joe hunter

Which brings me to the final figure in this sordid GOP dirty tricks operation using Gary Johnson as the "patsy": Joe Hunter, the thin, salt-and-pepper bearded energy stick who stuck close to Gary Johnson that night in Chicago.It turns out that Joe Hunter is a longtime GOP communications strategist who got his start with a Missouri Republican who represented Rush Limbaugh’s home district, later moving to the Bush-Quayle team where folks like Roger Stone, Jim Lacy and Floyd Brown were busy cooking up smears, while his former boss, the Missouri Republican Bill Emerson, checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic.In 2000, we find Joe Hunter engaged in the same far-right politics of immigrant bashing and race-baiting as the rest of Johnson’s campaign team. Hunter was the official spokesman for an outfit called "Utahns For Official English". Like other immigrant-bashing groups of that time, Utahns for Official English pushed for laws making English the only official language in the Deseret Kingdom (meaning all those "reformed Egyptian"-inscribed gold plates would have to go)."Utahs For Official English" was set up by a DC-based immigrant-baiting outfit called simply <a href="http://www.us-english.org/" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(58, 135, 173);">"U.S. English"</a> , an outfit that claimed at first to be a progressive project founded by a purported Green Party activist named John Tanton, who claimed his interest in pushing English-language laws was for the sake of the immigrants with whom he sympathized. Then some of Tanton’s private memos were leaked, revealing a deranged mind obsessed with racial eugenics and the "fertility" of dark-skinned races versus the relative infertility of the superior white races. Tanton was out to save and protect his beloved white race from contamination — sparking mass resignations from public figures tricked into believing they were serving a progressive Green Party agenda meant to help, not hurt, immigrants. Joe Hunter’s U.S. English headquarters got in trouble for hiring another white supremacist, James Lubinskas, as their communications director, until the <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/fall/mainstreaming-extremism" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(58, 135, 173);">Southern Poverty Law Center</a> outed Lubinskas as a longtime activist moving in the same circles as David Duke, and a former contributing editor at the racial eugenics fanzine "American Renaissance."After getting his English-only law passed, Joe Hunter was hired as the new chief of staff for Utah Republican Rep. Chris Cannon — one of the leaders of the Clinton impeachment — replacing Cannon’s outgoing chief-of-staff, David Safavian.Shortly afterwards, Safavian’s name came up as a central figure in the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal. Safavian was arrested and sentenced to prison. But Chris Cannon managed to hold on to his seat until 2008, thanks to a lot of help from George W. Bush, and to the Mormon church, which made the unusual step of openly calling for Mormons in Utah to vote in the 2006 primaries, effectively defeating Chris Cannon’s rightwing primary opponent.In 2008, Joe Hunter’s boss lost in the primaries to Jason Chaffetz. No one could help Chris Cannon’s political career anymore. But before leaving, just days before the 2008 election, Chris Cannon hatched a smear rumor against President Obama: He and his brother-in-law, a Utah Republican, paid a British professor who specialized in literary frauds to claim that Obama’s memoir was ghost-written by Bill Ayers. The rumors spread like wildfire around the media, and came right back into Joe Hunter’s boss’s office as the source, shaming Chris Cannon one last time.That’s who Gary Johnson’s campaign spokesman worked for. These are the ingredients in the "Perrier" Gary Johnson calls his politics, as opposed to the "Coke-Pepsi" of the Republican-Democrats.In other words, Gary Johnson is part of the fucking problem, and in many ways worse — he’s there to make sure you understand we have no way out of this dead-end trap. And so, to recap:Gary Johnson’s campaign for the presidency to shake up the corrupt two-party system and introduce a new kind of politics outside the old paradigm of left and right, was:<ul style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: none; color: rgb(55, 55, 55); background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);"><li style="font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Managed by a Republican/Koch pollster who partnered with far-right GOP dirty tricksters and the founder of Citizens United in a smear campaign against Harry Reid;</li><li style="font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">His spokesman worked to pass anti-immigrant English-only laws in an organization infested with fringe white supremacists, then served as chief-of-staff to one of the most corrupt Republicans in Congress, Chris Cannon, replacing Jack Abramoff’s partner-in-crime, David Safavian (who also was Grover Norquist’s business partner);</li><li style="font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">His nonprofit "OUR America Initiative" was chartered and incorporated by Jim Lacy, one of the main promoters of birther conspiracy theories, who also backed violent racist Minutemen causes, and who runs one of the largest slate-mail operations in the country, essentially a mass elections fraud business to trick voters into voting for the wrong candidate;</li><li style="font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The nonprofit papers that launched his campaign were filed by Maureen Otis, a central figure in the Texas Minutemen extremist movement, who also worked with Alan Keyes on nonprofits that smeared Obama as a foreign-born Muslim; Otis is also a supporter of Romney and has called for people to donate to the Romney campaign;</li></ul>And finally — Gary Johnson was a corrupt governor who privatized his prisoners with gruesome results, who wants to privatize the federal government and strip us of anything that might protect us from the Kochs and the rest of the oligarchy, and dismantle all the social programs including Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, college grants, minimum wage laws, even child labor laws — and in return, he’ll let you smoke pot. If your state votes to legalize pot, that is. If your state still wants to put you in prison for smoking pot, or even stiffen those penalties, sucks for you.That’s not Gary Johnson’s problem.