From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

If conservative leaders no longer even try to offer serious solutions to national problems, nobody should underestimate their capacity or their will to mobilize angry Americans. Behind the April 15 “tea parties” rallying against President Barack Obama’s economic program – promoted as a new phenomenon by Fox News Channel and right-wing bloggers – stands a phalanx of Republicans whose ideology is all too familiar.

At the apex of the tea-party movement, aside from such Fox revolutionaries as Rupert Murdoch, there is a well-funded organization known as FreedomWorks, headed by a former politician named Dick Armey. His past career should be instructive to any starry-eyed citizens who believe that they have at last found the true right-wing revolutionary path.

Back when the Republicans first gained control of Congress more than a decade ago, Mr. Armey, a former economics professor at a small Texas college, was hailed as the author of the Contract with America and led the Republicans as House Majority Leader until his retirement. Having risen to power on the strength of a “tax revolt” against President Bill Clinton’s first budget, which raised rates on the wealthiest Americans to trim the enormous deficit he had inherited from the first Bush administration. That summer Mr. Armey warned of an economic apocalypse – and his party won the midterm election before his predictions could be proved utterly wrong.

As anyone with a functioning memory should know, the Republicans under the leadership of Mr. Armey and his cronies Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay proceeded to rack up excesses in spending and boodling that made the old Democratic Congressional leaders look quite stingy. When he was asked once why he and his G.O.P. comrades were chomping so much more federal pork than the Democrats ever did, he replied bluntly: “To the victors go the spoils.”

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