This report out of Dallas has the fascination of a train wreck:
Speaker Dennis Bonnen apologized Tuesday to his 149 House colleagues for “terrible things” he said about some of them, just hours after more details emerged about slurs uttered by him and chief GOP sidekick Rep. Dustin Burrows.
“It was a mistake,” Bonnen wrote of his and Burrows’ June meeting with longtime conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan, which Sullivan secretly recorded.
“I said terrible things that are embarrassing to the members, to the House, and to me personally,” Bonnen said in an email obtained by The Dallas Morning News. “You know me well enough to know I say things with no filter.” [The Dallas Morning News]
But it’s not Speaker Bonnen who appalls me, as poor as his judgment appears to be. He appears to be the victim of someone truly repellant – this Michael Quinn Sullivan. His story just gets worse:
Sullivan, whose organization has spent millions targeting sitting Republicans it deems insufficiently conservative, has dribbled out the contents of the recording slowly and — for Bonnen and Burrows — painfully. He has refused to let news outlets listen to the recording but has provided it to Republican lawmakers, party officials and conservative activists.
Looks like the Texas GOP has a cancer growing in its midst, doesn’t it?
But it’s not just because Sullivan appears to be a scumball. Sullivan is a “conservative activist”, which means he’s the guy behind the scenes promoting his philosophy. This is not a bad thing in itself, but not only does the above chronicled underhanded tactic of his mark him as dishonorable, but consider this: He doesn’t have any real skin in the game.
Suppose he gets his favored candidates elected, and they pass laws reflecting his philosophy.
Then further suppose those laws lead to sub-optimal results. Oh, let it all hang out – it’s a fucking disaster.
Is he the guy who gets excoriated? No, of course not; his name isn’t on the legislation. Even if he’s fingered, he’ll just shrug and blame his legislative lackeys for not writing the legislation properly, even if it’s word-for-word his.
And because he’s not putting himself in a position where his paw will get burned if he’s wrong, he’ll never learn and thus he’ll continue to be a cancer in the bowels of the GOP. As a frenzied, underhanded ideological zealot, odds are he’ll never have to pay for any negative results coming from his bad ideology.
And that pisses me off.
