Basking in the afterglow of Senator Aqua Buddah's announcement of his presidential aspirations, Utah's Tea Party superstar, Senator Mike Lee spoke fondly of his good friends in the Senate: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. He supports them all and wants their policies to speak for themselves, ducking and dodging the idea of picking a favorite.
My focus has been on the policies, rather than the specific personalities, and I think the policies that will emerge in this debate will help identify one of these candidates as the front-runner not based on who they are but based on what they do, based on the policies that they embrace.
Gretchen Carlson and Lee used the same day Rand Paul announced his bid for the 2016 Presidential Election to tie in his book promotion. His book, “Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document,” plays on the idea that our constitutional law-scholar president is deliberately ignoring the document he knows inside and out. Tea Party politicians play on the common misconception that fester in a fascist society, which include extreme paranoia and delusion.
In the work that is categorized as non-fiction, Lee takes an immense amount of creative license and makes up events that are incomplete. In the introduction, it reads,
“If this book succeeds, it will help you feel as if you were right there at the pivotal moments of history.”
To heighten the immediacy of some of those moments, Lee has resorted to an unusual device for a nonfiction work: He has made things up.
Lee’s office referred questions to Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Random House, which is publishing the book. (Sentinel specializes in conservative books and has also published Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio.) When asked if there are additional imagined scenes in “Our Lost Constitution” beyond the two Lee acknowledges, and why the use of such scenes was considered acceptable, Sentinel provided this e-mailed response from publisher Adrian Zackheim:
“The use of invented dialog in nonfiction has been a common and acceptable practice for many years, and can be found in the works of many noteworthy writers, both political and nonpolitical. We are surprised by this line of questioning, especially since Senator Lee’s use of invented dialog is disclosed not once but several times in the book.”
Mike Lee is capitalizing on the Tea Party movement's fondness for the principles of fascism much like the John Birch Society and the KKK. Many of the positions Lee outlined on the campaign trail appear to be inspired by the constitutional guru of the Tea Party movement, W. Cleon Skousen.
Skousen, a former FBI agent, Salt Lake City police chief, and professional conspiracy theorist, Skousen fashioned a narrative of American history that held a unique appeal to religious conservatives—all based on the notion that the Founding Fathers were members of a lost tribe of Israel. His work also sparked a fierce backlash over racist passages and baseless, bordering on conspiratorial, assertions that prompted the Mormon church to take steps to quash his influence.
The LDS Church, of which Lee is a member, had to renounce their claim that black people wore the mark of Cain, so they were cursed and could not hold the priesthood. The sudden revelation was not an epiphany, it was because President Carter threatened their tax-exempt status. There's absolutely no question that Lee is influenced largely by the racist undertones of the LDS church and Willard Romney's favorite philosopher, Skousen.
Playing to the far right wing fringe of the G.O.P., which seems to be enamored with Ted Cruz's platform, Lee solidifies the notion that only Republicans are capable of following "the Constitution in one hand and The Bill of Rights in the other." Never mind the fact that both are part of the Constitution, the Fox News audience just hears the talking points and nods in accord.
I suppose Lee is just biding his time for when his Senator buddies are no longer in the hunt for the Oval Office. He will certainly get the backing of his pals in the NRA, as he has a perfect A+ rating with the terrorist group. Plus, his radical "limited government" stance reflects the paranoia held by most Republicans. More specifically put, the imposter in the White House is simply out to get everyone and only a lily-white savior like Mike Lee will do the country proud.
