Lesbian Rhodes scholar and prison AIDS activist turned Air America radio jockette and MSNBC liberal commentator Rachel Maddow simply HATES Tea Partiers.   It should therefore come as no surprise that she would attribute the recent Republican revolt in New York’s 23rd district to astroturfing, ginned up by the likes of Dick Armey and FreedomWorks. 

On the November 3 broadcast of her show, Maddow said:

One point of interest in the New York 23 race has been the involvement of the ostensibly grassroots, but corporate-funded organization FreedomWorks, one of the many outside organizations that came in and sort of big-footed this local Republican Party race there. [Emphasis added]

Ostensibly grassroots?  I’m no Rhodes scholar, but I’m pretty sure she’s implying that FreedomWorks is NOT a grassroots organization.  The reason?  Because it is “corporate-funded.” 

So . . . if a group that organizes communities accepts money from corporations, said group can no longer be considered ”grassroots.”  Therefore, ACORN is not a grassroots organization, either, since it has extorted, er received millions of dollars from banks and corporations. 

But Maddow reserves her condemnation of ostensibly grassroots organizations to FreedomWorks, not ACORN.  In fact, Maddow is ACORN’s  biggest cheerleader.  A google search of “site:youtube.com rachel maddow acorn”  yielded the following hits, among others:

Rachel Maddow: The Truth About The Lies About Acorn
Rachel Maddow: Lies About Acorn & Something Unconstitutional?
Rachel Maddow: The Acorn Attack

Clearly, Maddow has a “thing” for ACORN. 

But let’s go back to the Republican revolt in New York’s 23rd district.  Later in the program, Maddow gave her explanation for the townhall outburts that occurred across the country this past August:

The reason that sort of thing happened in so many different town hall meetings during the month of August all around the country is in part because those things were not spontaneous. [Emphasis added]

Maddow goes on to discuss a memo authored by a Conecticut man named Bob MacGuffie that was supposedly circulated before one or more townhall meetings, urging people to essentially disrupt the meetings Alinsky style.  Maddow’s feigned outrage was, to put it mildly, unconvincing.  Maddow’s slobbering love affair with ACORN makes her faux outrage all the more laughable.

“Yes, but what does this have to do with NY23? ” you ask.

Maddow:

In our reporting over the summer, we described the author of that disrupt the town halls memo as a FreedomWorks volunteer, because of the extreme behavior at some town halls and the amount of attention they got, FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey tried to disassociate himself and his organization from that memo specifically on “Meet the Press” while at the same time attacking me for us reporting on it.

So, let’s thread the needle here.  Maddow contends that the Republican revolt in New York’s 23rd district was astroturfed by FreedomWorks, which is not a bonafide grassroots organization because it accepts donations given freely by evil corporations (unlike ACORN which only accepts money it can extort from corporations).  And to prove her point, Maddow accuses FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey of commiserating with the author of a memo supposedly circulated before some townhall meetings in August.

What rubbish.  I would expect more of a Rhodes scholar.

Chris Rowan