Well, Joe Conason takes a look at the glass house and the inhabitants who are doing the major stone-throwing, and finds some truly incredible characters.
[Club for Growth president Stephen] Moore and his club of corporate Republicans have a long history of stirring up Midwestern rubes with demagogic advertising, but this ad's script achieves new heights of hypocrisy. "Hollywood-loving?" Not long ago, Moore declared himself "honored" to accept an advisory position in the new administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, an actor not known for his adherence to "Middle America values."
That's only the first layer of phoniness in Moore's attack. There is in fact nothing "middle-class" or "Middle American" about the Club for Growth, an outfit financed and operated by such wealthy ideologues as Thomas "Dusty" Rhodes, Richard Gilder and Lawrence Kudlow.
Rhodes spent nearly two decades at Goldman Sachs. Gilder has been a stockbroker since 1954 and operates his own firm. Kudlow, of course, is the genial CNBC host and Wall Street economist (whose style of Savile Row tailoring is rarely seen in the barbershops of middle-class Middle America). All three gentlemen reside in New York City, a place even more akin to Sodom than Burlington, Vt.
And let's not forget Club for Growth co-founder Ed Crane, the president of the Cato Institute, where Moore himself is a senior fellow. What would Iowa's middle-class Middle Americans think of Cato's ongoing advocacy of full drug legalization? How would that couple leaving the barbershop feel about Cato's staunch opposition to the war in Iraq, and almost every other exercise of American military power abroad?
I wouldn't be surprised if many Iowans and even more Vermonters wish Moore would take his right-wing freak show back to Wall Street and K Street. That would be the most polite way to put it.
