Tom Delay,hypocrite with no bounds......

[catnap1972]

Originally posted by: Riprorin

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
Why is anyone arguing with Riprorin? He has shown time and time again that he is merely a link-bot, with no substantial higher order thinking. He barely has an original thought of his own and a warped sense of reality that is able to take objective facts, and spin them into something that suits his world view. If tomorrow, WDN or NRO said that 2+2 = 5, he would easily subvert his thinking to do so.

Lets try this exercise. When you see Rip, think zero critical thinking skills.

It's an obvious politcal smear campaign by the leftists against a high-profile Republican.[/b]

No it's obviously the black helicopters circling your head.

There's no mystery here.

That you're out of your mind? Nope, no mystery there.

 

[Riprorin]

Blather doesn't equal truth.

 

[conjur]

Originally posted by: Riprorin
Blather doesn't equal truth.

You would know...king of all trolls.

 

[BBond]

DeLay is a true scumbag. Check out the blatant selling of his office in Texas. What a true POS. And that goes for the entire Republican Party if they continue to defend this abomination.

If there is any justice left in America (and there is a strong case to be made that under the criminal reign of these pseudo-Republican Texan criminals there is in fact none) this clown will wind up in jail.

When does DeLay start serving DeSentence?

DeLay Fundraising Plied Special Interests

By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Fundraisers for a political committee founded by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay routinely solicited donations by identifying legislative actions that prospective givers wanted, from video gambling to lawsuit limits, memos show.

"What companies that you know of would be interested in tort reform in Texas with asbestos problems that might support TRMPAC?" one DeLay fundraiser wrote in a memo prospecting for donors to the Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee (TRMPAC).

That memo elicited an answer identifying several large companies and interest groups nationwide interested in lawsuit-limiting legislation in Congress and Texas, the documents show.

The fundraisers also discussed using DeLay himself to make calls to round up some of the bigger donations, and referred to delivery of at least two checks they collected directly to the House majority leader.

"Create a top 10 list of givers and let me call them to ask for large contribution," DeLay fundraiser Warren RoBold wrote in August 2002. "I would then decide from response who Tom DeLay others should call."

Other TRMPAC fundraising memos mention that Texas racetrack owners needed state permission for video gambling, that banks wanted new Texas home-lending rules and that energy firms wanted less regulation.

Federal law and congressional ethics rules prohibit government officials from connecting political donations to their official actions. DeLay was admonished last year by the House's ethics committee for creating the appearance of connecting energy industry donations with federal legislation.

DeLay spokesman Dan Allen said Monday, "These memos already have been covered in the press and the conclusions being reached are speculative and unsubstantiated. The contention being pushed is unfairly vague."

DeLay has said that while he founded the Texas political action committee and advised it, he is not involved in its day-to-day operations. A Democratic Texas prosecutor has indicted three former DeLay aides on charges related to TRMPAC's receipt and use of corporate contributions.

The documents reviewed by The Associated Press were made public through a civil lawsuit and by the House ethics committee. They provide a window into how the DeLay-founded Texas group studied policy and legislative issues as it targeted possible donors.

In 2002, a fundraiser's handwritten note appears alongside the name of a Texas racetrack owner who ? along with other state track operators ? wanted state permission to begin offering video gambling at the tracks.

"Brings $1 billion. Polls 83 percent in favor," the fundraiser's note said.

Weeks after that visit to the company's chief executive, track owner Maxxam Inc. contributed $5,000 to Texans for a Republican Majority.

In another exchange of e-mails, RoBold asked Drew Maloney, a lobbyist and former DeLay aide, for a list of companies and organizations interested in limiting damage awards, especially firms with asbestos liability problems.

"I would say Dow Chemical (they have a big asbestos problem), other cos. with asbestos problems including ... Owens Illinois ... Halliburton I believe too," Maloney responded.

"Other general supporters of tort reform in TX would be AMA, doctors groups, hospitals," Maloney wrote.

TRMPAC contribution reports do not list donations from these companies. An organization of nursing home providers, the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care, was TRMPAC's largest contributor at $100,000.

Maloney did not return several calls seeking comment.

A Sept. 9, 2002, TRMPAC trip listed donation-seeking visits for fundraiser Susan Lilly and a state GOP representative, Beverly Woolley.

In an interview, Lilly said of the notations next to the names of prospective donors, "These were my personal notes. It was just my personal knowledge of what a person likes or dislikes. They were notes I took at the meeting," she said.

"37 other states have it," she wrote next to Charles Hurwitz, the racetrack owner seeking video gambling whose company made a TRMPAC donation soon after the meeting.

A note next to the top executive of Alabama-based Compass Bank read, "Want to clear up home equity lending." Another notation said "22 K direct."

Four days after the meeting, Compass Bank's political action committee made $22,000 in contributions of $1,000 each to candidates in 22 Texas House races, according to an analysis by the Texas Observer newspaper.

Eight months after the fundraising visit, the Texas Legislature approved a constitutional amendment to allow home equity loans on lines of credit for the first time in the state. Voters ratified the amendment and Compass quickly marketed the loans.

The House ethics committee, in admonishing DeLay last year, particularly objected to a May 30, 2002, memo written by Maloney. The lobbyist organized DeLay's golf fundraising event, and formerly was a DeLay staff aide on energy matters.

He listed the specific goals of golf fundraiser attendees Reliant Energy, based in Houston; Williams Companies, Tulsa, Okla.; Mirant Corp., Atlanta; El Paso Corp., Houston, and Westar, Topeka, Kan.

Some three months after the memo, Reliant contributed $25,000 to TRMPAC, according to a database compiled by a state watchdog group, Texans for Public Justice.

In Maloney's memo seeking contributors with asbestos problems, the ex-DeLay staff member wrote, "I finally have the 2 checks from Reliant. Will deliver to TD next week."

 

[mhillary]

That was really good.

 

[arsbanned]

DeSentence is DeLayed until after DeTrial?

 

[Riprorin]

The Dems are just angry and upset that they're out of power and likely to remain so.

Boohoo.

 

[catnap1972]

Originally posted by: Riprorin
The Dems are just angry and upset that they're out of power and likely to remain so.

Boohoo.

Did you type all of that with your one free hand? :roll:

 

[Harvey]

Originally posted by: Riprorin
The Dems are just angry and upset that they're out of power and likely to remain so.

Boohoo.

And you are just angry and upset that you are out of touch with reality and likely to remain so.

Boohoowahahahaha! :laugh:

 

[Gaard]

Originally posted by: catnap1972

Originally posted by: Riprorin
The Dems are just angry and upset that they're out of power and likely to remain so.

Boohoo.

Did you type all of that with your one free hand? :roll:

:laugh:

 

[CaptnKirk]

Clinton Made Me Do It !

You got to be kiddin' me - Blame the Democrats because Delay is the crook that he is.

 

[conjur]

DeLay steadily loses any shot at becoming speaker of House
Chicago Sun-Times - 19 hours ago
The drip, drip, drip of negative stories about House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) have already accomplished one thing -- dashing the likelihood DeLay ...
http://www.suntimes.com/output/sweet/cst-nws-lynn13.html

DeLay should resign without further delay
Arizona Republic, AZ - 23 hours ago
There have been escalating questions about the ethics of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay over the past few years that need to be addressed. ...
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/0413wedlet131.html

Historic parallels as DeLay's woes deepen
Christian Science Monitor - Apr 11, 2005
By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor. WASHINGTON ? The gap between what House Republicans say ...
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0412/p02s01-uspo.html

DeLay Draws Fire From Fellow Republicans
ABC News - Apr 10, 2005
In this photo provided by ABC News, US Sens. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., right, and Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., appear for an interview ...
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=658869

The Loneliest Republican
Washington Post - 1 hour ago
By Dana Milbank. Rep. Christopher Shays (Conn.), the only Republican in Congress to call for Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) to resign as House ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51336-2005Apr13.html

GOP congressman says DeLay should step down as House majority ...
Newsday, NY - Apr 10, 2005
By LOU KESTEN. WASHINGTON -- Private GOP tensions over Tom DeLay's ethics controversy spilled into public Sunday, as a Senate leader ...
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/...727.story?coll=ny-region-apconnecticut

Under Fire, DeLay Apologizes for Criticizing Judges
Los Angeles Times (subscription), CA - 6 hours ago
By Maura Reynolds, Times Staff Writer. WASHINGTON ? House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, increasingly under fire for what critics describe ...
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld...,0,886778.story?coll=la-home-headlines

 

[kage69]

That's right Rip, keep covering your eyes and ears and pretend it's only dems who want this sleazebag to answer to the law. Blather indeed. :disgust:

 

[conjur]

heh heh

house of scandal

 

[conjur]

Tancredo: DeLay exit not bad idea

Coloradan is one of two in the GOP to suggest the majority leader step aside until issues are resolved.
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E11676%257E2817542,00.html


Damn Democrats picking on DeLay.



Oh wait....

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: Riprorin

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
Why is anyone arguing with Riprorin? He has shown time and time again that he is merely a link-bot, with no substantial higher order thinking. He barely has an original thought of his own and a warped sense of reality that is able to take objective facts, and spin them into something that suits his world view. If tomorrow, WDN or NRO said that 2+2 = 5, he would easily subvert his thinking to do so.

Lets try this exercise. When you see Rip, think zero critical thinking skills.

It's an obvious politcal smear campaign by the leftists against a high-profile Republican.

There's no mystery here.

Actually it is people like Rip that are voting and running the Country.

So it's no wonder those that are left that can still think on their own are being driven insane looking at the nonsense.

Rush, Hannity and Bush and Company are proud of this accomplishment of completely annilating rational thought out of the American Sheeple.

This is an amazing thing written into the History books although it is not that much of a surprise because History has repeated itself over and over again.

Humans are not as smart as they think they are.

 

[Darkhawk28]

Originally posted by: conjur
heh heh

house of scandal

Kenny Hulshof, my local Rep, is in arm deep with Delay as well. Boy, I'm shocked. :roll:

 

[conjur]

Lobbyist is target of calls for inquiry into millions in fees
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/nation/11402215.htm

WASHINGTON - A lobbyist under scrutiny for charging Indian tribes millions of dollars is facing a call for a congressional investigation into his work representing the Northern Mariana Islands.

California Democratic Rep. George Miller on Thursday asked the House Resources Committee to examine Jack Abramoff's work for the commonwealth, a tiny U.S. territory in the Pacific. The committee oversees U.S. territories.

Last month, Northern Marianas government auditors questioned whether the territory was overcharged when it paid Abramoff's firm millions of dollars during the 1990s.

The payments included at least $1 million that his then-employer, the Preston Gates lobbying firm, failed to justify. Auditors quoted officials as saying they could save lobbying money by flying fewer members of Congress to the islands.

"I believe there is more than enough initial evidence to warrant a thorough and bipartisan investigation of Mr. Abramoff and potential congressional wrongdoing in the territories," Miller wrote the chairman of the House Resources Committee, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif.

Pombo will decide whether the committee will investigate. His spokesman, Matt Streit, said Thursday that Pombo had not reviewed the letter.

An Abramoff spokesman has said fees charged by the lobbyist and his firm were justified. Preston Gates declined to comment on specific audit findings.

Miller has long sought to lift the islands' exemption from U.S. labor and immigration laws, contending that immigrants are facing widespread abuse. The islands' government hired Abramoff and Preston Gates during the 1990s to help fend off any possible changes.

Abramoff, a major fund-raiser for President Bush's re-election campaign, is under investigation by a federal grand jury and the Senate Indian Affairs Committee for deals in which he and an associate received at least $66 million from six Indian tribes to lobby for their casinos and other interests. The tribes maintain that the charges were excessive.

Congressional Democrats are also examining Abramoff's ties to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, including foreign trips that Abramoff arranged for DeLay.

The trips included one to the Marianas in December 1997. Abramoff organized DeLay's visit and the commonwealth government and the Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association paid for it. DeLay said after the trip that he viewed the islands' clothing factories as a success and believed that they should keep their exemption from U.S. labor laws...of course he did.

I don't think DeLay ever met a dollar he didn't like or a business owner he wouldn't drop his pants for.

As for Abramoff, he'd better not fly any small, charter flights if he decides to finally sing.

 

[kage69]

As for Abramoff, he'd better not fly any small, charter flights if he decides to finally sing.

OOooooooooooooooo.....

 

[Darkhawk28]

Originally posted by: conjur
Lobbyist is target of calls for inquiry into millions in fees
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/nation/11402215.htm

WASHINGTON - A lobbyist under scrutiny for charging Indian tribes millions of dollars is facing a call for a congressional investigation into his work representing the Northern Mariana Islands.

California Democratic Rep. George Miller on Thursday asked the House Resources Committee to examine Jack Abramoff's work for the commonwealth, a tiny U.S. territory in the Pacific. The committee oversees U.S. territories.

Last month, Northern Marianas government auditors questioned whether the territory was overcharged when it paid Abramoff's firm millions of dollars during the 1990s.

The payments included at least $1 million that his then-employer, the Preston Gates lobbying firm, failed to justify. Auditors quoted officials as saying they could save lobbying money by flying fewer members of Congress to the islands.

"I believe there is more than enough initial evidence to warrant a thorough and bipartisan investigation of Mr. Abramoff and potential congressional wrongdoing in the territories," Miller wrote the chairman of the House Resources Committee, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif.

Pombo will decide whether the committee will investigate. His spokesman, Matt Streit, said Thursday that Pombo had not reviewed the letter.

An Abramoff spokesman has said fees charged by the lobbyist and his firm were justified. Preston Gates declined to comment on specific audit findings.

Miller has long sought to lift the islands' exemption from U.S. labor and immigration laws, contending that immigrants are facing widespread abuse. The islands' government hired Abramoff and Preston Gates during the 1990s to help fend off any possible changes.

Abramoff, a major fund-raiser for President Bush's re-election campaign, is under investigation by a federal grand jury and the Senate Indian Affairs Committee for deals in which he and an associate received at least $66 million from six Indian tribes to lobby for their casinos and other interests. The tribes maintain that the charges were excessive.

Congressional Democrats are also examining Abramoff's ties to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, including foreign trips that Abramoff arranged for DeLay.

The trips included one to the Marianas in December 1997. Abramoff organized DeLay's visit and the commonwealth government and the Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association paid for it. DeLay said after the trip that he viewed the islands' clothing factories as a success and believed that they should keep their exemption from U.S. labor laws...of course he did.

I don't think DeLay ever met a dollar he didn't like or a business owner he wouldn't drop his pants for.

As for Abramoff, he'd better not fly any small, charter flights if he decides to finally sing.

Like somebody like Delay would concern himself with jet size and whether or not it was a charter flight. If I saw him on my TWA flight, I'd get off.

 

[conjur]

Time Magazine:

When Tom Met Jack
Inside the cozy relationship between Tom DeLay and D.C.'s most notorious lobbyist. Could it take the leader down?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1050216,00.html

It was congress's holiday for memorial Day 2000, and majority whip Tom DeLay's staff thought the boss and two top aides deserved a respite from the arduous hours they had been putting in doing the people's business. They wanted to make sure DeLay's little delegation had the finest of everything on its weeklong trip to Britain?from lodgings at the Four Seasons Hotel in London to dinners at the poshest restaurants with the most interesting people, right down to the best tickets for The Lion King?at the time, one of the hottest shows playing on the West End and one for which good seats usually meant a six-month wait. So DeLay's congressional office turned to someone they trusted far more than any travel agent or concierge: lobbyist Jack Abramoff. "He ran all the trips," recalls a former top DeLay aide. "You ask where the itineraries came from, who made all the travel arrangements?it all came out of Jack's shop."
Previous trips had taken DeLay and members of his staff all over the world, but none had been planned quite as meticulously as this one.

Three sources who worked with Abramoff at the time say the majority whip's office ran one of Abramoff's assistants ragged with its constantly changing requests. Indeed, say two of those sources, the whole idea for the expensive London jaunt originated with DeLay aides as an additional stop on a golf outing that Abramoff had proposed to Scotland's famous St. Andrews course.

Abramoff delivered on virtually everything DeLay's staff requested.

"Jack didn't need this to go awry," recalls a lobbyist who then worked with Abramoff at the Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds law firm and who notes that the trip came at a critical moment. Congress was considering legislation (which died a month after the trip) that might have shut down Internet gambling?and jeopardized the livelihoods of some of Abramoff's biggest clients. Two of them?a Choctaw Indian tribe and the Internet gambling company eLottery Inc.?each wrote a check for $25,000 on May 25, 2000, the day DeLay departed, to the sponsor of the trip, the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative nonprofit foundation on whose board Abramoff sat. Those checks would cover most of the cost of the $70,000 junket. Sponsorship by the center made the trip allowable under House ethics rules, which prohibit lobbyists from paying for congressional travel.

Yet the flurry of demands by DeLay's staff to Abramoff's lobbying operation call into question whether DeLay's office really believed the trip was, in fact, "sponsored, organized and paid for by the National Center for Public Policy Research," as DeLay spokesman Dan Allen maintained when the Washington Post first reported the indirect financing arrangement last month. What's more, if the idea for and details of the London leg originated with DeLay's office, that raises questions about possible violations of a House rule governing gifts and travel. The rule allows members to accept gifts, under limited circumstances, but not to solicit them. Allen told TIME he would not comment on any dealings between DeLay's staff and Abramoff unless TIME revealed its sources or provided documentary evidence.


Page 1 of 4 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next > >

Have to add in this snippet, though:

Bush still calls DeLay a friend, although spokesman Scott McClellan pointedly noted last week that "there are different levels of friendship." The President's team is increasingly frustrated by the majority leader's inability to mount a defense more persuasive than blaming his problems on a liberal conspiracy. DeLay, says a senior Administration official, "is handling this like an idiot."

McCellan is such a fvcking tool.

 

[BBond]

The NY Times sliced and diced DeLay today in a Times editorial and an op-ed by Frank Rich.

Republicans had best dump DeLay before the entire party dies from embarassment.

The only people still defending DeLay are his family and Rip.

What a joke.

EDITORIAL

<a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/opinion/17sun1.html?Power for Power's Sake">Power for Power's Sake
</a>

Published: April 17, 2005

When power and leadership come to politicians incapable of handling either, the results can be disastrous. The Democrats who controlled Congress into the 1990's grew so comfortable with their majority that they lost track of the country. As House speaker, Newt Gingrich sacrificed his revolution to his swollen ego. And now there is Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, whose hunger for power has grown so insatiable that it has detached him from the nation's business, the principles of electoral democracy and even the mainstream of his own party.

Mr. DeLay's ethical and financial lapses are serious and disqualifying for his high office. But even more alarming than his love for political money is his abuse of power. He appears to be confused about the difference between a legislative majority won in an election and total control held indefinitely.

Mr. DeLay is not content with having a Republican president and majorities in both houses of Congress. He wants to control every aspect of government fully, and to deny the Democrats any role at all. The method is simple: when the game does not go his way, he changes the rules. If Republicans cannot win huge majorities in House races, he shifts the boundaries of their districts; if ethics rules start to catch up with his reckless behavior, he rewrites them. Most recently, when rulings by judges - the one branch of government still beyond his grasp - did not precisely suit him, Mr. DeLay resolved to impose his ideology on the judiciary.

Mr. DeLay began building his megamachine with a breathtakingly hubristic "pay to play" system. It was not just that anyone who wanted access had to contribute to the Republican apparatus. The new rules also required that special interests refrain from contributing to Democratic causes.

In Texas, his home state, Mr. DeLay engineered an extraordinary gerrymandering to cement a Republican majority in the House delegation. When Democratic lawmakers left the state to stall a vote, he once again abused his power by sending federal agents after them. The circuitous funneling of DeLay machine money into the Texas scheme led to indictments against two close associates.

But when the timorous House ethics monitors began questioning Mr. DeLay's behavior and had the gall to actually admonish him last year, Mr. DeLay purged the committee of the Republicans who questioned his rule and replaced them with solid loyalists, some of whom have actually contributed to his legal defense fund. Then he began altering the rules to make sure that if some further charge managed to slip through, it would die of neglect.

When he bothers to explain himself, which is not often, Mr. DeLay complains about some vast left-wing conspiracy, or he rolls out the "everyone does it" dodge. Yes, many members of Congress take junkets, but the dubious financing for Mr. DeLay's trips seems like those off-the-books Enron operations. Surely, the House majority leader can get to Scotland or Seoul without the help of corporate chieftains, foreign lobbyists and shady accountants.

At first, Mr. DeLay's endless power grabs served a policy agenda, just as Mr. Gingrich's 1994 revolution had its Contract With America. Whether you liked it or not, it was a list of political positions and government initiatives. But increasingly, Mr. DeLay has been in hot pursuit of things that have nothing to do with the issues on which the Republicans ran in the last two elections, and everything to do with accumulating and monopolizing power.

The most striking recent example was Mr. DeLay's outrageous attempt to inject Congress into the personal tragedy of the Schiavo family. When nearly 20 judges, many of them conservative jurists appointed by Republicans, blocked Mr. DeLay, he became enraged and applied his principle of power. He ordered up a Congressional investigation of those judges and hopes to produce some new legislation. He didn't say what that legislation would be, but it was not hard to guess. Mr. DeLay has pushed bills through the House to strip the courts of their powers to review laws and even tried to break up the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. That bill, thankfully, died in the Senate.

Mr. DeLay says that his only critics are Democrats and their supporters, by which he includes this page. But Republicans are worried. Mr. Gingrich, who knows a thing or two about overreaching, said last week that Mr. DeLay "at some point has got to convince people that what he has done was reasonable and authentic and legitimate."

President Bush, who at least has an agenda related to public policy, has gingerly taken a step or two back from Mr. DeLay. On Wednesday, Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said: "We support his efforts, along with the efforts of other Congressional leaders, to move forward on the agenda that the American people want us to enact."

That point is surely lost on Mr. DeLay. After all, this is the man who once was reported to have declared upon being stopped from lighting a cigar in a government-owned building, "I am the federal government." The remark now seems prophetic. Government is hobbled by Mr. DeLay and it is up to his fellow Republicans to finally realize that.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Get Tom DeLay to the Church on Time

By FRANK RICH

Published: April 17, 2005

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 Dick 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.

 

[arsbanned]

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.

Which is exactly why I am going to enjoy watching him go down. He soooo richly deserves it.

 

[arsbanned]

Speaking of the ultra sanctimonious falling off high horses, I see Ralph Reed is in to his neck with these same crooks.

 

[conjur]

Reed's been deep in this crap for a very long time. Deep. He'll die unscathed, unfortunately.


Hmm...then again:

Ralph Reed's Zeal for Lobbying Has Shaken His Christian Base
http://nytimes.com/2005/04/18/politics/...e70d24ee2d8bf&ei=5094&partner=homepage