was it the best idea to invoke the heyday of the Tea Party, when scores more people could have flooded the space around the Capitol? Two weeks into the shutdown, Sen. Ted Cruz’s “grassroots tsunami” to defund Obamacare hasn’t materialized. Polling suggests that the Republican position is waning from week to week.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/10/glenn_beck_sarah_palin_and_tea_party_republicans_clean_up_the_mall_conservative.html