Stephen Viramontes, the interim state director of the tea party group FreedomWorks in Arizona, canceled plans to distribute Valentine’s Day cards to lawmakers featuring various dictators who opposed anti-union legislation — but not before tweeting about the cards, the Arizona Capitol Times reports.
Viramontes deleted those tweets, but not before the Times published them.
Viramontes explained who would be getting the cards in a second tweet, which was also deleted. “All those needing some help in supporting and passing #PaycheckProtection,” he wrote.
According to the Capitol Times, other cards featured Fidel Castro, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong as well as Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. Viramontes told the Times that FreedomWorks is planning a big push for legislation that will limit the ability of public sector unions to collect money from their members for use in political efforts.
This ill-fated Valentine’s Day stint comes on the same day that Mother Jones reported that FreedomWorks executives in Washington, D.C. made a video — which they almost showed at a tea party conference — in which a fake panda performs oral sex on a woman impersonating then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
