There has been some confusion as to whether any Democrats in Congress took money from lobbyist Jack Abramoff. John Dickerson of Slate explains:
“Abramoff wrote his personal checks to Republicans. GOP stalwarts, anxious to make the scandal a bipartisan one, have pointed out that Democrats may not have received money from Abramoff, but they received money from his clients. It’s true, but those clients don’t appear to have done anything wrong. All they did was hire Abramoff in the hopes that he would be a successful lobbyist: a person who convinces lawmakers to give his clients favorable treatment. By trying to pull in Democrats who merely received political money, GOP partisans indict the whole system of political giving, which in calmer times is not a campaign finance position normally associated with the Republican Party.”
Greed and corruption on Capitol Hill are in no way limited to the GOP, but Dickerson is right: The Abramoff problem is going to be largely a Republican one.
Posted by Melissa Cooley
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18 Comments
Billmon deals with that one rather nicely:
http://billmon.org/archives/002351.html
Rage,
Ah, Billmon; he’s one of the good ones.
We need to get rid of all corruption from Congress regardless of Party.
Democrat Congressman William Jefferson is going to be indicted for bribery. So the Democrat Party is not all that pure.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1495420
*yawn*
So they are both dirty and incompetent. Who elected them? They must reflect the general voting population because we sure keep sending them back.
ksfarmgrrl,I couldn’t agree with you more: We keep sending these same morons back to Washington, then rant and rave when we find out they’re thiefs and scoundrals. Then when the courts say no guilty, we send them back again. We are our own worst enemy. Boy, is we dumb.
Agreed, but this particular scandal belongs to the republicans. They got all the money….they can take the blame.
XXX,
Indeed. When the Republican party builds a dedicated, lobbying-money gobbling machine, and the top brass of the party actively participate in the effort to construct and operate it, we’re talking about a different kind of scandal than the usual, mundane kinds of graft.
Abramoff’s machine goes WAY further than what we’ve seen before. And it’s the GOP’s baby: they gave birth to it, nurtured it, and benefitted from it. Exclusively. They kept the benefits for themselves, and now own all the liabilities.
That’s what makes it so funny to watch them lie and spread the blame around. No deal, Joe Williams and others: Jack Abramoff was a Republican operative, and his influence-peddling constitutes an exclusively Republican scandal. The GOP’s rule of Congress has resulted in unprecedented levels of corruption, and that’s why they’re scared as hell. They know it’s true, and want to avoid the reckoning.
While the above post is accurate, I don’t find it funny to watch the Republicans lie and obfuscate. They’ve masterfully employed the lie, the distortion and the general uninformed gullibility of the American electorate to set this nation on a destructive path.
For proof, just read the calls from the ignorant Bushbots in Opinion Line every day.
Wow, the Bush boot-licks sure are quiet on this one.
Esod . . . Nathan . . . JoeBlow . . . Heckler . . . ID?
What? Cat got your tongue?
Rush Limbaugh hasn’t told them what to think yet . . .
Laugh now, liberals! Pretty soon you traitors will meeting your day of reckoning!
[Note: Just filling in. -- R.]
WE BELIEVE IN THE GOLDEN RULE. HE WHO HAS THE GOLD RULES!!!!!!!!!
XXXThat this is a republican nightmare is a given. That the same thing happened to the democrats years ago is a given. The point of this exercise is, or should be, what is congress going to do to keep it from happening again.
Wallo in your joy at the Republican morons who are involved in this, but mark my words: if it is not corrected on the basic of levels, it will be the democrats who are running for cover in ten years.
The basic properties involving favors in congress cross all party lines. If the democrats really want to do something about it, they will cease their crowing and get down to the business of straightening the mess out. Hopefully, they will come up with some good ideas, something they have lacked for quite some time. Gee, that sounds like a good campaign issue. There is nothing so satisfying as to ignore the idiots and creating an atmosphere that removes the root cause of the problem that allowed them to become idiots in the first place. Can the democrats do that, or will they be the next decades idiots?
JM – straighten it out how? Call an investigation? I doubt that Hastert or frist will allow that. Nor will the AG do anything.
Until the public votes the crooks out the crooks will protect themselves.
I think there is something pervasively corrupting with being there too long. People who knew Glickman “way back when” have told me he changed a lot while in Washington. I worked on Dennis Hastert’s ‘freshman’ campaign; he is no longer the man I knew back then. So tiahrt has also become one of the entrenched money-grubbers. We as voters need to term limit them.
I don’t think terms limits will do it, Ben. The problem isn’t so much lack of turnover but lack of effective democracy in the first place.
And, yes, Walker, money-driven politics didn’t start with the current Republican crop or even the Republican party, nor will it end there (they just happen to be particularly ruthless, audacious and reckless about it). Elsewhere I’ve repeatedly expressed my extreme non-admiration for the current Democratic party “leadership.”
If we throw out this regime, the next step will be convincing the public not to go back to total apathy (a hard sell, as they’re only slightly awake now, and will take any excuse to resume snoozing).
Can you believe it? Ben, Rage, and I agree on basically the same thing: Dump this whole congress and vote people in who are willing to step out of the litter box. Must be Friday the thirteenth.
Add me to the list, Walker. It’s the money. Pardon me for taking pleasure in the republicans delema, but they have it coming. We’re going to see a lot of smoke in DC for a while; pious blowhards will regale us with their proposals to “clean up” Congress, but it won’t make any difference. It’s the money!
Yes, we can vote the crooks out and send “honest” people to Washington, but it won’t make any difference in the end. It’s all about the money.
It doesn’t matter how “honest” a person is when they go to Washington. Everybody has their price. Everybody. It’s obscene.
And it’s all about the MONEY.
I thought it was all about the ranch.
…and true ranchers know it really is about the money.
I totally agree with you all about cleaning house completely. Until the two party system morphs into a system of real choice, money and the churches will continue to play both sides of the fence.
I’d like to believe both the dems and the repubs will die out according to evolutionary theory, but damn, in Kansas, we dont believe in evolution, so I guess we will be stuck with this same system until Jesus brings the pork chops.