Friday, August 15, 2008

Remember the PUMA's? So-called disaffected Hillary Democrats?

It seems that the PUMA's promised to hold a big convention in a downtown Washington hotel, with registration to be cut off after 250 registrants had paid $250 apiece to attend.

For some odd reason they cut registration off early, then moved the conference to a undisclosed location. One of Cheney's discards, perhaps? Rumproast has an excellent story on the conference.

Their two best known attendees were the notorious Vexatious litigant Andy Martin and Lyndon LaRouche devotee and 9/11 Truther Webster Tarpley. They seem to have joined the Republican shill Darragh Murphy who created PUMA to garner media attention after Obama won the Democratic primaries.

Go read the Rumproast story on the PUMA convention. The comments are priceless. And by the way, I counted either 30 or 31 name tags not picked up on the registration table in the second photo. They would be out of the 60 they alleged they had, after trying to get 250 and failing.

If I were a comedy writer, this story could be a great premise for something like "The Producers." Think of the characters! A Republican shill pretending to be a disaffected Hillary Democrat claiming to support McCain because of how badly Hillary was treated in the Primary. A conference attended by an antisemitic perpetual political candidate with a law degree who was not allowed by the Bar to practice law because of prior activities that did not reflect well on lawyers (a very low bar - pun intended) and another guy who is a well-known disciple of Lyndon LaRouche and is famous as a critic of US foreign policy who "...maintains that the events of 9/11 were engineered by a rogue network of the military industrial complex." according to his Wikipedia entry.

Throw in a shadowy Republican "handler" who offers suggestions, together with another shadowy money supplier who encourages new PR stunts and funds them. Add an in-house organizer who handles administrative details, and two or there dumb-as-post followers who take the whole thing seriously even as the Murphy and the organizer are rapidly and obviously skimming as much as possible off the top of any revenue that comes in. Track the events from the initial organization of the 527 and the first interviews with suckered-in reporters and TV producers through the RBC meeting to the DC convention. Then take it out to Denver.

The key that made the Producers work was that the plan was designed to fail. That way the investors could never expect any return on their investment. The disaster was that suddenly the play started actually making money. Since the producers had sold well more than 100% of the stock,there was no chance that they could ever pay the investors what was promised.

That premise wouldn't work here, but if Murphy and her helpers were living in paranoid fear that Democratic operators were trying to shut them down some similar dynamic could be built through the story. Say perhaps, they got a running gig on a FOX Bill O'Reilly clone and had to duck what they believed were Democratic operatives (actually process servers trying to get them into court for skimming the money) to get their interviews. This last part needs work, but should be workable. Just have everyone in the whole thing out to scam everyone else, and the cops and or process servers closing in on all of them.

I think something very funny could be done with that premise.

No comments: