The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air. I saw that a million dollars went to Beck this past year, that was the annual expenditure.Former Freedomworks head Dick Armey • Discussing, in an interview with Media Matters for America, the financial relationship his group had with Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, two men the organization paid millions of dollars simply to say good things about Freedomworks and the Tea Party. Armey calls the spending “ineffective,” stating, “If Limbaugh and Beck, if we were using those resources to recruit activists and inform activists and to encourage and enthuse activists, that’s one thing. If we are using these things to raise money; one, it’s a damned expensive way to raise money; and two, it makes raising money an end on to itself not an instrumental activity to support the foundation work that our organization does.” So basically, Freedomworks pays a ton of money to the people that would be most likely to support the Tea Party anyway.
Dick Armey no longer has an armey. He’s stepped down from FreedomWorks, the Tea Party-enabling organization he helped found. ”The top management team of FreedomWorks was taking a direction I thought was unproductive, and I thought it was time to move on with my life,” he told Mother Jones. “At this point, I don’t want to get into the details. I just want to go on with my life.” Could this be an early death knell for the tea party?
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