Governor Robert Taft pleaded 'no contest' to ethics violations not long ago and was let off with a $4000 fine. Yes, they were only four miserable misdemeanors...but investigtions--including a federal probe!--are continuing as I type this. Expect further revelations of criminal behavior; I'm an Ohioan who can state unequivocally that Taft is dirtier than the Cuyahoga River used to be. (That's the one that caught fire. Twice.)
Missouri governor Matt Blunt and Kentucky governor Ernie Fletcher, nervously eyeing Taft's comeuppance, both seem now to be scrambling to avoid similar fates. Arnold Schwarzenegger, House majority Leader Tom DeLay--again?!?--and Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham are also in BIG trouble for questionable financial dealings.
All these men are, of course, Republicans, supposedly upstanding conservatives and pillars of so-called moral values. Bet you weren't surprised, either.
Hang on tight. We're taking a long and dreadful journey to the underside of the human condition, down into the horrible heart of the right-wing snakepit...
Let's face facts: Politicians have been crooked for so long that it's become a hoary cliche. But things are different these days. American capitalism--enabled by a vociferous Republican Congress under Clinton and, subsequently, a non-elected Republican president--has taken steroids, run completely amok and metamorphosed into an omnivorous corporate Leviathan without care or conscience. See Enron, WorldCom, HealthSouth, Global Crossing, AIG and Tyco for some of the sordid details. There are piles and piles of money to tempt the unrighteous...and the corporate sphere has moved into an unholy alliance with government the like of which has never been seen before. For the first time in the history of our nation, there are more lobbyists in Washington DC than there are legislators, an ominous state of affairs if there ever was one.
Now, I am not anti-capitalism by any means. I LOVE buying stuff! Still, it's obvious even to an external observer like myself that Big Business, left to aggressively pursue next quarter's bottom line without mercy or accountability, is not only harmful to the market and the environment, but to the economy as a whole. Gouging, price fixing, bid rigging, toxic waste, unsafe products and deplorable working conditions are only a very few of the inevitable outcomes of the ruthless pursuit of profit to the exclusion of all else.
The Republican worldview, however, has specific flaws which grant it a dangerous blindness to these myriad undesirable side-effects, even while worshipping the wealth that is thereby generated. (This is but one of the scathing indictments of their core ideology of selfishness and me-ism that I intend to be analyzing in a forthcoming series of diaries here at Daily Kos throughout the autumn months.)
This unpleasantly venal outlook, vulgar as it is, becomes wholly hypocritical when coupled to the phrases "compassionate conservatism" or "moral values." There was NOTHING compassionate, for example, about the funding cuts last year that brought major repairs on New Otrleans' aging, sinking levees to a screeching halt. Did this ruinous right-wing mindset cause the widespread devastation to that most wonderful city? By itself, probably not...but it most assuredly exacerbated an already unsafe condition, making rescue, repair and rebuilding many times more difficult and expensive than they needed to be. And how many lives might have been saved if the surrounding wetlands had been left alone instead of being sold to quick-buck investors and developers...after the rigid Clinton policy of environmental protection was dismantled and discarded? Was the abandonment of the poorest, Black sections of the Crescent City a moral value?
Don't get me started.
I sumbit here and now that the ethically-challenged governors mentioned in my opening paragraphs are merely endemic to a party whose whole orientation is material rather than axiological; for them, the means are entirely justified by the outcome. It is even possible that some of them are so sociopathic, narcisistic and conscience-free that they believe their most radically conservative cruelties do not go far enough.
THE BUGMAN
Take, for example, Thomas Dale DeLay. This walking disease in the three-piece suit has been riding high, wide and handsome as Majority Leader of the House of Representatives. He has, seemingly, been on a one-man crusade to prove that crime does indeed pay. Handsomely. Highlights of his infamy can be found here, a collection of Greatest Hits, if you will: http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=430. (The very first one particularly offends me. When he returned from his fact-finding trip, a reporter asked him about the sweatshop. An urbane and supremely confident DeLay responded that the buildings were air-conditioned and "no one was sweating." How can you even TALK to someone like that?)
DeLay's ride, however, began hitting rough waters last year when the House Ethics Committee reprimanded him twice in one wonderful week--bringing his total to three--and aides James Ellis, John Colyandro and Warren Robold were indicted. (http://www.hillnews.com/news/092204/dlay.aspx) In July, a couple of re-issued indictments against Ellis and Colyandro popped up. (http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/politics/12078748.htm) Also, his beleaguered communications director, Dan Allen, deserted the sinking ship, unable to deal with mounting pressures. (http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/061605/delay.html)
Since then, the Federal Election Commission has found that this Sugarland, Texas greedweasel's political fund-raising committee failed to report more than $300,000 in debts and incorrectly paid for some activities with money from another of his hoodlum aggregtions. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/08/11/politics/p110056D55.DTL)
For a man who is almost militant about his Evangelical Christianity, DeLay simply doesn't seem to be able to follow the rules. It's no longer a secret that he's violated about half of the Ten Commandments and committed a majority of the Seven Deadly Sins. Although he blames liberals and the media for his recent run of bad luck--for him, telling the pure, unspun truth is simply not playing fair!--he's merely starting to reap the bitter fruit sown by his own corrupt hand. To quote the Rev. Mykeru, ever the master of the pungent phrase, "If you're going to be a hypocrite, you might as well be an atomic, Tokyo-stomping Godzilla of a hypocrite!"
He despises the Democrats of the House Ethics Committee who hung tough, esnarling procedures and forcing the Committee's equal number of Republicans to retreat from their attempts to protect him. Also, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have asked the Justice Department to investigate him for bribery and it appears only a matter of time before all the chickens come home to roost. Representative Maurice Hinchey of New York has quipped that Tom DeLay "gives hypocrisy a bad name."
Before we take our leave of this reptile, I'd like to pass along a couple of juicy rumors. A photograph supposedly exists of Terrible Tommy locked in a sexual embrace with a Mexican prostitute. It is also alleged that he has a grown daughter whose mother is NOT Mrs. DeLay and that he has paid support for this child. Thanks and a tip of the merciful halo to The Flynt Report for all the dirt.
Texas Slimebucket Update: This week, Travis County DA Ronnie Earle has handed down five fresh indictments in the ongoing investigation of Tom DeLay's sleaze machine. One came from the ranks of TRMPAC (Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee) and four from the Texas Association of Business; no names have been released as yet. The reptile himself escapes prosecution for the time being, due to a jurisdictional loophole...but it seems that all the rest of his comrades in crime are going down. And the tenacious Mr. Earle isn't finished just yet...
MUSCLEHEAD
No beating around the, er, Bush: Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Nazi.
His Austrian father was a card-carrying menber of the /Nationalsocialistiche Deutche Arbeiterpartei/ which translates as the German National Socialist Workers' Party. (The ubiquitous nickname, "Nazi," derives from the hard consonants of the proper German pronunciation of the first two syllables of the first word.) So it is unarguable that he spent his boyhood in a facist atmosphere...but more importantly, he has, of his own free will, come to embrace that singularly hideous version of totalitarianism. He was very vocal, early in his gubernatorial campaign, about his personal admiration of Adolf Hitler. It was rather forcibly brought to his attention that such sentiments didn't play well on Main Street, USA...so he's been largely mute on the subject ever since. Still and all, these are his own words: "There's a certain amount of people meant to be leaders and to control. And another large amount, 95%, are followers. We have to tell [them] what to do and how to keep in order, you know?" He's been known to offer drunken toasts to former German war criminal Kurt Waldheim and he's met with Austrian neo-fascist leader, Jorg Haider. These sound like the actions of a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi to me, okay?
Sure, I've enjoyed a few of his movies--True Lies was a hoot--but let us endeavor to keep this thing in perspective. Here's a musclebound goon with minimal real acting talent who managed to befriend a stellar director, James Cameron, and turn the association into highly watchable action fare and big bucks at the boxoffice. When not in front of the cameras, however, he also had absolutely no compunction whatever about groping--in public, mind you!--any attractive woman who struck his neanderthal fancy. He's about as qualified to be the governor of California as I am to be president of General Motors just because I used to drive a Buick.
There is every indication that Washington's Presidential Crime Syndicate incited funded and, uh, pumped up--so to speak--our most laid-back state's recall of Gray Davis. (http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/03/08/08_recall.html) While hard evidence is minimal, Ah-nuld DID unquestionably meet with Turdblossom Rove on April 12, 2003, a fact which must be considered indicative.
So Mr. Muscle won the election in a walk, as expected, due to near-universal name-recognition. (Remember what a hilarious campaign it was? Gary Coleman, porn star Mary Carey and Gallagher the comedian were all candidates! Big yucks on the left coast.) The halfwit celebrity worshippers out there, frontal lobes paralyzed by overdoses of ultraviolet radiation from constant sunshine, almost believed they were getting the Terminator or The Last Action Hero to rescue their state from the aftermath of Enron. Surprise, surprise, surprise. What they actually wound up with was a Beelzebub Cheney wannabe, complete with blatantly partisan crony-capitalism, Nazi-like intimidation (complements of the CHiPs and the Calif. National Guard, of which he instantly became Commander-In-Chief) and a full accompaniment of outright lies. According to some friends who live out there--Howdy, Anne! Hey, Stripey!--the state has become a microcosm of the country.
I don't know about Mudville, but there CERTAINLY is no joy in California these days. Ah-nuld is currently being investigated for specific conflicts of interest (What IS it with these dirty GOP governors?!?) arising from his private business relationships, most recently the EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS he's collected from fitness magazines and won't have to give back. You see, he refuses to regulate the dietary supplements upon which these publications rely so heavily for revenues. (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-governor14jul14,0,2776728.story?coll=la-home-headlines) He's also in trouble for violating a court order requiring implementation of safe hospital staffing practices. In addition, The Los Angeles Times has pulled the covers off the millions of dollars pouring into his coffers and raised by a network of tax-exempt groups, You see, that money has actually been coming from major corporations with legisltion pending before his office. Such behavior is not merely hypocrisy; it might also violate California law. (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-nonprofits24aug24,0,4098089,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines
)
As if all of this isn't enough, Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jack O'Connell, along with the California Teachers Association, filed suit against the governor's administration in Sacramento Superior Court. They claim he has failed to live up to promises early on and the state's schools are now owed something like $3.1 billion, that's billion with a 'b.' (I have also seen estimates as high as $3.7 billion.) Read about it here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/08/10/BAGVPE5DER1.DTL
And that's STILL not all! (C'mon! You knew it wasn't.) Tabloid publisher American Media, Inc. who vomits forth the National Enquirer, was wooing Mr. S for a business deal and promised to pay aspiring actress Gigi(!) Goyette the sum of $20,000 if she would sign a confidentiality agreement about a fling she had with the blighter some while back. Can you say "hush money?"
Apparently this hot young bimbo had a seven-year affair with him while he was married. Now for Republicans, adultery is old hat; they have NEVER paid that Commandment too much attention, but this time it's especially smarmy: Because of the confidentiality agreement, little Gigi couldn't speak word one about her and Arnie, shielding him from charges of infidelity during his campaign, when he needed it most. The lurid details are here: http://latimes.com/news/local/la-me-arnold12aug12,0,5059113,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines.
As a result of all this, our sunniest state is summarily rejecting its moviestar governor and his initiatives on the special ballot election. They're also awarding him dismal 34% approval marks for job performance. (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-poll25aug25,0,7101982.story?coll=la-home-local) Given such pathetic support, it's extremely possible that a little red hen could beat him in next year's election. Or even Mary Carey. And the Rolling Stones don't much like him, either.
The honeymoon is ended.
Thanks for reading Part I of a two-part rant about the evils of the radical right. (I used to call them cheap-labor conservatives...but these bloodthirsty varmints aren't the least bit conservative!) Part II, entitled *GOP*erversion, will be up sometime early next week. Meantime, take a Democrat to lunch...
Angel Of Mercy over and out.