Dick Armey: shock trooper, grifter, blackmailer

Dick Armey: shock trooper, grifter, blackmailer

by digby

So basicallyDick Armey blackmailed Freedomworks' sugar daddy and is now admitting to being a whore. Well, why not? It's not as if the man's ever been an upstanding citizen.

My favorite clip of Dick remains:


Aside from the sexist creep's snide, anachronistic behavior toward Joan Walsh, if you watched that clip you saw Limbaugh's early complaints about being asked to "hope" the president will succeed. Oldies like me will recall that Dick Armey was the guy who said this earliy in Clinton's term:

In 1994, he told [the Democrats] "your president is just not that important for us."

Hardcore Republicans never acknowledge a Democratic president. In fact, they start with the proposition that they cannot possibly be legitimate because they are Democrats and go from there. The Obama administration should not have been surprised by this.

Armey was one of the modern conservative movement's shock troops and rose in the leadership along with Gingrich. He was a tea partier before tea partiers were cool.
The funny thing is that Armey was the right wing's favorite "economist" in the congress for many years but apparently didn't figure out how to properly milk the spoils system he helped build. So now, at the age of 72, he has resorted to blackmailing his wingnut welfare benefactor. What a perfect ending to a thoroughly ignominious career.