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We’re
All Crooks Here
Everyone who goes into poli tics is crooked. You know it,
I know it, everyone you talk to at parties knows it. Mark
Twain called Congress America’s “only distinctly native criminal
class.” We joke about it, and cartoonists poke fun at it every
chance they get.
So who wants to mess with a good thing, right? Nothing like
going with the flow when it comes to a truism that everyone
acknowledges.
Except right now this truism is part and parcel of the Republican
playbook in Washington, right when they’ve got a hold on the
White House, the Congress, and a stranglehold on the Supreme
Court.
Why are Republicans suddenly disparaging all the institutions
of which they happen to be in charge? One guy who turned around
to the feds and started singing like a bird, some guy named
Jack Abramoff. Abramoff is starting to make dear old Richard
Nixon look like the late “Clean” Gene McCarthy. He’s the headliner
in the rock concert that was former House majority leader
Tom DeLay’s “K Street Project.” Abramoff tied together all
the money interests—the people who wanted to buy and sell
legislation and members of Congress like poker chips—with
the lobbyists, who then worked with those said members of
Congress and the people in the White House to give away the
store.
The reason why the Republicans are crowing that everyone is
crooked is so that you’ll agree, put down the newspaper, and
go back to hating the Steelers or watching American Idol
or whatever it is they think people outside the Beltway do
when they’ve written off all politicos as crooks. Nothing
to see here folks, move along. If you think that both sides
are equally crooked, then you don’t care, and they’ll breathe
a big sigh of relief. And then they’ll go back to selling
communications law to the phone and cable providers, the wilderness
to logging interests, and your credit to the people at MBNA.
The phrase “Abramoff gave money to Democrats as well as Republicans”
has been repeated so much in the last three weeks that I’m
surprised no one has set it to music. Never mind that it’s
not true—Abramoff gave money only to Republicans, George W.
Bush and Robert Ehrlich among them. His clients may have given
some money to Democrats, but he himself gave money to not
one Democrat—not one.
And nobody has yet proved that those clients, all Indian casinos,
gave money to Dems because he told them to—after all, why
would they? Abramoff has always been all about Republican
power in Washington. This man is so radioactive that presidential
spokesman Scott McClellan suddenly went back on his word and
won’t detail who in the White House Abramoff has met with.
How is a man like this a bipartisan crook?
It’s hilarious how members of the so-called liberal media
are backing away from how they acted as full-on stenographers
for the GOP when it comes to the “both sides got Abramoff
money” talking points. Washington Post ombudsman Deborah
Howell got such a huge outpouring of grief after she claimed
that Democrats “have gotten Abramoff campaign money” that
the paper shut down the comments link to her web column. Post
media critic Howard Kurtz was almost as bad, covering for
her by saying that her phrase was “inartfully worded.” Uh-huh,
right.
As a Dec. 21 Bloomberg news story artfully put it:
“Between
2001 and 2004, Abramoff gave more than $127,000 to Republican
candidates and committees and nothing to Democrats, federal
records show. At the same time, his Indian clients were the
only ones among the top 10 tribal donors in the U.S. to donate
more money to Republicans than Democrats.”
Claiming this is a bipartisan scandal is just plain prevarication.
And now the president and every member of the Republican Congress
that has ever taken a dollar from this felon is interested
in painting everyone as crooked, because it’s the only possible
way they can come out smelling halfway decent.
Now it turns out that both Washingtonian magazine and
Time magazine have seen no fewer than five pictures
of Bush and Abramoff together—photos that put the lie to the
McClellan tale that “the president does not know him, nor
does the president recall ever meeting him.”
So Washington is full of crooks, all of them. You vote some
out, and the next ones aren’t any better. And if you think
that, then it’s OK not to care about Jack Abramoff. After
all, what’s the matter with believing something everyone knows
is true anyway, right?
—Brian
Morton
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