dick armey sucks

I normally don’t express my opinions on matters involving my employer, but geez, that Dick Armey can be a little silly at times, can’t he?
For those not following this matter with eagle-eyed precision, Armey is the retiring House majority leader. He wanted his 32-year-old son Scott to succeed him, but my newspaper wrote a few stories exposing things he had done in his previous job of Denton County judge. (In Texas, the county judge is the chief executive of the county, not a judicial figure.) These included giving government contracts to his buddies, steering public cash to a charity a friend ran, and pushing to allow alcohol sales in a neighborhood that didn’t want them after working in a questionable position for a beer company.
In any event, Scott Armey got an old fashioned Texas whoopin’ at the polls, losing by 10 points to a political unknown. This despite an enormous fundraising advantage, support from folks like Phil Gramm, and, well, the fact that his last name is Armey.
This made Dick Armey mad. He accused Belo of having “an outragous vendetta against me that was focused on my son.” This was interesting, considering (a) Belo is not known for its radical leftist, playa-hatin’, GOP-bashing tendencies — if anything, it’s much more commonly accused of being a lapdog to conservatives in power, and (b) the Morning News has endorsed Armey every time he’s been up for election for a long, long time.
(The 2000 editorial endorsing his last run for office: “Mr. Armey is a smart, consistent fiscal conservative who too often has blunted his voice with intemperate remarks and partisan disputes. Still, as House majority leader, Mr. Armey is a valuable asset for North Texas. He is an influential advocate of free trade and free markets, both of which are important to the region. He is a savvy economist and could do much to elevate the discussion on Social Security reform and tax reform.”)
Anyway, Dick Armey’s solution to his son’s whoopin’? Slip a clause into a military spending bill that would do only one thing: force Belo to sell one of its three Dallas-area businesses. Those would be The Dallas Morning News, WFAA Channel 8, and The Denton Record-Chronicle. They’re a “dangerous monopoly,” he claims, that needs to be broken up.
What bull. Monopoly? Let’s see:
– WFAA is one of five TV news operations in town. It doesn’t even have the highest ratings of the five.
– The Dallas Morning News is indeed the only newspaper in Dallas (although, of course, anyone is free to start up another one). But Dick Armey’s hometown of Flower Mound is closer to Fort Worth than it is to Dallas. Fort Worth, of course, has its own (middling) newspaper. I’d bet it has more subscribers in Flower Mound than the Morning News does; if not, it’s awful close.
Yep, sounds like a monopoly to me. At least others are seeing through his facade.
I end this entry with a link to a great, funny anti-Armey piece from the Post, including some of his past greatest hits (like calling Barney Frank “Barney Fag” and Hillary Clinton a Marxist).