Frank Rich: In the Beginning, There Was Abramoff

[highplainsdem]

Free Link

In the Beginning, There Was Abramoff
The New York Times
October 2, 2005
Author: FRANK RICH


"Terri Schiavo is not brain-dead; she talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort. Terri Schiavo is not on life support."

-- Tom DeLay, March 20, 2005


IF you believed Tom DeLay then, you no doubt believe now that the deposed House majority leader is only on "temporary" leave from his powerful perch in Washington and that he'll soon bounce back, laughing all the way, from a partisan witch hunt that unjustly requires his brief discomfort in a Texas courtroom.

Those who still live in the reality-based community, however, may sense they're watching the beginning of the end of something big. It's not just Mr. DeLay, aka the Hammer, who is on life support, but a Washington establishment whose infatuation with power and money has contaminated nearly every limb of government and turned off a public that by two to one finds the country on the wrong track.

<snip>

Mr. DeLay's latest plight is only a tiny detail within this vast Boschian canvas of depravity. If this were Watergate -- and Watergate itself increasingly looks like a relatively contained epidemic of corruption -- the Texas grand jury's indictment of the congressman and his associates would be a sideshow tantamount to the initial 1973 California grand jury indictment of the Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and his pals in the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office; Watergate's real legal fireworks were still in the wings. So forget about all those details down in Texas that make your teeth hurt; don't bother to learn the difference between Trmpac and Armpac. Fasten your seat belt instead for the roller coaster of other revelations and possible indictments that's about to roar through the Beltway.

<snip>

The courts can punish crooks, but they can't reform democracy from the ground up, and the voters can't get into the game until 2006. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the key players both in the White House and in the leadership of both houses of Congress are either under investigation or joined at the hip to Messrs Rove, DeLay, Abramoff, Reed or Norquist. They seem to be hoping that some magical event -- a sudden outbreak of peace and democracy in Iraq, the capture of Osama bin Laden, a hurricane affording better presidential photo ops than Rita -- will turn things around. Dream on.

<snip>


Another brilliant Frank Rich column. Check out the complete text at that link.

[OneGrassRoot]

1. Thanks for posting this...........

"The Washington Post reported this year, the number of lobbyists has more than doubled (to some 35,000) since the Bush era began in 2000. Conservatives who once aspired to cut government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" -- as a famous Norquist maxim had it -- merely outsourced government instead to the highest bidder."


THAT's a good number to remember.

[Lindsay]

3. Well, we knew those inflated employment numbers

hadda come from somewhere!

[highplainsdem]

8. LOL

[Voltaire]

2. He was doing fine until the last paragraph

McCain is a chickenshit bullshit artist. Everyone keeps talking about how courageous he is, even when he consorts with people who actually slander his family. Fuck McCain.

[blueknight]

4. voltaire

i totally agree, fuck mccain.after the way kkkarl rove and company slandered him, he fell right in step with them. i dont think he is courageous, i think he is a gut less mother fucker

[anitar1]

19. And I think you are absolutely right. I would never

trust McCain. He is a swine IMHO.

[hang a left]

26. I agree with both of you....but one thing about this article is...

it is a great one to send to republicans.

[ReadTomPaine]

12. Yes Bush was leading him around pre-election like some trophy wife

Kissing and groping him. I wonder if this is how McCain felt as a POW, because he certainly looked like a gimp to me.

[anitar1]

20. Thanks, I love these disgusting pictures. n/t

[SheWhoMustBeObeyed]

18. Any 'expose' by McCain is motivated by revenge, not reform

That man waited five years to be freed by the Viet Cong. Waiting for the right chance to destroy his enemy's administration must have been a cakewalk for him.

And I agree, he's a chickenshit bullshit artist.

[Cha]

24. AND, mccain is a

LIAR..I've seen so many times when it was reported what mccain said on corporate media and they were just damn lies..so how does that measure up to someone who is doing things, ethically?

[leftchick]

5. Rich is rich!

<snip>

We have to hope that the law will get to the bottom of these cases and start to connect the recurring dots. But while everyone is innocent until proved guilty, the overall pattern stinks and has for a long time. It's so filthy that the Republican caucus couldn't even find someone clean to name as Mr. DeLay's "temporary" stand-in as House majority leader last week. As The Washington Post reported in 2003, Roy Blunt, the Missouri congressman who got the job, was found trying to alter a homeland security bill with a last-minute provision that would have benefited Philip Morris-brand cigarettes. Not only had the tobacco giant contributed royally to Mr. Blunt's various campaign coffers, but both the congressman's girlfriend (now wife) and his son were Philip Morris lobbyists at the time.

:applause:

[highplainsdem]

6. What's really funny is that it was DeLay supporters who leaked that story

about Blunt to the WP.

See the topic I posted at

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4923312

and the other GD topic on this that I included a link for in the opening post there (there are links to the original WP story and a Missouri newspaper's story in a later reply in that second topic).

I don't know if the story would ever have gotten out without DeLay's supporters leaking it (presumably with his approval), since it wasn't reported until several months after it happened...

[babylonsister]

7. Thanks for posting; I love Rich! nt

[CantGetFooledAgain]

9. Scathing article...

It gives me some hope that the house of cards is about to come down. Once again, bravo Frank Rich!

[DemoTex]

10. I scrounged a NYTs print copy at my b-fast place this morning.

But this will give Dr. D a chance to enjoy Frank Rich, too. Excellent piece. Thanks for posting.

[jazzjunkysue]

25. I could just cry.

But there are still a zoo full of neocons to replace the top offenders, were this ever to happen.

[Patsy Stone]

11. Thanks for posting this.

These are great paragraphs. A comprehensive list of the investigations.

"The DeLay and Abramoff investigations are not to be confused with the many others percolating in the capital, including, most famously of late, the Justice Department and S.E.C. inquiries into the pious Bill Frist's divine stock-sale windfall and the homeland security inspector general's promised inquiry into possible fraud in the no-bid contracts doled out by FEMA for Hurricane Katrina. The mother of all investigations, of course, remains the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's pursuit of whoever outed the C.I.A. agent Valerie Wilson to Robert Novak and whoever may have lied to cover it up. The denouement is on its way.

"Every time you turn over a rock, you find more vermin. We've only just learned from The Los Angeles Times that Joseph Schmitz, until last month the inspector general in charge of policing waste, fraud and abuse at the Pentagon, is himself the focus of a Congressional inquiry. He is accused of blocking the investigation of another Bush appointee who is suspected of siphoning Iraq reconstruction contracts to business cronies. At the Justice Department, the F.B.I. is looking into why a career prosecutor was demoted after he started probing alleged Abramoff illegality in Guam. According to The Los Angeles Times, the demoted prosecutor was then replaced by a Rove-approved Republican pol who just happened to be a cousin of a major target of another corruption investigation in Guam."

The piece harmonizes nicely with this Guardian Op/Ed:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4946973

[WCGreen]

13. LEt's not forget....

The Dem's are not articulating an understandable alternative, an easy to grasp concept of what they believe and how they would go about implementing their beliefs if returned to power....

Honestly, Paul Hackkett is the only political figure in the last few years that has aligned himself with the democratic party that has been able to articulate an easy message....

ON the national level, Gen. Clark....

There are a few others, but let's face it, what kind of vision can be explained while, as Rich points out, they are still trying to figure out how to "play" their votes for the war......

[realFedUp]

14. I do disagree with giving McCain that much credit...

snip
The one notable anomaly is John McCain, who retains a genuine hunger for reform, a rage at the corruption around him and the compelling motive of his presidential ambitions to push him forward; it's his Indian Affairs Committee, after all, that exposed the hideous Abramoff cesspool to public view last year.

(McCain hasn't done much on this issue since last year.
Justice delayed again by conservatives.)

[rndmprsn]

15. great read...frank rich has been hitting his stride with the last few...

op/eds...this one put it all together...abrahmoff, delay, norquist, reed and rove, if every american could take 10 mins to read pieces like this many eyes would be opened to the infested rat whole washington has become under the reTHUGlicans

[highplainsdem]

16. kick

[Maestro]

17. Great article

:kick:

[Cha]

21. Darn! The link

didn't work for me.

Edit! Never mind now it is, thanks for this Free link!

[Cha]

22. Rich is tough on the dems..I

don't like it when they are LUMPED.

"But don't take my word for it. And don't listen to the canned talking points of the Democrats, who are still so busy trying to explain why they were for the war in Iraq before they were against it that it's hard to trust their logic on anything else. Listen instead to Andrew Ferguson, of the conservative Rupert Murdoch magazine, The Weekly Standard. As far back as last December in a cover article on the sleazy lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Mr. Ferguson was already declaring "the end of the Republican Revolution."

And that's not the only time he mentions their ineptitude.

Frank Rich does speak well of that LIAR mccain, though.

Other than that he Tears the rethug bandits inside the beltway a new asshole.

[0007]

23. Great article!

I hope everyone reads it and understands that DeLay will not be coming back anytime soon.

The most important plot development of the past two weeks, in fact, has nothing to do with Mr. DeLay (as far as we know). It was instead the arrest of the administration's top procurement officer, David Safavian, on charges of lying and obstructing the investigation of Mr. Abramoff. And what an investigation it is: The F.B.I., the I.R.S., the Treasury Department and the Interior Department have all been involved. The popular theory of the case has it that Mr. Safavian, a former lobbying colleague of both Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Norquist, is being muscled by the feds to rat on the big guys in Washington -- much as another smaller fish may have helped reel in Mr. DeLay in Texas.