Tim Phillips: Portrait of a Parasite

If a bucket of excrement could somehow be imbued with consciousness and an evil intelligence, you’d have Tim Phillips.

Karl Rove and the late unlamented Lee Willie Horton Atwater have been household names for years. But Tim Phillips has managed to stay beneath the radar, as well as beneath contempt. FreedomWorks is the best known of the “grass roots” front organizations for the Health Insurance lobby. But Americans For Prosperity (AFP), led by Tim Phillips, is just as busy behind the scenes. And they’re every bit as slippery and underhanded.

HMO employees and lobbyists disguised as protesters, inbred dunces who are gullible enough to believe all the bullshit spewed out by the HMO lobby — Americans For Prosperity has it all. In addition to fighting health care reform, Americans For Prosperity has other Astroturf front groups “protesting” against labor unions and clean energy legislation.

In the late 1990s, Tim Phillips and Ralph Reed were working together to unify devout Christians and corporate powerbrokers against their common enemy: those wicked Satanic bureaucrats who were regulating the energy industry. Their organization was called Century Strategies. Their “grass roots” campaign was what led to the deregulation frenzy that brought us the Enron meltdown — which caused thousands of people to lose their jobs, retirement pensions and life savings. Hallelujah!

Remember now, they were just following the Bible. Who could forget that stirring passage where Jesus said: “Get those fuckin’ socialist bureaucrats out of the oil industry! NOW, Asshole!”

After wreaking havoc on millions of people, Phillips sunk even lower. In the history of political attack ads, one particular commercial set the all-time record for its long reach into the depths of putrid. Yes, you know the one — that 2002 TV ad that equated Senator Max Cleland (Vietnam veteran and triple amputee) with Osama bin Laden. And that ad was produced by none other than…drum roll…Tim Phillips.

Rachel Maddow interviewed Phillips on her show and called him a parasite. That’s putting it mildly.