05.10.13
Collateral damage: Bigot deals death blow to Heritage
I’d remarked in November that Roscoe Bartlett’s removal from the House of Representatives had crippled the Cult of Electromagnetic Crazy. His caucus leader replacement, Trent Franks of Arizona, is a birther nobody even the most crazy in the GOP pay no mind.
This week the Cult had another spike put through its zombie head with the revelation that the Heritage Foundation’s “immigration study” was co-authored by a man, Jason Richwine, easily tied to a white bigot organization on the web.
I’m not going to go into the details. It’s big news on the political blogs.
But over the years electromagnetic pulse doom, aka the astro-turfing lobby for bombing Iran and buying more missile defense, has also been one of Heritage’s hobby horses.
Heritage Foundation was never a think tank. It’s just another propaganda mill funded by wealth to provide convenient studies and experts for the worst GOP impulses.
So anything that blows it up, like this, is very good.
From Krugman’s blog, this morning:
Wheee! The Heritage Foundation is engaged in frantic damage control; not only did its big anti-immigration-reform report turn out to be a steaming heap of, um, bad research, but one of the co-authors turns out to have a serious white supremacist background.
It would be a terrible thing to happen to a serious think tank. But Heritage isn’t a serious think tank, which means that all of this is just a bit of overdue poetic justice.
Remember, Heritage came up with the ludicrous claim that the Ryan plan would cut unemployment to 2.8 percent, then tried to scrub the result from its records. It produced ludicrous “studies??? purporting to show that small farmers and businessmen were victims of the estate tax. And there are many, many more examples.
So, adios, Heritage and buddies in the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy. It’s been almost twenty years and I’ll miss you. But only a little.
Cult of EMP Crazy — from the archives.