Lanny Davis: Glutton for Punishment and Ridicule

When I was doing research for a post on my main blog about why taking on Rush Limbaugh is a winning strategy for the Obama administration, I found some interesting information about former Clinton adviser Lanny Davis. The reason I was doing research on Davis was that early in the Clinton administration, when Limbaugh and other talk radio jocks were running roughshod over the truth and concocting lunatic conspiracy theories about Bill and Hillary being behind the death of Vince Foster, instead of an strategy of aggressively exposing the lies of Limbaugh, Falwell, Liddy and others, the Clinton administration sent out Lanny Davis to appear on G. Gordon Liddy's radio show. Liddy was one of the top proponents of the various Vince Foster conspiracy theories. He should have been easy to discredit. For one thing, the man is an unrepentant terrorist who had planned to bomb the Brookings Institution. He had Nazi sympathies and was one of the Watergate conspirators. I defy anyone to read Liddy's autobiography Will without concluding that the man is a complete nutcase.

Instead of taking the fight to Liddy, Davis appeared on Liddy's radio show and took the role of the liberal punching bag (good practice for Davis' later role as a Fox News Democrat). Liddy and Davis became fast friends. What a clueless pussy.

Davis is a masochist. He loves being abused by the right. Davis was in George W. Bush's fraternity at Yale and being an underclassman to Dubya, Davis was hazed by the future president. In addition to being an on-air punching bag on Fox News, Davis provides legitimacy to Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times by writing a column for the rag.

One hilarious thing I recently found out, Davis was a victim of the right-wing scam-business Amway (for more information on the Amway Global scam, read my blog devoted to Amway). That's right: Lanny Davis used to be an Amway salesman. This is the nadir of humiliation. Not only was Davis a victim of a scam that helped to fund the radical right but Davis acted like a typical Amway drone. I busted a gut when I read this excerpt from a 1997 Washington Post article by Lloyd Grove on Davis:

After he narrowly lost a 1976 House race, Davis, 51, began evangelizing for the motivational door-to-door distribution company, which markets everything from toothpaste to telephone service. A prominent Maryland lawyer-lobbyist, who refused to speak for attribution, recalled that Davis once invited him to lunch to discuss a "business opportunity."

"We didn't order yet when he started talking, and it was like a switch went on," the lobbyist recounted. "He asked, `Are you interested in making more money?' Well, what lawyer isn't? `Do you want to be in control of your destiny?' And I go, `Wait a minute, Lanny -- is this an Amway pitch?'

"And he says, `Can I finish? I've got these wonderful products to show you.' So he opens this box from the front to reveal a beautiful array of multicolored bottles and packages of toothpaste, dishwashing soap and other stuff. And I said, `No, Lanny. Please. No demonstrations. Thank you and good luck.' I had to virtually push myself away from him, but I got up and left."

This guy is a piece of work. It's just sad that the Clintons trusted him to deal with the right's media.

Addendum: Grove's Washington Post article is not available online so I posted it on the archives of my main blog.