By one account Rove arranged to meet Abramoff on DC street corners so as to avoid being detected by the White House visitors logs. Rove hired his former personal assistant, Susan Ralston, away from Abramoff, and just a month before the election she was forced to resign her White House position due to her contacts with Abramoff while at the White House. A congressional committee found evidence of 485 contacts between the White House and Abramoff and his lobbying team.
Foley, you may recall, was strong-armed by Rove into running for re-election, with Rove threatening to torpedo Foley's plans to start a lobbying practice after leaving Congress unless he ran again in 2006. (No evidence has emerged that Rove or the White House had any knowledge of Foley's page problem at that time.) Haggard, as is now widely known, was one of Rove's main contacts within the evangelical community, a regular participant in weekly conference calls with the White House political shop headed up by Rove.
And we've just begun to scratch the surface. There's Rove's involvement in the Plame scandal, and the RNC's involvement in the New Hampshire phone-jamming case. I could go on, but I think the point here is clear: Rove was and is the architect of a political machine that was probably corrupt from its inception and is certainly corrupt now.
The corruption manifests itself in everything from bribery (Duke Cunningham and Bob Ney) to influence-peddling (Abramoff) to the broader corruption of traditional conservative principles (budget earmarks and deficit spending).
That's not a lesson Republicans seem to be taking from this election.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Going at Corruption
David Kurtz at TPM suggests that the GOP, especially Bush and Rove, seem not to be taking seriously the voters' outcry against corruption on Tuesday. Bush says, "People want their Congress -- congressmen to be honest and ethical." Well, sure they do. Same goes for the executive, bubba. And the corruption goes to the core of your party, Mr. Exec, the one that scandalously put you in power, the one that has played ethical Twister® to keep your needs met. This buck just seems to keep flying all over the place.
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2 comments:
It's funny that Rove seems to be the only one smart enough to have figured out that "Abramoff" was a name that you should avoid putting into the White House log. We know that not all of Jeff Gannon's visits were recorded, and this story makes you wonder who was getting Jeff Gannon into the White House without Gannon's signing the log.
A bit of historical trivia: after Watergate broke, John Dean insisted on meeting Liddy on street corners to avoid having him entered into the visitor's log.
My thought is always that it the current corruption would have to be more widespread and deeper than the logs show, given that it's already pretty stupid to have Abramoff all over the logs.
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