Bye bye Jim DeMint

[BMW/M]

Under DeMint, the foundation became incapable of anything beyond churning out wack-job talking points...

The real reason Jim DeMint got the boot

Even as his alliance with Donald Trump boosted Heritage's influence, old-timers saw a more fundamental problem taking shape.

Jim DeMint's ouster from The Heritage Foundation came as a shock to the hundreds of scholars and staffers who've seen the organization's political influence grow thanks to DeMint’s controversial decision to align the leading conservative think tank closely with Donald Trump.

But interviews with over a dozen sources at the center of the drama suggest Heritage's stewards — particularly DeMint's predecessor, Ed Feulner, and Feulner's sharp-elbowed protégé, Mike Needham — became convinced that DeMint was incapable of renewing the foundation's place as an intellectual wellspring of the conservative movement.

Days of speculation, tension, and internal bickering came to a close on Tuesday: The organization's board members voted unanimously to remove DeMint from his post as president, a decision first reported by POLITICO last week. Feulner, who presided over the institution for 37 years, will be named interim president and to preside over a search for a permanent replacement.

"After a comprehensive and independent review of the entire Heritage organization, the Board determined there were significant and worsening management issues that led to a breakdown of internal communications and cooperation," the board president Thomas Saunders III said in a statement. "While the organization has seen many successes, Jim DeMint and a handful of his closest advisers failed to resolve these problems."

Ironically, it was Feulner’s decision in 2010 to create an advocacy organization, Heritage Action, and to install Needham atop it, that sowed the seeds of DeMint's fall. Though the think tank and the advocacy arm are legally separate entities, several sources familiar with the institution's internal dynamics say that both organizations became increasingly focused on mediating fights among congressional Republicans rather than on generating policy ideas. The problem existed before DeMint took the helm of Heritage in 2013, but has mushroomed since, Heritage insiders said.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/0 ... age-237876

[O Really]

You know you're extreme when even the fountain of right-wing fanaticism boots you out.

[Boatrocker]

". . . Mike Needham — became convinced that DeMint was incapable of renewing the foundation's place as an intellectual wellspring of the conservative movement."

[Emphasis added]

Quoted in Politico:

"Some Heritage board members believe that DeMint has brought in too many Senate allies and made the think tank too bombastic and political — to the detriment of its research and scholarly aims."

[Emphasis added]

"Intellectual wellspring?" "Research?" "Scholarly aims?" Really? To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, "You keep using those words; I do not think they mean what you think they mean.”

[O Really]

"intellectual wellspring..."
But if they were, Trumpists would hate them for being educated "elitists" meaning of course anybody whose family tree has forks.

[Boatrocker]

"intellectual wellspring..."
But if they were, Trumpists would hate them for being educated "elitists" meaning of course anybody whose family tree has forks.

Or who can count their own nostrils and get the same number twice.