Tea partiers air doubts about Armey

My only advice to fellow teapartiers is to just watch everything he says and does.    Any politician is potentially suspect when they seek to “lead” this movement.  We do not need politicians to keep up the fight for freedom.  We need educated patriots willing to fight this on the streets and in the courts as well as the court of public opinion.

“It seemed a strange fit to begin with — a former House Republican leader turned $750,000-a-year Washington lobbyist who resurfaced as perhaps the single most identifiable leader of a populist, anti-Washington movement.

And in recent weeks, Dick Armey has found himself targeted by a quiet, but concerted campaign from fellow conservatives challenging — and seeking to undermine — his status as a leader of the tea party movement.

Critics ranging from prominent conservatives to bloggers to grass-roots tea party activists have called into question whether Armey’s stances on illegal immigration and social issues, his candidate endorsements and his past lobbying work are fundamentally inconsistent with the tea party movement. They also have suggested he raised the white flag too early in the fight over the Democratic health care overhaul and is beholden to corporate benefactors, and have accused him of trying to hijack the tea parties to serve those benefactors or his own personal political ambitions.

To be sure, some of the resentment seems to stem from jealousy over adept positioning by Armey that has put him and the small-government nonprofit group he co-chairs, FreedomWorks, at the vanguard of tea party activism, which everyone on the right — from theRepublican Party and its elected officials to the groups that emerged from the 1960s restructuring of the conservative movement — has jockeyed to harness.

But the attacks on Armey, which started as a whisper campaign and have spilled out into the open in the past couple weeks, also highlight deeper tensions within the loose confederation of local and state groups that make up the tea party, as well as the broader conservative movement, about whether there is any need for national leaders, and whether social and national security issues should be part of the agenda.”