Say what you will about the tea party but it has been remarkably effective at pushing select fringe candidates to electoral victories.
In late 2009, you would have been hard pressed to find anyone in Washington who would have believed that a Republican would soon fill the Senate seat held for decades by the late Ted Kennedy.
Brown -- a state senator at the time of his election -- was the first in what would become a long line of tea party endorsed candidates with rather colorful pasts.
The traditional media outlets can't get enough of the Tea Party story, even when it doesn't merit it. According to counts of people by independent sources at town hall meetings in August of last year, there were considerably less angry Tea Party folks than there were people generally supportive of the bill, or even people less sure who just came with questions, but the screaming Tea Partiers got all the press. When 200,000 pro-immigration reform activists marched on the Capitol earlier this year on the same day a few hundred tea partiers screamed "nigger" at John Lewis and "faggot" at Berney Frank, guess who got the front page stories? And when progressive forces have taken on establishment Democrats and won big primaries, like when Joe Sestak beat Arlen Specter or when Ann Kuster beat Katrina Swett, it hasn't gotten much attention, whereas the media just can't get them enough of tea party craziness and crazies.
Amazingly enough, though, there is one tea party candidate who, once he won his surprise victory, hasn't gotten much media play: Joe Miller in Alaska. Joe's surprise victory in Alaska stirred up a bit of dust, but then Christine O'Donnell and her masturbation/witchcraft videos came along, and that's the last we heard of poor old Joe. I decided, though, between now and the election, some spotlight ought to be shined on this guy- after all, unlike Christine, he might actually become a Senator.
I'm not going to write a lot about him today, but in the coming weeks there will be much to report, because this guy's past is a piece of work. For today, I will just note one thing, and this is about current times not the past: Mr. Outsider did drop by Washington, DC this week. As much as he rails against the establishment, guess what the first place he dropped by when he came to town. It wasn't a tea party demonstration. It was the offices of DLA Piper, one of the biggest corporate lobbying firms in the country, with a powerhouse corporate client roster second to none, for a fundraiser. And here's the kicker: they don't just lobby for big American corporations. One of their clients is United Arab Emirates in Dubai.
Welcome to Washington, Mr. Miller. Glad you are already getting comfortable with our culture here. Maybe on your next trip out of Alaska, you can take an all-expense paid junket to Dubai.
Here's a real shocker for you: the same people who deliberately misread climate science are now offering a phony explanation for the Alaska primary loss of incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who conceded the race yesterday.
If you listen to the wing nut brigade, they will tell you clean energy/climate legislation did in Murkowski. Phil Karpen -- who, as the policy director of Americans for Prosperity, is as good as on the payroll of Dirty Energy -- said this even before Murkowski bowed out, in an op-ed on FoxNews.com:
"Joe Miller has a narrow lead over Sen. Lisa Murkowski in a surprising Alaska Senate primary. If the absentee ballots break hard for Murkowski she may narrowly escape, but at the moment it looks at least as likely that Miller will pull the upset. If he does, Murkowski's support for energy taxes may be one of the major reasons."
In a sad commentary on modern journalism, this unfounded, inaccurate notion was echoed by Reuters who said, "Murkowski, the most senior Republican on the Senate Energy Committee, has been considered a moderate on several issues and a potential compromise vote on national climate legislation. Miller is on record as denying that human-caused emissions are responsible for climate change."
Even the usually very sharp team at ClimateWire took the bait: "Republican Joe Miller, a former judge with a Yale law degree, showcased Sen. Lisa Murkowski's past support for climate legislation, among other things, before slipping by her at the voting stations Tuesday to capture a 1,900 vote lead with several thousand absentee ballots still being counted."
Well, if there was even a shred of evidence that it was true, this would qualify as an interesting bit of political analysis. Given the lack of evidence, it is just another lie that has filtered in from the crackpot world of climate science deniers to mainstream political reporting.
