Benjy Sarlin does some great reporting on Bruce Majors, the author of the Tea Party guide to D.C. I made fun of last week and finds out his politics aren't exactly straightforward.
According to OpenSecrets.org, he's donated about $15,000 to Democrats since 2000, including a $10,000 donation to the DNC in 2000, a $500 donation to Howard Dean in 2003, and a $1,000 donation to John Kerry in 2004. His only recent contribution to a Republican candidate was $250 in 2002 to retired Rep. Jim Kolbe, then lone openly gay Republican in Congress.
"I kind of wish I hadn't given tens of thousands of dollars to Democrats, especially with the real-estate business what it is today," he said. "Now I can only give a few hundred a year to libertarians to try to make up the balance."
Majors says he also donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy group, and once won a role as an extra in the sitcom Will & Grace at one of their charity auctions."I was going to a lot of lesbian cocktail parties raising money for Gore and then Kerry/Edwards," he said. "I'm sure they're all horrified this week."
In hindsight it was really silly for me to have imputed an ideological motivation to what Majors wrote. Having grown up in Washington, D.C., I don't know how many times I've heard liberals express similar sentiments, marveling at the possibility that I grew up inside the city, as though it were a never-ending war zone of buildings pockmarked from gunfire and herds of crack fiends wandering the streets like out of a scene from a Robert Kirkman comic book.
