Corbett Hires Tea Party Conspiracy Theorist at $70k/Yr

Here’s how to get a plum job in government: Spend four years railing against the government. Bucks County-based Ana Puig, a co-founder of the Kitchen Table Patriots, is now the legislative liaison for the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue. She will make $68, 245/yr. Presumably, as a good Tea Partier, she will work hard to get that revenue number as close as possible to zero. Here are some greatest hits from her resume, courtesy of Keystone Politics.

In recent years, she has promoted an event featuring topics including “The Muslim Brotherhood and creeping sharia law in America” and “Pro-Islamic bias and indoctrination in our public school textbooks.”

And:

In 2009, Puig told the New York Village Voice that Barack Obama is a Marxist and that the way Obama advanced health care reform was “the same thing” Hugo Chávez did to Venezuela—an “infiltration of the education system, political correctness, class warfare ideology, voter fraud, brainwashing through the mainstream media.”

And:

Her Kitchen Table Patriots website also features a blog that promotes the “birther” conspiracy, refers to the President as a “petulant child,” and says that Obama is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Whether she’ll be seen as a traitor to her grassroots cause remains to be seen. Her Kitchen Table Patriots co-founder Anastasia Przybylski, for instance, was still pounding the pavement this spring. Still, it’s not so surprising that Puig would rush into the arms of a taxpayer-funded position. Here’s Inky politics writer Tom Fitzgerald in a piece about Puig’s hiring.

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket,” wrote the social philosopher Eric Hoffer in his 1967 work The Temper of Our Time. OK, that sounds a little cynical, but the broader point works: Social movements have natural life cycles.

What’s more surprising is that Corbett would hire such an inexperienced, extreme candidate in the first place. Actually, come to think of it, that’s not so surprising either.