Right v. Right: Battle of the Wingers

As has been noted here in the past, former Rep. Dick Armey, who is currently the Chairman of FreedomWorks, and Focus on the Family’s James Dobson have been having a rather public spat.  

First, Armey said “Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies” who rely on “demagoguery” to manipulate the “intellectually lazy.”  Not surprisingly, Dobson and Focus on the Family didn’t take too kindly to that, so FOF went out and found a few Republican members of Congress willing to defend Dobson and dispute Armey’s “disgusting” comments.  

And then things were relatively quiet … until Armey penned a long column more or less calling Dobson a power-hungry egomaniac

Another Armey's Axiom says that if it is about power, you lose. And unfortunately when it comes to James Dobson, my personal experience has been that the man is most interested in political power.

As Majority Leader, I remember vividly a meeting with the House leadership where Dobson scolded us for having failed to "deliver" for Christian conservatives, that we owed our majority to him, and that he had the power to take our jobs back. This offended me, and I told him so.

In a later meeting Dobson and a colleague came into my office to lobby against a trade bill, asking me to stop the legislation from going to the House floor. They were wrong on the issue, and I told them no. Would you at least postpone the vote, they asked? We have a direct mail fundraising letter about to go out to our membership, they said.

I wondered then if their opposition to the bill was driven less by their moral compass and more by the need to rile their membership and increase revenue. I wondered then, if these self-appointed Christian leaders, like many politicians, had come to Washington to do good, but had instead done well for themselves.

One can only imagine what sort of accusations and sniping round 4 of the on-going Armey/Dobson battle will bring.