Rolling Stone: The harder they fall...

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Fri, 27 Jan 2006 07:04:46 -0800

[Zepps_News] #Rolling Stone: The harder they fall...

 

 

 

 

Rolling Stone : The Harder They Fall

 

--Republicans are scrambling to clean their House -- but the dirt

won't wash off

 

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, January 27, 2006

 

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" The Republicans are now and always have been the party of reform, " said

a grinning David Dreier, surveying the crowd of journalists in the

congressional radio and TV gallery.

 

The nattily dressed House Rules committee chairman then paused, as if to

give someone in the crowd a chance to chuck a bottle at his head. No one

did. So he went on: " I see this, " he said, " as a wonderful new

opportunity for us . . . "

 

Again, he paused. No bottles, no rotten tomatoes, no clouds of flying

dog-shit landing with a slap! on his receding forehead. Given what the

Republican leadership might have expected, at a press conference

unveiling a " lobby reform " package in the wake of the Jack Abramoff

scandal (what Dreier meant by " this " ), the event was a smashing success.

 

Standing next to Dreier, nodding with mild approval but also scanning

the crowd cautiously, was the boarlike House speaker, Dennis Hastert.

Hastert had kicked off this presser with similarly inspired oratory --

the highlight of which, according to my notes, was this line: " It's not

acceptable to, uh, break the rules or the law. "

 

Now he was standing there next to Dreier, motionless and mute, with the

nervous, half-bored look of a man with a commuter train to catch. It was

a lonely picture: an exhausted fat man playing his last political card

and an effete Californian in a too-orange tie, standing alone behind a

plywood podium in a dank congressional closet, putting a brave face on

The End. In the wake of the Abramoff scandal, they were all that was

left of the once-vaunted Republican leadership. It was like a Star Trek

script gone hopelessly wrong, with Kirk and Spock beheaded in the first

two minutes, and no one left to man the bridge but Scotty and maybe that

blond nurse of McCoy's, the one in the blue minidress.

 

The Dreier-Hastert press conference felt in every way like the very last

act in the desperate black comedy known as the Tom DeLay era of

Republican rule in Washington. What will follow is a new play, a

gruesome tragedy in all likelihood, whose main characters will be

Abramoff, an enraged public and a succession of grandstanding criminal

prosecutors. But lonely and desperate as it was, this last event had all

the wit and spirit of an inspired farce -- the chutzpah, the arrogance,

the spit-in-your-eye rhetoric, the maddening cloud of impunity hanging

over it all.

 

Just consider: At this critical moment in the party's history, when

survival required some kind of dramatic public gesture toward

self-policing, the GOP needed an innocent, someone with clean hands, to

lead the " anti-corruption " drive. The Democrats, who a day later would

announce their own reform bill, would do just that -- elevating relative

political virgins Rep. Louise Slaughter and Sen. Barack Obama to

starring roles in their own " Clean House " movement.

 

But the Republicans who ran this town like a dictatorship for most of

the past five years apparently looked around and could not find a single

plausible virgin for the part of their Mr. Clean.

 

Of the two leading candidates for the recently vacated House majority

leader seat, one (acting leader Roy Blunt) had attempted to slip

tobacco-friendly language into a Homeland Security authorization bill

while having an extramarital affair with a Phillip Morris lobbyist,

while the other (John Boehner) had once been caught handing out checks

from tobacco interests to members of Congress on the floor of the House.

 

Elsewhere, the Commerce committee chairman (Joe Barton) had inserted a

provision into an energy bill on behalf of a company that had paid

$56,000 to a PAC to " get a seat at the table, " and the names of the

House deputy whip (Eric Cantor), the House conference secretary (John

Doolittle) and the House appropriations chair (Jerry Lewis) were all

floating around in various sordid Abramoff tales involving golf junkets,

Indian tribes and floating casinos. The only Republican names not

burning putrid holes in the front pages of The Washington Post were the

ones who at that very minute were busy forming alliances and gearing up

for a factional challenge to the DeLay/Hastert/Bush-backed congressional

leadership.

 

So in the end, to whom did the Republicans turn to be their white

knight? David Dreier, a man whose very first act in last year's Congress

was to write a Rules package that not only sought to rewrite the

congressional rules to allow the majority leader to continue service

while under indictment for a felony but also castrated the Ethics

committee, changing its structure in such a way that the Republicans

could unilaterally quash any further investigations of DeLay.

 

As chair of the Rules committee -- a murky body whose chairman has the

power to rewrite bills entirely before they are voted on --Dreier

moreover was presumably the gatekeeper to much of the midnight

shenanigans involving earmarks and last-minute insertions of paid-for

corporate goodies in big pieces of legislation. Perhaps more than any

other Republican, Dreier was a symbol of the institutional corruption

that allowed DeLay to almost single-handedly manipulate Congress like a

marionette for the Abramoffs of the world. As one Democratic staffer

said to me, " Putting Dreier in charge of this is the biggest fucking

joke you can possibly imagine. "

 

Which made it all the more beautiful that when Dreier finally did ascend

to the podium, he came through with a brazen performance worthy of the

best and most confident days of the in-your-face DeLay regime. Grinning

and fingering his tangerine-colored tie (Dreier's inappropriately cheery

Crayola tie collection is a source of many dark jokes in Congress),

Dreier explained that when he'd called to wish Hastert a Happy New Year,

the latter had surprised him by asking him to take up lobby reform.

 

" And I thought, " said Dreier, raising his hands to his chest, " 'My gosh,

is this something more that I want to take on?' "

 

The " my gosh " inspired a muffled groan on my side of the room. Dreier

smiled and went on. " Yesterday, we marked the birthday of Dr. Martin

Luther King . . . "

 

Reporters shot each other looks, all thinking the same thing: In this

dire situation, with Jack Abramoff babbling strings of names and account

numbers into an inquisitor's mike somewhere, would even a Tom DeLay

Republican have the balls to defile the corpse of Martin Luther King?

The answer came quickly, as Dreier quoted MLK to explain his attitude

toward lobbyist reform:

 

" I thought about one of his letters, " he began. " 'We should always be

careful about the tranquilizing drug of gradualism . . .' "

 

He smiled and surveyed the crowd, a hand still pressed to his breast.

Gradualism! It was a breathtaking show of balls -- a cynical display of

Mozartian virtuosity. Well, I thought, they're not dead yet. Or if they

are, what a way to go out!

 

* * *

 

Washington is a different place since January 3rd, a date that will go

down in infamy for this Republican regime. It was on that quiet day at

the tail end of the New Year hangover that the superlobbyist Abramoff

announced his intention to cop a plea -- an announcement that sent half

of Washington in search of good criminal representation.

 

Since that day, the Republicans in this town can often be seen

staggering down the halls of Congress, faces caked with debris and still

deaf from the impact of the Abramoff nuclear shit-bomb. Complicating

matters is the fact that the party has been forced to return to

congressional business very early in the winter recess to conduct

elections for the House majority leadership seat, which of course was

recently vacated by Tom DeLay, himself now headed for Texas to meet with

the Hand of Fate.

 

There are three candidates for the leadership spot, who represent three

distinct strategies for dealing with the current crisis. The

front-runner is the acting leader, Blunt, who pointedly represents a

strategy of doing nothing at all. Blunt's biography is brimming with the

kind of pornographic devotion to money and corporate privilege that was

a prerequisite for political success in the good old days.

 

The Missouri congressman three years ago ditched his wife for a Phillip

Morris lobbyist named Abigail Perlman, whom he subsequently married;

it's been a profitable marriage, as Phillip Morris (now called Altria)

has donated more than $270,000 to committees tied to Blunt. Meanwhile,

Blunt's son Andrew is also an Altria lobbyist, and Blunt's other son,

Matt, is governor of his home state --elected, conveniently, with the

help of funds from Altria. One gets the impression that the whole family

spends its holidays sitting in a circle, two-fistedly smoking

Chesterfields while handing each other wads of hundred-dollar bills.

 

Blunt's hands are also wet with the blood of the Abramoff scandal; as

party whip he co-signed (with DeLay) letters on behalf of a Louisiana

Indian tribe represented by Abramoff. Meanwhile, Abramoff is one of the

first names on the list of 2004 individual donors to Blunt's PAC, the

sickeningly named Rely on Your Beliefs fund.

 

Blunt appears to be the choice for majority leader in the event that the

party concludes that it still has a chance to get away with absolutely

everything, Abramoff trial be damned. But the next choice, Ohio

long-timer John Boehner, appears to be the cosmetic fallback position

should the party conclude that business can go back to operating as

usual only after a few carefully chosen heads are rendered unto Caesar

-- whomever Abramoff decides to give up.

 

On the surface, Boehner would seem a brilliant choice; he has

game-show-host looks, no shame and has never been indicted for anything.

Although his own sugary-titled PAC, the Freedom Project, has accepted

some $31,000 from Abramoff clients over the years, there are as yet no

allegations that Boehner has ever traded favors with the Evil One.

 

Still, folks around the House describe the long-serving Boehner -- who

was kicked out of party leadership once before (he was House Republican

Conference chairman in the 104th and 105th congresses but lost his seat

when his mentor, Newt Gingrich, was ousted) -- as having an off-putting,

semi-delusional, almost Kerry-esque sense of entitlement about the

leadership post.

 

Boehner's zeal for the leadership post is such that he issued a

thirty-seven-page Power-Point presentation to campaign for the job. The

document is a towering monument to political cliche, wrapping quotations

of Reagan, Churchill and John Paul II around paeans to the virtues of

change, light, hope, " big goals " and hitting the accelerator while

others stay stuck in neutral.

 

But for all his sterling qualifications, Boehner can hardly be described

as someone who lived outside the K Street/DeLay universe. If anyone in

this race can claim that distinction, it could only be the third and

last candidate, John Shadegg of Arizona, another Gingrich protege, who

kicked off his campaign by bragging on national television that his

" level of taint " was, if not entirely absent, at least " decidedly lower "

than that of his opponents. A late entry into the race, Shadegg

menacingly represents the prayer-and-belt-tightening future of the

Republican Party, should Abramoff sink the Rove-DeLay-Hastert-Norquist

rampaging corporate-money machine that took over the party in 1999.

 

While those Republicans spent the years since treating Washington like

their own personal Girls Gone Wild video -- drinking champagne out of

bra cups at lavish corporate fund-raisers and turning Congress into one

big turnstile, passing any and every law that anyone with a dollar felt

like paying for --there were other Republicans with actual ideological

convictions who just went along with it all in a co-dependent fashion.

 

These were the true believers, the deficit hawks and the Bible thumpers,

who bit their lips and voted the party line even as the government

exploded in size in the first five years of the Bush presidency. They

had blind faith, but now they're organizing to take the party back. This

process began last fall with the ascendancy of the uber-conservative

Republican Study Group, which mounted a brazen factional challenge to

new acting leader Blunt over emergency spending for Hurricane Katrina.

It continues now with the leadership candidacy of the humorless Shadegg,

whose conservative bona fides include a father who managed the 1952

Senate campaign of Barry Goldwater.

 

Shadegg's run coincides unpleasantly -- almost audibly, like fingernails

on a blackboard -- with the unsolicited reappearance on the public scene

of his mentor Gingrich. The latter keeps showing up in newspapers with

the description " presidential hopeful " violently attached to his person,

shaking his head in anguish over this whole Abramoff business and acting

as though someone asked for his advice.

 

That Gingrich has somehow managed to position himself as a pre-Abramoff

Republican champion shows how dangerous a moment this is not only for

the Republicans but for the country in general. All but forgotten now is

the fact that Gingrich more or less invented the K Street Project -- a

Republican scheme to freeze out Democratic lobbyists -- and that

Abramoff was a bridge between K Street and Gingrich as long as a dozen

years ago.

 

The raging shit-fire that is the Abramoff scandal exposed Washington as

a veritable inferno of crushed values and boundless activist cynicism.

It eloquently revealed an America whose system of government had finally

mutated to fit the vapidity and anything-for-money morality of the

culture as a whole. In a country where people eat bugs for money on

national television, how surprising is a congressman who sells his vote,

or a Congress run like a Wal-Mart?

 

Barring a sudden and unforeseen flowering of affirmative values in the

depraved whorehouse that is our nation's capital, money is still going

to remain a hell of an effective substitute for political principle in

this town, meaning all manner of frauds --from Gingrich on down -- will

be moving in not to do anything different but to take over the old

dealer's territory. The Democrats, whose innocence in the crimes of the

last five years to date corresponds exactly to their lack of

opportunities for corruption, may now get a chance at the helm. But it

won't take much exposure to cheap stunts like a beaming Harry Reid and

Nancy Pelosi signing a " Declaration of Honest Leadership " before people

begin to remember how much the other guys can suck, too.

 

Bush haters are celebrating this week as old villains descend to the

death chamber, but they should be careful what they wish for. Trusting

Washington to fix itself is a whole new kind of torture.

 

 

 

--

" Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking

about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order.

Nothing has

changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists,

we're

talking about getting a court order before we do so "

-George W. Bush, April 20, 2004

 

Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!

Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.

 

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