Thursday, January 29, 2009

Joan Walsh: 'Battling Dick Armey'

Column here.

The most charitable explanation I can come up with for former GOP Rep. Dick Armey's wild retro outburst at me on Wednesday's "Hardball" is that he knows I'm a huge "Mad Men" fan, and wanted to throw me back into the sad straitened sex roles of the early 1960s, but without the afternoon cocktails or Joan Holloway's hot dresses.

Apparently I've been lucky. I've never before had a man try to win an argument -- public or private -- by saying "I am so damn glad that you could never be my wife," as Armey famously did, when he ran out of arguments about President Obama's recovery bill. But I should have known that the guy best known for calling Barney Frank "Barney Fag" would throw me a strange curveball. As far as I can tell, it flew around and hit Armey in the face. Just like the Rush Limbaugh insults we were supposed to be debating, it showed the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the right-wing political project in 2009. Judging from my e-mail and blogosphere reaction, Armey's attack on me was as effective as the House Republicans voting unanimously against the stimulus bill that passed the House overwhelmingly without them. (Glenn Greenwald links Armey's crazy assault with his impotent former House minions' latest moves very well, here.) . . .

See her column here also (includes videos).

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