Robespierre of the Right (All about Paul Weyrich)

Weyrich tried to sue the New Republic because of this article because it told the truth about him

What I ate at the revolution.

On August 10, 1996, just one day before the Republican National Convention, several hundred of the country's most conservative activists and donors met secretly at a resort on Southern California's Coronado Island. It was the same spot where, nearly four decades earlier, Marilyn Monroe had filmed Some Like It Hot--a coincidence probably lost on this crowd, members of the Council for National Policy who were fleeing temptation. Only the purest of the movement had gathered at Coronado: men like Oliver North, Pat Robertson, and Larry Pratt (whom the press had recently drummed into exile for his alleged ties to white supremacists). In the past, the group's clandestine revival meetings had spawned liberal warnings of a right-wing conspiracy.

But this morning, the council would plot against its own internal enemies: GOP apostates. And the chief conspirator was Paul Weyrich, the man who founded the Heritage Foundation, orchestrated the party's alliance with evangelical Christians, and, more than any other figure, organized the right inside the Beltway. "I will tell you that this is a bitter turn for me," Weyrich confessed. "I have spent thirty years of my life working in Washington, working on the premise that if we simply got our people into leadership that it would make a difference.... And yet we are getting the same policies from them that we got from their Republican predecessors." It was time, Weyrich concluded, to contemplate the once unconscionable: another revolution, this time against "our people."

Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post covered or even noticed the meeting. But within weeks, the internal purges had begun; even Newt Gingrich, the man who had brought Republicans to power, was no longer safe from attacks on his right. The fight resembled that of the old left, with Leninists killing Stalinists killing Maoists; or, in this case, Friedmanites killing Buckleyites killing Burkeans.

What Weyrich was proposing was something new in American politics: a Republican politburo. He used his tottering conservative TV network, National Empowerment Television--which he dubbed "the means of communications"--to "denounce" party members who compromised on even the most obscure GOP commandments. He accused Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, a man he had once touted for president, of having "psychological problems." After Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott supported the chemical weapons treaty, Weyrich released an open letter to the public, declaring: "I can't have friends who sell out their country."

...

Finally, on the verge of realizing his right-wing utopia, Weyrich harvested what his friend Morton Blackwell termed "the greatest track of virgin timber on the political landscape": evangelicals. "Out there is what one might call a moral majority," he told Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979. "That's it," Falwell exclaimed. "That's the name of the organization." Weyrich, who had converted from Roman Catholicism to the Eastern Orthodox church after Vatican II, did more than coin the name; with a handful of activists, he engineered the alliance between the Republican Party and the growing number of evangelicals angry over abortion rights and federal intrusion in parochial schools. Less than a year later, Ronald Reagan walked into the White House.

By 1981, while his friends were still basking in their newfound power, Weyrich began to experience sudden bouts of pessimism and paranoia--early symptoms of the nervous breakdown that afflicts conservatives today. One hour Weyrich would enter the Republican White House to strategize, the next he would flee outside to condemn its policies. All around him, he complained to the editors of the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, his friends had gotten "high- paying jobs and expensive mortgages, and to be part of the problem."

Hoping desperately to stay on the outskirts, Weyrich started weekly conservative luncheons to keep pressure on the administration. Yet already there were signs of compromise. Even Reagan seemed seduced, flirting with Mikhail Gorbachev and inflating the deficit. In 1984, a despondent Weyrich met with Viguerie to consider creating a third party. "We're sick of electing candidates for the GOP and then being left out in the cold, used, abused, and lied to," Viguerie told the press.

By the 1988 presidential campaign, Weyrich was even more disillusioned. When the Bush camp refused to meet with a group of Afghani resistance fighters, Weyrich conspired to hide them in an adjoining room when Dan Quayle turned up for a luncheon hosted by the Free Congress Foundation; the plan was to spring them on the unsuspecting Quayle. But at the last minute, Bill Pascoe, Bush's liaison to the Beltway conservatives, leaked the plot, and Weyrich snapped. "Suddenly there was a volcano of screaming," recalls one lobbyist in the room. "Weyrich was calling Bill a traitor. He was spitting and frothing at the mouth. We were ready to get him a room right next to Hinckley." When the yelling stopped, Weyrich dispatched a letter to Pascoe's fiancee, questioning Pascoe's loyalty and implying that he was unfit for marriage.

There are many explanations for what Weyrich did next. Some say it was to exact revenge against the Bush administration for snubbing him; others say it was retribution against a pro-choice Republican legislator. But on January 31, 1989, Weyrich simply did what any authoritarian must: he held his first show trial. Surrounded by hordes of media, the still little-known political mechanic strolled into the Senate Armed Services Committee room and denounced his one-time ally, John Tower, as morally unfit for the post of secretary of defense. "Over the course of many years," Weyrich said, as the cameras clicked, "I have encountered the nominee in a condition--a lack of sobriety-- as well as with women to whom he was not married...." Tower later tried to defend himself, but it was too late. The Bush administration, Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama told The Washington Post, "poured gasoline all over him sent him up to the Senate. Paul Weyrich struck a match and he continued to burn."

(Just in case you were like me and saw familiarity in Jown Tower's name, Tower was the man who died in a plane accident one day after Heinz (the first husband of Teresa Heinz Kerry) did)

http://www.tnr.com/archive/10/102797/grann102797.html
Read it. Weyrich and his friends are as bad as the Neo-Cons and are responsible for the creation of the Christian Right.

Weyrich would be laughable -- if he hadn't spawned the RW ascendance.