Don't get me wrong, the flood of scandals now leaving their massive poop-stains all over leading right wing figures is highly gratifying to me too. But even in the midst of all of this, there's an
elephant in the room that nobody in the media is acknowledging.
The corruption of Republican politicians is well-documented on this site and many others. But it runs deeper than that. The Republican Party itself has become an apparatus of corruption, consistently appearing as an enabling entity in many of these scandals.
First, some background. During the Bush years, the RNC has been chaired by four men. It's striking how short each of their terms are, in comparison to chairmen of the past. After Bush was first elected, he appointed the socially and fiscally conservative ex-governor of Virgina, Jim Gilmore, to the post. Gilmore lasted a year or less. After the Democrats won some key elections, he was kicked to the curb when Rove&Co. decided that the RNC was going to be key to the continued dominance of the Republican Party.
In his place, Bush appointed Marc Racicot, who some of you may remember as the spokesperson for the Bush recount team during Florida 2000. Racicot had been governor of Montana; at the time Bush appointed him to the RNC chair, he had a very successful lobbying business representing a host of large clients, including Enron. He made headlines at the time for refusing to give up his lobbying job while he was RNC chairman.
That's right, a registered, practicing lobbyist was simultaneously chairman of the Republican Party. He was tight with the White House -- as this article notes, 'he and Rove meet each Monday at 6:30 a.m. over oatmeal in the White House mess.'
Not surprisingly, Racicot was RNC chair during the 2002 Tom Delay/RNC money-laundering operation, as well as the New Hampshire phone-jamming jihad. (As Josh Marshall notes, the RNC is footing the bill for the defense of at least one of the principal suspects.)
Ed Gillespie, another former Enron lobbyist, succeded Racicot in July 2003. Like Racicot, Gillespie kept his ties to his own prominent Washington lobbying firm. Gillespie was at the helm for the raucous 2004 election, during which he helped the GOP raise record amounts of cash. You guess where all that money came from. Lately he has been prominently helping the White House push the Harriet Miers nomination.
And last but not least, Gillespie was succeeded by Ken "not gay" Mehlman, former Bush campaign manager and general mouthpiece extroadinaire. Can someone so embedded in this White House be very far from the taint of scandal?
It's a tight world these guys run in. All of them are Bush appointees, and at least Racicot seems to be pretty intimately connected to the various shit hitting the fan right now. It's our job to make sure that the GOP name is tied in the public consciousness with the corruption they've been an active part of. 2006 is just around the corner, and they're going to be hitting with everything they've got to hang on to those Congressional majorities.
Let's hit back.