Republican Scandals

Well, it's been a month and I have a pile of items that I had planned to post that are all backed up in the pipeline. I'm going to continue that bout of laziness by being a lazy linker and not giving the hotlinks to a few references here, which is like filing a legal paper without the exhibits, but oh hell, maybe I'll find them later.

Crooks and liars has a video of some talking heads talking about the Foley scandal. It's a hoot because the Democrat guy spreads like a 1N debater, rattling off more than a dozen high-profile Republican scandals. I remember a great video they posted months ago with Howard Dean saying again and again how the Abramoff scandal had touched not one Democrat.

Counterpunch has an article with an analysis if why so many times Republicans get caught literally with pants down (With links to an about.com list of scandals that is redacted from Wikipedia).

My own thought is that this is at once a hard and an easy issue for the Democrats. It's hard because attention span is so short that any smart Republican can run out the clock listing Democratic scandals and make it look like a bipartisan failing. (Note however that the Crooks and Liars video shows that Republicans often aren't smart.) On the other hand, there must be some way to make the point that Republicans dominate in the area of scandal, because they do.

Beyond the lists you could make from this administration, one could compare the relatively clean Clinton, Carter, and Johnson white houses with the corrupt administrations of Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes. (Ford was apparently not so bad.) For Johnson you had, what, a petty scandal regarding a Supreme Court appointee? Compare to Nixon: president resigned and pardoned, top advisors sent to jail. Ford restored and Carter restored some of the reputation the government had lost. Then recall when Time magazine presented its "Wall of Shame" showing a hundred-odd Reagan officials who'd been indicted or left under a cloud. Bush I had his own set of pardons of a half dozen of his top people right before leaving office. Clinton, in spite of being impeached and ultimately surrendering his law license for a misleadingly captious denial about sex with Monica Lewinsky, had a relatively clean house. Now Bush II and you have numerous investigations reaching into the White House, with various spy scandals, Plamegate, Abramoff, etc...

You read about the slimy environment in which young Republicans are trained to fight dirty, and I've seen these shenanigans in student politics. Anything goes, because the issues are always black and white to the authoritarian personality. John Dean has recently discovered this and written a book about it. It's no accident that the new breed of Republicans includes a disproportionate share of grifters, liars, and pedophiles.

Foleygate has been amusing and disturbing in part because of the lack of unified Republican spin. Of course, many want to shoot the messenger. Wonkette caught Fox News letting the Republicans off the hook by labeling Foley a Democrat. The FRC Christians have blamed the scandal on the Republican's coddling of gays. Drudge blames the kid victims for going along. Boehner blames Hastert. Foley blames alcohol. Hannity invented the fact that the twentysomething Lewinsky was actually still a tender child while servicing the Presidential staff, a comparison that O'Reilly had said only an extremist lunatic would make (but in Hannity's defense, you would only be a lunatic to compare the real facts of the cases, and as a Fox News pseudojournalust, he was dealing in made-up facts). How many different stories and scapegoats are we up to? Oh yeah, Stephen Colbert blames himself. Thanks for owning up.

Locally, we have a governor's race that is all about scandals. The Democratic governor, running for reelection, received a lot of campaign money from people who benefited from his policies, making him exactly like 100% of other politicians. He has not been the target of any investigation and exactly one person in state government, a minor functionary, has left under a cloud. This is the substance of all the negative Republican adds. Plus, they've added a new charge -- he tried to rig the election.

Now, I'm no great fan of this guy but I defend people who are attacked with stupid arguments. How did he attempt to rig the election? His lawyer lobbied the elections board to make a ruling favorable to him concerning his opponent's illegal activities. Scandalous -- a lawyer presenting an argument to a legal body. The Journal-Sentinel, only mass daily paper of the state's largest city, ran this "scandal" on page 1; it reported later on page 6B that the lawyer for the Republicans did the same thing, apparently not a scandal. The elections board voted along party lines, but a judge affirmed its ruling.

The substance of that ruling, as I understand, was that the Republican candidate, who is currently in Congress, transferred his entire Congressional campaign warchest into his budget for election to the statehouse. A bit over 1/3 of that money was raised from national donors who had never complied with the restrictions for giving to a state campaign. Its transfer violated federal law. The television station owned by the Journal's parent company covered the story last night in a condescendingly simple manner, apparently because it presumes its viewers are idiots who would not otherwise understand. They treated the whole warchest as suspect, and said that a Democratic congressman had done something similar in the last election -- but no word on whether his actions were significantly different in legal terms. It's like saying that a cop is partisan because he pulls over the Republican for driving drunk, but not the Democrat, even though the Democrat is also driving (and not mentioning that maybe he's sober). I believe about 10% of what this station airs as news.