More Asinine Armey Analysis From "The Old Gray Lady"

Michael Sokolove wrote the following profile of Dick Armey in the New York Times magazine on Sunday, in which we learned the following…

The (Washington) march on Sept. 12 was largely organized by FreedomWorks (the non-profit “Astroturf” group of which Armey is co-chairman) which secured the permits and opened the podium to a range of speakers — including those from the like-minded but separate Tea Party movement.

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters had a good response to that and other excerpts here (and as noted here, I’m sure the statement from Sokolove that Armey’s group is somehow separate from the “teabaggers” is news to Joe Conason, among others - Wikipedia does tell us that the "Tea Party Patriots" are officially separate from Freedom Works, however).

Also…

Armey told me that he had doubts from the beginning about the Iraq war and now regards it as a mistake.

That’s interesting, because while in Congress, Armey voted for the Authorization to Use Military Force (noted here, though to be fair, a lot of other members of Congress on both sides of the aisle did also).

Also...

To Armey, the Constitution is not a “living document” — a phrase he mocks at rallies, to laughs and great applause — and is in fact so straightforward and speaks so directly to this era that it’s reasonable to wonder why we need the nine justices of the Supreme Court to interpret it.

I can’t think of a word to describe my disgust over the fact that Armey actually served in Congress at any point whatsoever if he actually felt such disregard for the constitutional separation of powers.

And if you don’t feel repulsed by Armey over that, I’m sure you will over this (here)…

In 1998, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a reporter asked him what he would do if he were in President Bill Clinton's position. He replied "If I were in the President's place I would not have gotten a chance to resign. I would be lying in a pool of my own blood, hearing Mrs. Armey standing over me saying, 'How do I reload this damn thing?'"[5] Several of his former female economics students went public with stories of his sexually harassing them — harassment allegedly so severe that at least one student transferred to another school. He would later divorce his wife and marry one of his students.[6]

And finally, I give you this from Sokolove’s article…

If Armey’s views seem disconnected from how many Americans experience health care, one reason could be that Armey himself has very little recent personal exposure to the system. Like many American men, he avoids doctors and said he has not seen one in many years. “I’ve been very fortunate, very healthy,” he said, “so why change up what I’ve been doing?” He equates medical care with unpleasantness. “What happens to old folks, and I’m 69, is they get prodded and poked and picked on. They run a camera up your behind. If these things are medically necessary, I will adhere to them. But don’t make me go through them for your comfort. Medicine is supposed to be for my safety, not yours.”

If Armey chooses to put off colorectal screenings to prevent detection of cancer, that’s his right, even though he’s a damn fool when it comes to his health (to say nothing of his politics either, of course) since he’s in a higher-risk age group. However, this story tells us that colorectal cancer rates have ticked upward for groups beneath the age of 50, generally considered the cutoff for procedures to detect colorectal cancer.

This merely proves that Armey knows as little about enabling better health care outcomes as he does about economics (he referred to the stimulus as "fiscal child abuse"), as noted here.

Update 11/20/09: Too funny.