From The Star Telegram, 10/9/05:
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/12852363.htm
The Republican racket (which isn't tennis)
By MOLLY IVINS
Creators Syndicate
It seems to me what we are looking at was put best by noted journalist
Billy Don Moyers, formerly of Marshall, who was home recently and
observed that the Republican right came to Washington to start a
revolution and stayed to run a racket.
It has become a game of ideological flimflam, a scam in which all
manner of distracting hoo-hah -- abortion, judicial activism, even
"the war on terra" -- is used to obscure the fact that the government
has been taken over by people who are using it to make money for
themselves and their friends.
In the business world, this is called "control fraud," and it refers
to an organization, like Enron or Tyco, that is rotten at the head.
One of the key figures in this web of malfeasance is Jack Abramoff,
the super-lobbyist, top fund-raiser for Bush's re-election and close
buddy of Rep. Tom DeLay -- himself the architect of the "K Street
Strategy" to convert the entire business lobby into the fund-raising
arm of the Republican Party in return for whatever legislative favors
the major donors want.
Abramoff is the close ally and college roommate of Grover Norquist, a
key right-wing political activist and major leader of the "movement
conservatives" in Washington.
Abramoff has also bragged that he contacted Karl Rove on behalf of
Tyco.
Washington is theoretically covered by the largest concentration of
journalistic talent anywhere in the world.
This is just a straight, old-fashioned corruption story of the sort
theoretically uncovered by many Washington reporters earlier in their
lives at various city halls.
Did everyone forget how it's done?
Equally, the arrest of David Safavian -- former head of procurement at
the White House Office of Management and Budget -- on grounds of
having impeded justice by lying or covering up material facts opens up
all kinds of lines of inquiry.
Safavian was previously a partner in Norquist's consulting firm
Janus-Merritt Strategies.
Safavian also worked with Abramoff at another law-lobbying firm.
One definition of Establishment journalism is relying solely on news
conferences held by people with public office and power.
With the exception of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times,
the Washington press corps appears to be standing around waiting for
word from the official investigation.
Why aren't they ahead of the official investigators?
Seems to me we have all mourned the descent of politics from the noble
(if messy and comically picturesque) doings of democracy into a system
of legalized bribery.
Taking huge campaign contributions from special interests and doing
legislative favors in return is so common that one barely blinks at
it.
Rep. Roy Blunt, the man whom Republicans chose to replace DeLay
temporarily while he's under indictment, tried to alter a Homeland
Security bill in 2003 with a last-minute provision to benefit the
cigarette company Philip Morris.
Philip Morris had not only contributed heavily to Blunt's campaign --
it also employed both Blunt's girlfriend, whom he married in 2003, and
one of his sons.
DeLay gets indicted, and the Republicans replace him with another
DeLay.
The scandals seem to be a new and more sinister level of corruption.
_____________________________________________________________
Harry
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