Those wackos

Oh, this is too good not to pass along. Via Crooks and Liars, Salon.com has a riveting article on the Abramoff/Scanlon dirt that's coming out in their Senate hearings (emphasis mine):

Consider one memo highlighted in a Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday that Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, sent the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana to describe his strategy for protecting the tribe's gambling business. In plain terms, Scanlon confessed the source code of recent Republican electoral victories: target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives.

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them." The brilliance of this strategy was twofold: Not only would most voters not know about an initiative to protect Coushatta gambling revenues, but religious "wackos" could be tricked into supporting gambling at the Coushatta casino even as they thought they were opposing it.

Oy. Gotta wonder how a memo like this, written by a former aide to Tom Delay, is going to strike the "wacko" supporters of the GOP. I'm not a professional lobbyist or anything, but it seems to me like calling some of your staunchest supporters nutjobs isn't the most savvy strategy. Of course, maybe the problem is having nutjobs for your staunchest supporters in the first place.