| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fredric L. Rice" |
| Date: |
17 Apr 2005 12:28:03 PM |
| Object: |
Get Tom DeLay to the Church on Time |
New York Times
April 17, 2005
Get Tom DeLay to the Church on Time
By FRANK RICH
A scandal is like any other melodrama: It can't be a crowd pleaser
unless the audience can follow the plot. That's why Monica Lewinsky
trumped Whitewater, and that's why of all the story lines ensnaring Tom
DeLay, the one with legs is the one with the craps tables. It's not
just easy to follow, but it also has a combustive cultural element that
makes it as representative of its political era as Monicagate was of
the Clinton years. As the lies and subterfuge of the go-go 1990's
coalesced around sex, so the scandal of our new "moral values" decade
comes cloaked in religion. The hair shirt is the new thong.
This time the plot begins with money. Two K Street fixers, a lobbyist
named Jack Abramoff and a flack named Michael Scanlon, managed to
snooker six American Indian tribes into handing over $82 million in
exchange for furthering their casino interests. According to The
Washington Post, some of their tribal takings, cycled through a
nonprofit center for "public policy research," helped send Mr. DeLay
golfing in Scotland. The pious congressman, a gambling foe, says he had
no idea of his trip's sinful provenance. Never mind that Mr. DeLay was
joined abroad by Mr. Abramoff, whom he has described as one of his
"closest and dearest friends," or that Mr. Scanlon had once been his
spokesman. Mr. DeLay was as innocent of the goings-on around him as a
piano player in a brothel.
Beltway cronyism, dubious junkets, loophole-laden denials are all, of
course, time-honored Washington fare. The few on the right backing away
from Mr. DeLay, from The Wall Street Journal's editorial page to Newt
Gingrich, make a point of reminding us of that. As they see it, more in
sorrow than in anger, the Gingrich revolutionaries who vowed to end the
corruption practiced by Congressional Democrats have now been infected
by the same Washington virus as their opponents. That's true, but this
critique of Mr. DeLay and company by their own camp all too
conveniently sidesteps the distinguishing feature of this scandal.
Democratic malefactors like Jim Wright and L.B.J.'s old fixer Bobby
Baker didn't wear the Bible on their sleeves.
In the DeLay story almost every player has ostentatious religious
trappings, starting with the House majority leader himself. His efforts
to play God with Terri Schiavo were preceded by crusades like blaming
the teaching of evolution for school shootings and raising money for
the Traditional Values Coalition's campaign to save America from the
"war on Christianity." Mr. DeLay's chief of staff was his pastor, and,
according to Time magazine, organized daily prayer sessions in their
office. Today this holy man, Ed Buckham, is a lobbyist implicated in
another DeLay junket to South Korea.
But it's not merely Christian denominations that figure in the
religious plumage of this crowd. Mr. Abramoff, who is now being
investigated by nearly as many federal agencies as there are nights of
Passover, is an Orthodox Jew who in his salad days wore a yarmulke to
press interviews. In Washington, he opened not one but two kosher
restaurants (I hear the deli was passable by D.C. standards) and
started a yeshiva. His uncompromising piety drove him to condemn the
one Orthodox Jew in the Senate, Joe Lieberman, for securing "the
tortuous death of millions" by supporting abortion rights. Mr.
Abramoff's own moral constellation can be found in e-mail messages in
which he referred to his Indian clients as "idiots" and "monkeys" even
as he squeezed them for every last million. A previous client was
Zaire's dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who, unlike Senator Lieberman,
actually was a practitioner of torture and mass murder.
Another Abramoff crony is the political operative Ralph Reed, whom Mr.
Abramoff hired for his College Republicans operation in the early
1980's. Mr. Reed, who has called gambling "a cancer on the body
politic" and is running for lieutenant governor in Georgia, is now
busily explaining that he, like Mr. DeLay, had no idea that some of his
consulting firm's Abramoff-Scanlon paydays ($4.2 million worth) were
indirect transfers of casino dough. Mr. Reed, of course, is best known
for his stint as the public altar boy's face of Pat Robertson's
political machine, the Christian Coalition.
It was at a Christian Coalition convention in Washington in 1994 that I
first encountered yet another religious figure who pops up in this
tale, the South African-born Rabbi Daniel Lapin. He was regaling the
crowd with scriptural passages proving that high taxes are "immoral."
Now the show rabbi of the Christian right, Rabbi Lapin has moved on to
bigger broadcast pulpits. When he's not preaching the virtues of "The
Passion of the Christ," he is chastising "Meet the Fockers" for
promoting "vile notions of Jews" that "are not too different from those
used by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels." He apparently didn't like
the idea that Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman played characters who
enjoy sex.
Rabbi Lapin, according to Slate, is the networker who jump-started the
mutually beneficial business relationship of Jack Abramoff and Tom
DeLay by introducing them in the early 90's. That was some mitzvah. As
Marshall Wittmann, a former Christian Coalition lobbyist who later
jumped to the Democratic Leadership Council, told me recently, "We now
see the meaning of Judeo-Christian values."
The values alleged so far in this scandal - greed, hypocrisy,
favor-selling, dissembling - belong to no creed except the ruthless
pursuit of power. They are not exclusive to either political party. But
the religious trappings add a note that distinguishes these Beltway
creeps from those who have come before: a supreme righteousness that
often spirals into anger and fire-and-brimstone zealotry that can do
far more damage to America than ill-begotten golf junkets.
It's not for nothing that Mr. DeLay's nickname is the Hammer. Or that
early in his Christian Coalition career, Ralph Reed famously told a
Knight-Ridder reporter that he wanted to see his opponents in a "body
bag." The current manifestation of this brand of religious politics can
be found in the far right's anti-judiciary campaign, of which Mr. DeLay
is the patron saint. As he flew off to the pope's funeral in Rome, the
congressman left behind a rabble-rousing video for a Washington
conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" staged by a new
outfit called The Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional
Restoration. Another speaker, a lawyer named Edwin Vieira, twice
invoked a Stalin dictum whose unexpurgated version goes, "Death solves
all problems; no man, no problem." The reporter who covered the event
for The Washington Post, Dana Milbank, suggested in print that one
prime target of the vitriol, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy,
might want to get "a few more bodyguards." It wasn't necessarily a
joke.
You can see why ***** Cheney and President Bush in rapid succession
distanced themselves from Mr. DeLay's threats of retribution against
judges who presided in the Schiavo case. If an Eric Rudolph murders a
judge in close chronological proximity to that kind of rhetoric,
they've got a political Armageddon on their hands. Mr. DeLay got the
message, sort of. At his Wednesday news conference, he tried to dial
back some of his words, if only as a way of changing the subject from
Indians and his own potential outings in a court of law. Unlike Bill
Frist, he has yet to sign on to next Sunday's national Christian right
telecast bashing what its organizer, the Family Research Council, calls
"out-of-control courts."
Many believe that Mr. DeLay's legal fate is tied to that of Mr.
Abramoff, whom the congressman has now downsized into one of "hundreds
of relationships I have in Washington, D.C." Mr. Abramoff, intriguingly
enough, hasn't always been a creature of the capital. He was raised in
Beverly Hills, the town that is supposed to be anathema to every value
that Republican theocrats stand for. And he returned there for a time
in the late 1980's, when he produced an anti-Communist action film
called "Red Scorpion." Once it was reported that extras and military
equipment had been supplied by South Africa's racist government, Arthur
Ashe's Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid condemned the film, and
no major studio would touch it. But it opened nationwide nonetheless,
to few customers and many protesters.
In 1992 Mr. Abramoff, eager to prove that he was unlike secular
show-business Democrats, told The Hollywood Reporter that he was
starting a Committee for Traditional Jewish Values in Entertainment to
emulate Christian anti-indecency campaigns. (He didn't.) But "Red
Scorpion," on which Mr. Abramoff shares the writing credit, has many
more four-letter words than "Meet the Fockers," as well as violence,
bloodied beefcake (Dolph Lundgren's) and crucifixion imagery
anticipating "The Passion of the Christ."
Though Mr. Abramoff has closed his yeshiva and is now being sued for
back wages by its former employees, his cinematic creation survives on
DVD. "Red Scorpion" is seriously Godawful, but, unlike the Ten
Commandments displayed in Tom DeLay's office, it may yet endure as a
permanent monument to what these people are about.
---
http://www.ElmerFudd.US/ http://www.notserver.com/
Scientology crooks: http://sf.irk.ru/www/ot3/otiii-gif.html
http://PerkinsTragedy.org http://www.rightard.org/
"Bible scholar" is just a euphemism for "unemployed."
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