Criticism
Some of FreedomWorks' campaigns have been called "astroturfing", and some claim that they project a false impression of grassroots organizing.
On August 14, 2009, after Armey's leadership of FreedomWorks became a problem to his employer, the lobbying and legal firm of DLA Piper, Armey was forced to resign from his job at DLA Piper. DLA Piper chairman Francis Burch responded that the firm serves clients “… who support enactment of effective health care reform this year and encourages responsible national debate."
Armey disagreed with FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe's use of FreedomWorks staff for the research and promotion of Kibbe's book Hostile Takeover, which according to Armey put FreedomWorks’s tax-exempt status in jeopardy. Armey has stated, “what bothered me most … was that was asking me to lie, and it was a lie that I thought brought the organization in harm’s way”.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)