Now, don’t get me wrong, I am sure there are plenty of 90-year-old, Brahmin conservatives who get flummoxed at “the Facebookings.” I am sure there still exist out-of-touch, elder statesmen of the movement that just haven’t caught up with those newfangled Internet tubes that our friend Al Gore created. I am sure that there are more than a handful of aged establishment types shaking their fist at the Fox News and those darn websheets positive that they’ll never catch on, just as they were sure rock-n-roll was a passing fad. But can you be an up and comer in the conservative movement and be wholly unaware of one of the newest icons of conservatives everywhere?

I am here at CPAC this week and just ran into Joe “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher who was telling me about his run for Congress in the 9th Congressional District. Joe made me aware of a hilarious little example of the abject cluelessness of his opponent. So let me introduce to you one Mr. Steve Kruas. Professional auctioneer actually licensed with the Ohio State Ag Department with well over 300 “successful” auctions under his belt. I guess you don’t need the Internets, talk radio and TV news shows to sell used farm equipment.

Anyhoo, the “strong fiscal conservative” is running in the 9th Congressional District GOP Primary against Wurzelbacher both of whom are vying to face Marcy Kaptur (D, OH) in the general election this year. Steve is a bit miffed that Joe isn’t giving him much notice at this point in the campaign.

Certainly, Kraus is happy to link himself with the Tea Party and even helped put on an event in Sandusky, Ohio where he set himself up as a spokesman for those venerable homegrown activists.

But it’s Kraus’ website where all the action is. There Kraus attacks Joe as a scurrilous sort of scoundrel. Why? Well, because Joe claims to be a limited government guy but he and all his friends work for BIG Government, darn it!

Joe the Plumber is a contributor for Biggovernment.com.

His campaign manager Phil Christofanelli was going to school in Missouri and is a contributor at Biggovernment.com.

Dustin Stockton of the Western Representation PAC (based in Nevada I think) solicits money for Joe the Plumber and again is a contributor for Biggovernment.com

Kinda funny all these connections to Biggovernment.com and supposedly they are fighting for limited government.

Maybe I ticked off Andrew Breitbart in a previous life (owner of Biggovernment.com)?

Horrible, right? How could this Wurzelbacher fellow, whoever that is, be claiming to be for small government when he works so darn hard for this BIG GOVERNMENT thingie?

But isn’t it obvious that Kraus doesn’t have any idea what he is talking about?

Yes, BigGovernment.com is a site owned by Andrew Breitbart (whoever that is, eh Stevie?). But BigGovernment.com is not a site that is working to promote big government ideas. It is a site that attacks big government ideas. The site’s subject is big government exposées.

So, one has to wonder how someone can claim to be a tea party conservative — a new movement, mind you, one informed daily by the Internet, talk radio, and TV cable news — and not know who Andrew Breitbart is and what his websites are and do? How can he not understand that Andrew Breitbart and all his minions are not advocates of bigger government? How can he be a new, young conservative and never have become aware of one of conservatism’s most active rock star-like personages?

Go ahead and claim that I am just coming to the defense of my boss and my coworkers here at BigGovernment.com, but come on. Think about it. Can you be a well-informed conservative these days and not be aware of the leaders in your own movement?

You tell me? But what do I know? Not only do I write for this Breitbart fellow’s BigGovernment.com but I also write for his BigJournalism.com site, too. So I must be enamored of fat journalists.

(Reuters) – The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed on Thursday a bill to curb insider trading by lawmakers and other government officials, despite objections from both Democrats and Republicans that it was weaker than a version passed by the Senate last week.

The House voted 417-2 to pass the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, even though it did not include a provision to impose new regulations on Washington insiders who collect “political intelligence” from lawmakers and sell it to Wall Street. The Senate version included this proposal.

House and Senate members are now expected to haggle over the differences between the two bills before sending the legislation to President Barack Obama, who has promised a swift signature.

Read at Reuters

Steve understands that while we’re trying to work our way out of this economic crisis, we have to hold the financial industry accountable to prevent the next one. That’s why Steve wrote a bill that would have taken back the bonuses paid to top executives at Wall Street firms – like AIG – that received federal bailout funds. (Source: Steve Israel For Congress Website)

Did you ever wonder where a self-proclaimed corporate raider and Occupy Wall Street supporter such as Congressman Steve Israel gets his campaign donations from?

According to Open Secrets, Israel has raised $1,581,081 for this election cycle (2011-2012), of which $15,790 comes from small donors, the “average Joe” like you and me.

Another $965,850 was raised from his top 100 donors, an all-star team of big labor and big business; many of those businesses from industries, which based on his committee assignments, Israel is supposed to be overseeing (including those Wall Street firms he talks about on his campaign site). The following takes a look at the donations to his reelection campaign and political action committee (PAC).

Intl Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Service Employees International Union, AFSCME, Asbestos Workers Union, Teamsters Union, United Transportation Union, Plumbers/Pipefitters Union, Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association,  Air Line Pilots Association, American Federation of Teachers, Sheet Metal Workers Union, National Electrical Contractors Association, Mason Tenders District Council of NY, Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen,  National Air Traffic Controllers Association, National Association of Letter Carriers, Boilermakers Union,  Operating Engineers Local 138,  Operating Engineers Union, American Postal Workers Union, Communications Workers of America, Credit Union National Association and National Association of Postal Supervisors.

Among his defense contractor donations are; BAE Systems, Honeywell International,  Northrop Grumman,  Stidd Systems,  L-3 Communications,  Lockheed Martin, Boeing Co, Dasnet, AmerisourceBergen Corp, General Electric, United Technologies, Curtiss-Wright Corp,  and ITT Industries.

Israel also receives almost $39,000 from Big Health-related Corporations such as Henry Schein Inc, the Community Oncology Alliance, the American Hospital Association, US Oncology and Sandata Technologies. I am sure that it has nothing to do with his work in pushing through that big healthcare bill he didn’t read before he voted for its passage.

Big Law Firms: Speaking of healthcare, do you want to know why there is no tort reform in the Obamacare bill? Democratic leaders like Steve Israel will tell you it’s because tort reform hurts the little guy. Sadly that has nothing to do with it, because Tort reform brings down healthcare costs, thus helping the little guy.

The real reason is that for the lack of tort reform is the Democrats get lots of cash from the legal industry. According to Open Secrets almost $1.5 trillion dollars was donated by the legal industry since 1990. Over 71% of those donations have gone to Democratic Party candidates and PACs. So don’t look at the $66,000 Steve Israel got from giant law firms as he is somehow being owned by these firms, think of as he is just following a Democratic Party tradition.

Long Island Congressman Steve Israel can be called Mr. Big. He gets the bulk of his campaign donations, from Big Labor and Big Corporations. Some of these companies operate in the very industries Congressman Israel is supposed to be overseeing.

DNCC Chair Israel’s reliance on campaign donations from the industries he is supposed to be overseeing cannot be good for his constituents. In the end, what is going to sway Steve Israel more, the $965 thousand from big labor and giant corporations, or the $15 thousand he got from folks like you and me? I think you know the answer.

That will not change whether the Establishment’s candidate Mitt Romney wins in November or not.  After the election, the battle really starts; what is happening now are just skirmishes in a fight for control of the Republican Party.  Not the soul of the party – if it had one, it auctioned it off long ago – but the mechanism of the party.  The Grand Old Party matters only as a vehicle to carry our banner forward.

To do that, we need to seize control, and we do that by destroying the Establishment starting next November 7th.

Superficially, it might seem that we – the outsiders, the Tea Party, the conservatives, whatever the label – are outgunned by opponents with their hands on the reins of power, money in amounts we can’t hope to match, and pals in the media backing them.  But if we understand our strengths, and our opponents’ weaknesses, we can not only compete but eventually prevail.

First, let’s understand our opponent.

The GOP Establishment is an amorphous entity composed of politicians, media types, consultants, writers, lobbyists, party hacks and donors whose first priority is protecting their positions and privileges.  Power, and holding onto it, is more important than ideology.  That’s where we conservatives differ – we have no formal power or position, so changing the power structure doesn’t scare us.  We have nothing to lose; the GOP Establishment has everything to lose.

So, how do we beat it?

The Oscar-nominated film Moneyball tells the story of the Oakland A’s of the early 2000’s and how it had to adapt to compete with clubs like the Yankees with payrolls four times its size.  Under manager Billy Beane, the club reassessed what it thought it knew about baseball, gained a clear understanding of what made a team successful, and then focused ruthlessly on the long game to build a winning team.

What is the key to winning?  In baseball, it is runs – you get enough runs over the course of a year, you tend to be a winning team.  That’s the long game; the short game is the game tomorrow afternoon.  It’s nice to win that fight too, but the secret of moneyball is building success over time by playing the numbers.

In politics, winning takes the form of offices.  You win enough political offices, you eventually become the establishment.  And that’s what we want – numbers, as in numbers of offices our people hold.  We want our vision of a free market, Constitution-based, strong America to become the nation’s social paradigm – the right wing equivalent of the left’s current campaign to turn America into a western European welfarocracy.  We do that by getting our people into office in ever greater numbers over time.

That’s the long game, and we won’t lose it.

We won’t lose it because, despite what you see in the media and the rise of moderate Mitt, all of the energy and all of the excitement is with us.  All of it – a bunch of BYU kids bussed into Florida to yell at a Romney rally is not “excitement.”  It’s an admission of defeat.

The most important part of the Tea Party/conservatives’ rise since 2009 has not been its remarkably rapid rise to significance and its ability to affect marquee elections in 2010.  That’s the short game, and while it matters, what matters more is that it drew huge numbers of conservatives into the political process.

The next generation of GOP leaders will be Tea Party/conservatives.  They are the folks starting out now to compete for the kind of local and state party and political offices that lay the foundation for the party’s future.  These offices are vital – they are our farm team, a place for future congressional and senate candidates to gain experience and build resumes while implementing Constitutional conservative policies right now that will improve voters’ lives and win them over to our cause.

Billy Beane’s strategy was to find undervalued players – essentially, to sign players who got a lot of hits but didn’t cost much.  Why pay $7 million for a guy who gets on base 35% of the time when you can pay $600,000 for two guys who each do it 30% of the time?  He bought runs; we “buy” offices, and our currency is commitment, passion and effort.

We are uniquely positioned to do it.  In this environment, the moderates and squishy pseudo-cons that for so long dominated GOP lower offices will be scared off by the volatility of the Tea Party/conservative base.  It’s the Tea Party/conservatives who will be motivated to run, who have the excited backers to man phone banks and walk precincts, who have the passion for it.  Being a precinct captain or central committee member is a pain – you need to really want to do it.  And we do.

Of course, there is no way to centrally implement the strategy like Billy Beane did – he picked the players and built his team.  As the Tea Party/conservatives have shown, they are self-organizing – they don’t need a centralized organization to operate.  Conservative groups can facilitate the trend – running candidate boot camps, perhaps throwing a few dollars to down-ticket races – but this trend is happening on its own.  It’s grassroots, not astroturf.

The GOP establishment, by definition, is centralized.  That can be an advantage, at least in the major races.  There’s no question that the GOP Establishment has the edge in the short game – the money Mitt used to nuke his opponents proves that.  But the Establishment has little ability to influence anything except the most important and visible races – it’s neither that powerful, nor that rich, nor that organized.  This leaves a void that only we Tea Party/conservatives can fill.

So, in the long game, we will take over the GOP from the current GOP Establishment.  The old guard will die out, whether retiring, getting primaried out or being caught tap dancing in airport restrooms.  There’s no coming wave of button-down, “sensible” moderates honing their skills as school board members and rural water panel commissioners.

We are the future.  That’s the long game.  In a decade, the GOP Establishment we know today will be gone, swept away by time, disillusionment and voter disgust.  The nomination of Romney – which seems likely – will be its last hurrah.

Yes, if Romney wins, expect the GOP Establishment to decide that it didn’t need us.  And if it loses, expect it to blame us.  Who cares?  Let it revise history all it likes; its denial and smugness will only keep it from undertaking the kind of serious intropsection that might save it.

The GOP Establishment is a zombie, a dead power structure walking.  It will get a few punches in before it goes down – Exhibit A is Mitt, Exhibit B the pile of bodies that were the Not-Mitts – but go down it will.

The short game is important too as a supporting effort.  Understanding your strategic situation is a key to success, and that sometimes requires accepting hard truths.  The fact is that we are probably only a slight majority of a minority political party.  America is not a Tea Party/conservative nation – not yet.  That’s another critical reason to work at the grassroots and locally, to start implementing policies that will sway more Americans to our banner.  But in the short term, we simply are not strong enough to seize and hold the reins of power at the highest levels of government.

The Tea Party/Constitutional conservative movement is still an immature movement, not in the sense that it is childish but in the sense that we have not yet fully grown to our full strength.  We are having growing pains.  Candidates like the ridiculous Christine O’Donnell or failed Joe Miller in Alaska in 2010 were simply sub-par, but that was not because Tea Partiers are inherently incompetent but because we lacked experience and ended up with some flakes.

That will happen less and less as we grow savvier.  And conservatives will have less need to rally around massively flawed candidates with questionable non-Establishment credentials like Newt Gingrich.  We can and will do better.

That is not to say we should not fight in the short term; we can and should.  The conservative alternatives to Mitt, while each failed for their own reasons, still forced him to the right and are keeping him there.  The threat to Orrin Hatch, who saw his squish buddy Bob Bennett tossed out by Tea Party/conservative backers of the awesome Senator Mike Lee, has turned him sharply back to the right.  This is good.

Richard Lugar is now learning the Tea Party/conservatives are not to be trifled with as Richard Mourdock hits him with a primary challenge.  Also good.  Fear is our friend – if these spineless weather vanes are afraid of us at election time, maybe they’ll vote like conservatives in the off-years.

We need to start planning now for the battle after the election.  If Barack Obama was not such a fundamental threat to the foundation of our democracy, it might be conceivable not to support likely nominee Mitt Romney.  As it is, not voting for Romney is a vote for Obama, and the situation is simply too perilous not to do everything possible to toss Obama out in November.  We need to back Mitt even though we will get no credit for doing so.

If Romney wins, the focus needs to be on keeping him on the right despite his squishy instincts.  The best way to do that is to elect the most conservative Congress possible – and to draw a line in the sand on compromises over issues like repealing Obamacare.  We need to not be shy about the potential for a conservative primary challenger in 2016.

If Obama wins, our goal needs to be to steel the limp noodle spines of the GOP Establishment to fight a no quarter rearguard action against this lawless administration until 2016 rolls around with a crop of potential candidates who won’t seem to have piled out of a clown car.

The key to leveraging wimpy senators and representatives?  The 2014 elections and the ruthless primarying of non-performers.  There is nothing an incumbent hates more than the specter of a brutal primary – and at age five years, the Tea Party/conservatives will have a lot more experienced, savvy candidates looking to move up and ready to strike if they sense weakness in the guy holding what they see as their next job.  Again, fear of the ballot box is our ally.

Besides political offices, the Tea Party has a unique capability to undercut the current GOP-oriented media/think tank establishment.  Much of the conservative media and academia are already Tea Party/conservative-friendly.  The rest will find themselves marginalized more and more if they continue to distance themselves from the Tea Party/conservative insurgency.  And the Tea Party/conservative insurgency is, of course, actively creating its own outlets (like Big Government and the other Breitbart sites) as well as institutions and events, like BlogCon 2012.

Here are the facts:  We are getting stronger every day.  They are getting weaker.  And a little political moneyball – putting our strengths against their weaknesses in the long game – will do a great deal to hasten the GOP Establishment’s demise.

And no one will miss it.

And I don’t understand that concern. It is the theory of most Democrats that giving money to people stimulates the economy. It should be of no concern to anyone whether that money is used to stimulate patrons of a strip club, liquor store owners, or casino magnates (who BTW are often HUGE political contributors).

The bill is almost completely futile. It won’t insure that welfare money is not spent at a strip club; it only means that the ATM at the gas station across the street from the strip club is going to see a lot more traffic.

This is just the kind of government bias, that gives legitimate business a bad name. Certainly those girls are working as hard as any SEIU employee; whose pensions were paid out of stimulus funds, while they protested in Wisconsin. Money spent on bikini wax, cover stick, and glittery lingerie will trickle down through the economy just like any other stimulus package.

If that money was earmarked for scientific research on the anthropological roots of exotic dancing and its impact on global warming; or if it were an NEA grant to promote the American Folk legacy of lap dancing, there would be no question whether taxpayer money should eventually find its way into a g-string. The welfare recipient should not be punished, since he is actually a victim of a public education system, that did not teach him how to write a proper grant proposal.

Meanwhile, spending money at a casino is no less risky than “investing” in green energy. At the rate subsidized industries like Solyndra and Ener1 have been flying down tubes, a crap shot seems like a much more conservative measure than putting half a billion on Solyndra to win.

And what is wrong with using an EBT card at a liquor store? What the bill effectively does, is limit the amount of ATMs in poor neighborhoods. Many ATMs are privately owned, and grocery stores in poor neighborhoods won’t want to file the paperwork (and campaign contributions) necessary to prove they’re not a “liquor store.” Even if they are a liquor store, there are plenty of legitimate State Approved® items available in liquor stores, like tomato juice, citrus, and Lotto tickets. I might add that most grocery stores not only sell cigarettes and liquor, they sell all the ingredients necessary to make meth. There are a lot of things more intoxicating than liquor, one of them being congressional power

Because, ultimately, what business is it of the government to decide which decisions are made? In this country, we’ve decided that poor people should get free money. There is no way the government can absolutely ensure it isn’t spent on stupid things. (In many cases, it is those same stupid things that caused recipients to be on welfare on the first place.) And does the government have any moral authority in the first place? They can’t even prevent themselves from spending it on stupid things. Which is why we’re 16 trillion dollars in debt.

I think we need a Congressional Budget Integrity Now for Children and Families Act of 2012.

He’s held big gigs at BMW and Ford.  He also worked way up the food chain at (now $85 billion bailed-out) Chrysler and General Motors (GM) – retiring as GM’s Vice Chairman in 2010.

And he has recently written a piece:

Chevy Volt And The Wrong-Headed Right

…in vociferous defense of the Chevy Volt.

You know, the more-than-$200,000 in government-subsidies-per-unit-sold Volt.

The overproduced, unprofitable, unpopular, combustible Volt.  (And January 2011’s sales were no less disappointing.)

That Chevy Volt.

Are we on the Right wrong-headed?  Let’s take Mr. Lutz’s piece piecemeal and see.

The recent media coverage of so-called “Chevrolet Volt fires,” especially by the conservative talk shows and Fox News, has attracted my attention and ire.

Let’s set out the facts (and feel free to check them yourself):

Don’t mind if we do.

1) Not one Chevrolet Volt has ever caught fire in normal use or in accidents. Not a single one.

Fundamentally untrue, as we laid out in great detail after last week’s House Oversight Volt hearing.

From our piece:

There were in fact three other, private-owner Volt fires.  None of which involved Volts that were in crashes.

These three fires involved Volts that were simply garaged or recharging – i.e. “in normal use.”

More from Mr. Lutz:

2) The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), even after the highly artificial crash test (placing the car on its back, even though it did not roll over in the test) nevertheless awarded the Volt NHTSA’s highest crash-safety rating: 5 stars. Volt is supremely safe.

But there wasn’t just one NHTSA fire – there were three.

More from us:

The one NHTSA Volt fire discussed at the hearing was not the only NHTSA Volt fire that occurred.  In November, there were two others.

After conducting three different tests two weeks ago, the NHTSA found that the Volt’s battery either caught fire or began to smoke in two out of the three.

So that’s three Volt fires – all in the hands of the Obama Administration, all after crashes.

For a grand total of six Volt fires (about which we know).

And excuse us for being slightly suspect of the Government’s Five Star rating of Government Motors.

Especially when NHTSA, the Barack Obama White House and GM all covered-up the Volt fire(s) for nearly six months.

Especially when President Barack Obama is campaigning for reelection on the $85 billion auto industry bailout “success,” and showing up at car shows to do it.  So bad news for the Volt and Government Motors is bad news for him and his reelect.

So, again, excuse our suspicion.

More from Mr. Lutz:

3) The crashed Volt, its battery shorted by coolant from the period unjustifiably spent “feet up,” caught fire three weeks after said test. (I submit that this would provide adequate time for surviving passengers to exit the vehicle.)

Again, what about the other five fires?  Three of which were just plugged in or garaged – “in normal use?”

Mr. Lutz:

4) On average, 278,000 cars with gasoline engines caught fire in the U.S. each year between 2003 and 2007, according to the National Fire Protection Association.

True – but gasoline engines are a long-known commodity.  Lithium-ion battery cars are not.

And when the Obama Administration and GM have spent half the Volt’s shelf life covering up Volt flameouts, it certainly warrants additional attention.

Mr. Lutz:

5) No factory-produced electric vehicle has ever caught fire, to the best of my knowledge.

As we’ve just demonstrated, Mr. Lutz needs to better his knowledge.

And Mr. Lutz is making a blanket assertion – applicable beyond just the Volt to all electric cars.  Is he really comfortable going that far?

Mr. Lutz:

6) The Volt, the most technologically advanced car on the planet, was conceived by me and my team well before any federal bailout of GM.

Is the pride of creative authorship clouding Mr. Lutz’s judgement?

I’m not sure the Volt is the “most technologically advanced car on the planet” – given that the 1891 electric Morrison had a better battery range than the Volt.

The Volt was in fact conceived by Mr. Lutz and his team, in 2007.  But I notice, Mr. Lutz, that you didn’t rush to mass-produce it, did you?  It existed only as a visual aide for auto shows – not for actual for-sale production.

Only with the arrival of President Obama – and We the People’s $50 billion – did Volts find their way to the mass-assembly line.

Mr. Lutz:

These are the bedrock facts.

Yours aren’t.  Ours are.

Mr. Lutz:

Now, how did the U.S. right-wing media choose to report this admittedly headline-tempting news?

A nationally syndicated editorial three-panel cartoon stated (I believe I remember the sequence): “Thomas Edison discovered electricity;” then, “Alexander Graham Bell discovered the telephone;” and, in the third panel, “But it took the US Government to discover fire!” (accompanied by a drawing of a burning Chevy Volt).

Come on, that cartoon is just FUNNY.

Mr. Lutz then goes into some detail about Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs (appearing on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News Channel show) publicly decrying the Volt.

Then Mr. Lutz writes:

Much air time was spent on the $50 billion-plus (GM) bailout, which, the audience was left to assume, “funded” the Volt, doubtlessly at the whim of Obama’s known army of evil enviro-Nazis, intent on forcing vehicle electrification on a good-ole’-boy, V8-lovin’ populace.

Again, the Lutz-era GM created the Volt – but never mass-produced it.  Obama and the bailout arrived – and suddenly Government Motors is (sort-of) selling Volts.

Clearly there is some electric vehicle forcing going on.  GM in 2011 produced about 10,000 Volts – and sold only 7,671.  And until very recently – when finally hounded into  submission-to-sales-reality – Akerson and GM were planning on upping 2012 Volt production to 60,000.

Sounds forced to me.

Mr. Lutz:

To top it off, these two media pros lamented the fact that the same government that had forced GM to produce the Volt was now extending $7,500 tax credits towards its purchase, thus squandering even more of “our taxpayer” dollars on this failed Socialist-collectivist flop. Truth? The $7,500 tax credit was enacted under the Bush administration!

True.  But again, you, Mr. Lutz, never produced the Volt for sale under the Bush Administration.  Only after you left, under Obama – when General Motors became with our coin Government Motors – did the foolish tax credit apply to the foolish Volt.

And we Right-wingers have long acknowledged – and publicly decried and lamented – many terrible Bush Administration policies.  The $7,500-per-foolish-car is but another.

Mr. Lutz:

But who the hell cares about facts when you’re in O’Reilly’s self-described “No Spin Zone?” (The fine print might as well read, “We said ‘no spin,’ not ‘no deliberate misstatement of facts.’ ”)

Again, as we have thoroughly demonstrated, it is the esteemed Mr. Lutz that is misstating and omitting facts.

Mr. Lutz:

What on Earth is wrong with the conservative media movement that it feels it’s OK to spread false information, OK to damage the reputation of perhaps the finest piece of mechanical technology our country has produced since the space shuttle, OK to hurt an iconic American company that is roaring back to global pre-eminence, OK to hurt American employment in Hamtramck, Mich., as long as it damages the Obama administration’s reputation?

It is Obama that is staking his reputation – and his reelection effort – on the $50 billion GM bailout and the Volt.

If our pointing out egregious, inconvenient facts is harmful thereto, it is simply happy collateral damage.

Mr. Lutz concludes:

While as a conservative Republican I may well share the goal, I deplore the means employed to attain it. The conservative cause damages itself, destroys its credibility through the expedient spreading of untruths. The public will figure it out.

The right-wing “talking heads”, O’Reilly and Limbaugh at the forefront, have managed to make me embarrassed to describe myself as a conservative.

Come on, you guys. Shape up! There’s plenty of legitimate fodder out there. Let’s leave the “invention of facts” to the left-wing climate-change alarmists.

Unfortunately for Mr. Lutz – and the Obama Administration – there are plenty of inconvenient truths about Government Motors, the Obama Administration bailout and the absurd Chevy Volt.

And we “wrong-headed” Right-wingers are the only ones delivering them.

Mr. Lutz is in need of but a minor recalibration.  The Chevy Volt he’s defending may be unrecoverable.

It’s official.  Former Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY), who resigned in disgrace over a bizarre sexting scandal this past June, was NOT hacked.

Today, eight months after the congressman first claimed he was the victim of a hacking or a prank, the NY Daily News has broken the story that Anthony Weiner spent more than $13,000 in campaign funds to hire private investigators to track down a hacker that never existed.

Weiner paid T&M, a Manhattan-based firm, $13,290 for “legal services” in the fourth quarter of 2011, financial statements filed Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission reveal.

Sources told the Daily News, however, that Weiner hired T&M — a firm loaded with former NYPD sleuths — when he was in full spin mode over the controversy that eventually led to his resignation from the House.

[...]

Two sources familiar with Weiner’s downfall said the Queens pol told investigators the same story. T&M investigated — and learned Weiner had sent them on a fool’s errand.

“They did their job, and then it was time to sit down with lawyers,” another source said. “Self-denial, it dies a slow death.”

Surprised? No, neither were we.

The married congressman from Queens, NY initially told the public his Twitter and Facebook accounts had been hacked, after a tweet sent to a female college student in Washington state appeared in his public Twitter timeline, complete with a photo of a man’s bulging underpants.

The tweet triggered the unraveling of a series of sexually explicit online messages and additional photos Weiner had shared with numerous women. More than two weeks would pass before Weiner finally came clean about his extracurricular activities.  But not before embarking upon a media blitz to embellish his imaginary tale of hackers and pranksters and other political scapegoats:

“You know, I can’t say with certitude. My system was hacked. Pictures can be manipulated, pictures can be dropped in and inserted,” reported HotAir.

“At a time when the GOP is playing games with the debt limit, a member of the Supreme Court is refusing to recuse himself from matters he has a financial interest in, and middle class incomes are stagnant, many want to change the subject,” Weiner said in a statement emailed to POLITICO by his office. “I don’t. This was a prank, and a silly one. I’m focused on my work.”

Anthony Weiner indicated at the time that he’d asked a firm to look into whether his photos “could have been taken or manipulated,” followed shortly thereafter with the announcement that he’d hired an attorney to explore “civil or criminal actions” in response to the “prank.”  Now we learn that he used campaign funds to try and cover his hide.  And The Hill is reporting that Weiner continued to spend more than $130,000 in campaign cash even after his resignation.

This may be a good time for some to reflect on the unwarranted over-zealous scrutiny that fell upon Andrew Breitbart and other writers associated with these very websites who were accused of targeting, setting up, and/or hacking Congressman Weiner (or other ludicrous conspiracy theories), accusations that are often still repeated today, months after Weiner’s admission and resignation.  And one of the whistleblowers who stuck through the story has since had his life turned upside down, largely as a result of Weiner’s dishonesty (I won’t link to the horrid posts).

Might I remind these same critics that BigGovernment, which first broke the Weinergate scandal, reported the facts and did so responsibly, despite numerous claims to the contrary.  The dishonest party in this story is the one who no longer holds a seat in Congress.  And that’s a fact.