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Dick Armey, Retroactive Civil Rights Champion

From Politico's report on tea parties and right-wing activism, including Dick Armey's FreedomWorks:

“As an organization, we have been very closely studying what the left has been doing,” explains FreedomWorks press secretary Adam Brandon, who says he was given a copy of “Rules for Radicals” when he took his current job . Brandon describes the Sept. 12 rally in D.C. as the “culmination of four years worth of work” and says that organizers were “incredibly conscious” of the symbols they chose.

With the logo, he explains, they were “trying to evoke the imagery of the counterrevolutionary protests of the 1960s that captured the imagination of the world.” And as for the phrase “March on Washington,” Brandon says, “this is something people said in the office. If we had been alive back in the 1960s, we would have been on the freedom bus rides. It was an issue of individual liberty. We’re trying to borrow some from the civil rights movement.”...

Dick Armey did not, in fact, participate in the freedom rides of the 1960s. Brandon said the former House majority leader was an undergrad in Jamestown, N.D., at the time, working his way through school putting up electric poles, and “wasn’t politically active at the time."

Well, naturally. Besides, the breaches of liberty occuring during the 1960s -- denying people the right to vote, beating anybody who objected, etc. -- weren't the kind of thing that would make a freedom-minded young person want to become politically active anyway. It's not like today, where the government is trying to provide health insurance for people who don't have it. You've got to prioritize.