The BEAST: Buffalo's Best Fiend

DLC Moose shit

A Letter to Marshall Wittman

by Matt Taibbi

What about a [Democratic Party] Chairman who hails from the reddest of red states, a former Republican, ex-union official who worked with devout Christians and is Jewish and has well-defined ties to the McCainiac-independent voter? And all of the candidates express their appreciation of the power of the Internet, why not a Chairman who resides there? The Moose—what's not to like!

The antlered one could certainly give the donkey a well-placed kick in the behind and transform him into a reform animal. And the Moose certainly knows the adversary since he was once privy to the counsels of the DeLays, Santorums, Norquists and Reeds.

The Moose shouldn't make a hasty decision. Perhaps he should embark upon a listening tour of the blogosphere and hear from the Mooseketeers.

—Marshall Wittmann

How about it, Mooseketeers? Marshall Wittmann, the former legislative director for the Christian Coalition and also a veteran talking head of such excellent organizations as the Heritage Foundation and the Hudson Institute (which hypes him as "one of the nation's most quoted analysts"), offers himself as a candidate for the chair of the Democratic Party. Wittmann, you see, is now an operative at the Democratic Leadership Council—he got the policy operative spot that opened up when Al From and Bruce Reed were tipped off that their initial choice, Mobutu Sese Seko, had been dead for years. So they brought in Wittmann, whose chief credentials were that he used to stand guard for Ralph Reed at church rest rooms whenever the latter ducked out of evening mass to jerk off to Ranger Rick centerfolds.

Wittmann calls himself the "Bull Moose," and his blog, bullmooseblog.com, is one of two blogs funded and maintained by the Democratic Leadership Council. The other, as previously noted in this space, is the no-less-loathsome newdonkey.com, maintained by the noted corporate whore and windbag, Will Marshall.

A moose, and a donkey. The Democratic Leadership Council, it seems, is a place where soulless 50-year-old men can dress up in Garanimals and e-gloat about shooting our votes into space. It is really too bad the guillotine has gone out of style.

The above passage from Wittmann came from his Jan. 6 entry, and invited his "Mooseketeer" readers to respond to his little bit of self-promoting whimsy at this address: bullmooseblog@gmail.com. I encourage readers of this column to send their own letters. I wrote one. Here it is:

Dear Fuckhead,

No, I don't think you should run for the chair of the Democratic Party. I think you should get into your car, check into the nearest dingy motel, eat one last cheeseburger and blow your brains out.

Let's start with something small—your nickname. To begin with, it's taken. It belonged to a person that the world has judged to be of genuine historical import, a man with balls, a person who, by all accounts, literally bowled crowds of people over with his personality every time he entered a room.

You, on the other hand, are a nobody, a bureaucrat, a stuffed suit. You don't have a single idea of your own. You have to honk in order to get served at the local drive-thru. You think you're being cute and funny by taking Teddy Roosevelt's nickname, but it's not funny. It's sad. What you are, exactly, is a high school nerd who starts a Van Halen cover band and does David Lee Roth kicks when he rocks out in his garage in front of his only friend's eight-year-old brother. Outside that garage, the whole world concludes that you will never reproduce. That's you in your DLC offices, playing at being Teddy Roosevelt.

Continuing on with the theme of your nickname: It's not lost on anybody that this animal-cracker blog business is a cute little insider thing among political operatives in Washington, a little bit of fun people like you, Will Marshall, and the Yak, Ed Gillespie, add to your professional profiles. Politics is a serious business, but this is your way of saying, mainly to each other, that it's not all serious, but also a little bit of a game, too.

It's significant that you and Marshall started your animal blogs after Gillespie, the triumphant Republican, started the Yak—just as you're now pushing a "Pennsylvania Avenue Project" to match Tom DeLay's "K Street Project," and just as you wrote a long essay pleading with Democrats to come up with their own version of Norquist's coalitions and Gingrich's "Contract With America." Again, you have no ideas of your own; you copy everybody, most enthusiastically the enemy.

But there's a difference between your doing an animal blog and Ed Gillespie's doing an animal blog. The difference is essentially the same difference that separates the Democratic Party from the Republican Party—Ed Gillespie is a winner, you are a loser. The reason Ed Gillespie can pull off treating politics like a game is that it is, and should be, a game to an Ed Gillespie. He is, unabashedly, a professional con artist. That's what a Republican political operative is supposed to do—con Americans who've had their jobs taken away by big business into voting Republican anyway. And when he's done doing that, he's supposed to prance around the beltway in a cap and bells, laughing to high heaven about how cleverly he screwed the whole country. Government is a big frat prank to people like Norquist and Gillespie, which is why frat names work for them. It could have been Otter or Flounder. Gillespie chose Yak. It makes sense.

Democrats don't want to be conned by their leaders; they want their party to actually represent them. They do not want Otter or Flounder returning from the offices of Eli Lilly or (more to the point) Loral Satellite with some grand "realistic" plan to put a pair of Bible-thumping arms- industry executives on the 2008 ticket. They do not want to be told that this is the only way to get the "McCainiac" swing voter (another one of your cute words) to go against the Republicans the next time around. That shit does not work with the vast majority of Democrats. They want men, not clowns, running things. And you, Marshall Wittmann, are a fucking clown.

Enjoy your time playing with your Teddy Roosevelt blog, Marshall. These salad days are not going to last very long. If even one of your charges should win the DNC chair elections next month, the time will come soon thereafter that you and Al From and Bruce Reed are going to replace the Bushes and Rumsfelds and Ashcrofts as the chief villains among progressive young Americans. The next four years will not see George Bush's face morphed with a white beard onto a photo of bin Laden and sent rocketing around the internet; it will be your face, your beard. The next antiwar demonstrations are not going to see "Buck Fush" and "No Blood for Oil" posters by the tens of thousands racing down the mall; the signs will read "Fuck Al From" and "I Hunt Moose."

People are slowly coming to understand what the DLC is. You are a tiny gang of needle-nosed cubicle slaves hired to sell out the genuine political aspirations of millions of people. You have been hired to rush from newsroom to newsroom badmouthing almost every principle your constituents have held for decades, and to propagandize at every opportunity the hopelessness of such ideas as peace, tolerance and ideological backbone.

It's bad enough that you are who you are. But that you should have fun doing what you're doing is just flat-out intolerable. I wouldn't get too used to it, if I were you. But that's just one Mooseketeer's opinion.

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[sic] - letters

TONGUE LASHING

Dear Vile & Dangerous Misogynists,

As a member of the Buffalo chapter of the Feminine Liberation Organization (no connection whatsoever to FelLatiO), I must tell you that I take great offense at your sophomoronic attempts at mocking the divine act of beaver licking. So what if our future Secretary of State engages in a periodic tongue lashing? Does it frighten your xenophobic male staff that a woman can satisfy a woman?

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...Marshall Wittmann, the former legislative director for the Christian Coalition and also a veteran talking head of such excellent organizations as the Heritage Foundation and the Hudson Institute (which hypes him as "one of the nation's most quoted analysts"), offers himself as a candidate for the chair of the Democratic Party. Wittmann, you see, is now an operative at the Democratic Leadership Council—he got the policy operative spot that opened up when Al From and Bruce Reed were tipped off that their initial choice, Mobutu Sese Seko, had been dead for years...

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