“Rogues of K Street” – GP Makes Playboy Mag’s Tea Party Spread

[Valin]

Gateway Pundit:

Jim Hoft
June 17, 2010

Cool.
Playboy magazine features an excellent piece on the tea party movement this month written by an TP insider:

The Rogues of K-Street: Confessions of a Tea Party Consultant

This is actually a fair piece on the tea party movement and on the many movers and shakers in the national tea party scene. There’s quite a bit of focus on Team Tea in St. Louis led by Hennessy, Loudon, Loesch, Hoft, Moore, (Sharp, Darin, Jim, Jon, John, Stephanie, Fred, etc.).

OK, let me be honest, I was a pumped to read this (in Playboy) about Gateway Pundit:

Tea Party members are into less sexy things than a missing birth certificate, such as the national debt and privacy. They watch Fox News and read blogs. They’re conservatives, but don’t call them Republicans. They are intense followers of bloggers such as Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit), Andrew Marcus (Founding Bloggers), Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) and Mike Flynn (Big Government.com). BigGovernment.com was created last fall as part of Andrew Breitbart’s growing media empire.

(Snip)

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Before you ask...YES I really read the article!

(Excerpt)
Everything I know about being a good consultant comes from Fight Club. Discretion is everything. Rule number one is you don’t talk about consulting for the Tea Party. Rule number two is you don’t talk about consulting for the Tea Party. The story about the wild characters who are shaping this campaign cycle is worth telling, but please excuse my anonymity.

I hold as many meetings as possible over Tanqueray and tonics at the St. Regis hotel on K Street in Washington, D.C. The bar is dark and private, with comfortable couches. Even the gin tastes better there. On weekday afternoons the only people in the bar are foreigners and political consultants long past caring about who actually wins.

"You’re going to see something spectacular," an old friend who has a knack for black-bag operations said as he proudly downed his vodka. "About a month from now you’ll see ACORN explode from within." Right on schedule a video was released that showed undercover conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles getting advice from employees at the Baltimore office of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now on how to smuggle underage El Salvadoran girls into a fictitious brothel.

That’s when I realized this isn’t an average fringe movement. This one is credible, legit and—for the first time in a decade—scaring the crap out of the left. In my years as a campaign hack and then as a consultant, I’ve created more than my share of fake grassroots organizations. Some were downright evil but effective beyond expectations. Did you get an automated call from the sister of a 9/11 victim asking you to reelect President Bush in 2004? That was me. Did you get a piece of mail with the phrase supports abortion on demand as a means of birth control? That may have been me too.

Conservatives had been trying to take down ACORN for three decades. Where they failed, BigGovernment.com and my friends succeeded. In one magnificent explosion, a loose group of troublemakers, libertarians and Republicans took its first scalp. Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chair of ACORN’s Maryland chapter, told The New York Times in March, "That 20-minute video ruined 40 years of good work."

The ACORN blood tasted good. Shortly after, a core group of about 30 of us convened for the first time. It was the kind of conference call during which no one, except the handful with nothing to lose, offered last names. But it didn’t matter. I’d been around long enough to know many of the people by voice. Most of our talk was devoted to rants about the K Street lobbyists who are ruining the GOP. There I sat, in the quiet corner of a coffee shop on K Street, listening to a conference call beating the s^#@ out of the people who keep me in business.

The cynical among us think it’s a group of peasants with pitchforks controlled by an underground cabal of Glenn Beck, wealthy donors and the guys who killed JFK. But the worst thing I can say about the Tea Party I work for is that it can make lots of noise but can’t win without professional help. I love the irony of helping run this organization from the St. Regis Bar......(Snip)