There's a number of very good reasons why one might dislike Dick Armey, currently engaged in spreading false information about health reform.
On Friday Mr Armey announced his resignation from DLA Piper, the Washington-based lobbying firm that he has advised since stepping down from Congress in 2002. Both DLA Piper, which has big healthcare clients including Bristol Myers Squibb, the pharmaceutical company that opposes elements of Mr Obama’s health reforms, and Mr Armey said he had decided to quit in order to spare the firm any further embarrassment by association with Freedom Works.
Freedom Works is associated with the town hall screamers and disrupters, and it's easy to see where embarrassment might come from. But Armey goes further and starts to get all tin foil hat conspiracy theory on us:
Mr Armey, 69, predicted that the "grassroots" backlash against what he called Mr Obama’s "hostile government takeover of a sixth of the US economy" would cause the reform to fail spectacularly. But he predicted that supporters of reform would attempt to win over the "bed-wetters caucus" – a group of wavering lawmakers who spanned both parties, he said – with a fear campaign in the autumn.
"In September or October there will be a hyped up outbreak of the swine flu which they’ll say is as bad as the bubonic plague to scare the bed-wetters to vote for healthcare reform," said Mr Armey. "That is the only way they can push something on to the American people that the American people don’t want."
For Armey to politicize pandemic influenza is pretty remarkable - and a case of remarkably bad judgment. Since George Bush's release of a national pandemic plan in 2005 Mike Leavitt, Michael Chertoff, Katherine Sebelius, Janet Napolitano and a host of political figures from this and the last administration have approached this in a non-partisan fashion befitting a public health emergency that can wind up affecting as much as 30% of the population this fall. What everyone else has avoided, Armey has stepped in.
To quote Joseph Welch, "You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" In Armey's case, I'm afraid the clear and obvious answer is no. He should stick to lying about health reform (after all, that's his job), and leave public health to the grownups.