Tag: Scandals

Pathetic: While he waits for his trial on corruption-related charges to begin, Tom DeLay is out promoting his book. (I seriously can’t think of the title and don’t feel like looking it up.) Sales must not be going well because today he stole a page out of Ann Coulter’s playbook and emitted something deeply controversial in front of a video camera:

DELAY: I think Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are getting very, very close to treason.

INTERVIEWER: Treason. Now that’s a pretty serious charge.

DELAY: And I’m serious about it. For the Majority Leader of the United States Senate in the time of war, with soldiers dying on the ground, announcing that we had lost the war, is very close to treasonous.

I looked it up while we were driving over here, what the definition of treason is. It’s the betrayal of trust. I have never in my adult life, nor in my understanding of history, seen something so blatantly outrageous for political reasons.

There is so much wrong with this it’s hard to know where to begin. During the Clinton era, DeLay said this:

“[Milosevic is] stronger in Kosovo now than he was before the bombing. … The Serbian people are rallying around him like never before. He’s much stronger with his allies, Russians and others.” Clinton “has no plan for the end” and “recognizes that Milosevic will still be in power,” added DeLay. “The bombing was a mistake. … And this president ought to show some leadership and admit it, and come to some sort of negotiated end.”

And treason is not simply a “betrayal of trust” — or every cheating spouse would be hanged for treason. Here’s the actual definition:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

But even with all that being said, the worst thing we could do to Tom is ignore him.

As you have probably heard by now, at the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner on Saturday night, Karl Rove got ugly with Sheryl Crow when she had the temerity to question him about global warming. Here’s her version of the story, told with Laurie David, who was also on hand:

We reminded the senior White House advisor that the US leads the world in global warming pollution and we are doing the least about it. Anger flaring, Mr. Rove immediately regurgitated the official Administration position on global warming which is that the US spends more on researching the causes than any other country.

We felt compelled to remind him that the research is done and the results are in (www.IPCC.ch). Mr. Rove exploded with even more venom. Like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum, Mr. Rove launched into a series of illogical arguments regarding China not doing enough thus neither should we. (Since when do we follow China’s lead?) …

In his attempt to dismiss us, Mr. Rove turned to head toward his table, but as soon as he did so, Sheryl reached out to touch his arm. Karl swung around and spat, “Don’t touch me.” How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow? Unfazed, Sheryl abruptly responded, “You can’t speak to us like that, you work for us.” Karl then quipped, “I don’t work for you, I work for the American people.” To which Sheryl promptly reminded him, “We are the American people.”

At that point Mr. Rove apparently decided he had had enough. Like a groundhog fearful of his own shadow, he scurried to his table in an attempt to hibernate for another year from his responsibility to address global warming. Drama aside, you would expect as an American citizen to be able to engage in a civil discussion with a public official. Instead, Mr. Rove was dismissive, condescending, and quite frankly a bully.

Reality has a liberal bias, as Stephen Colbert said. Bushies don’t like it when reality intrudes inside their bubble.

Conservative utopia: In the wake of the Virginia Tech gun massacre, the conservative movement has exposed its utter lack of grounding in practical reality. Last week, both former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and former Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested that the solution to gun violence on campus is to arm every student, professor and (let’s assume) administration staff member.

Have these guys ever seen an episode of the “Real World” on MTV? Imagine the unintended consequences of, say, 20,000 18- to 21-year-olds on the average state college campus carrying fire arms:

• Guns and alcohol are deadly mix, so every late-night party would have the potential of turning into a bloodbath, especially in the wee hours when young inexperienced drinkers are so blottoed that they have lost the ability to reason.
• Maybe it’s news to conservatives, but drugs are widely available on campuses, too. Like alcohol, drugs and guns can be a lethal mix.
• During college years, romantic relationships are at their most fluid. In a world in which every super-posessive young man or woman has a firearm in a drawer, cheaters had better watch their backs.
• Hyper-achieving students often lose their grounding in reality as they try for good grades. Arming them would put noncompliant professors in their crosshairs.
• Other students vent their frustration on themselves. Having guns readily available would increase the number of campus suicides.
• Let’s not even start imagining how armed students might react if their college team loses the big game.

DeLay has apparently forgotten what college life is like. He was kicked out of Baylor University after two years for drinking and vandalism. If armed students at rival Texa A&M had caught him defacing a building on their campus, the Hammer would have been cut down in his prime. Instead, Baylor expelled him and he went on to achieve glory as the poster boy for Republican corruption.

Before he ran for Congress, Gingrich was a professor at a state university in the hinterlands of west Georgia. He ought to know better than to suggest arming campus denizens. Professor Gingrich was infamous for diddling his colleagues’ wives. Would he have wanted his fellow professors to be armed back then?

I was wrong: On Tuesday, I wrote, “Even so, there is some new evidence [CIA Leak case special prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald may have whiffed on going up the chain in the Libby trial. Either he didn’t know about Karl Rove’s secret email system, or he deliberately failed to subpoena all of Rove’s correspondence.”

That was incorrect. In January 2006, Fitzgerald made a filing that indicated he had been informed by the White House that some emails sent by senior staff had been improperly archived and were missing:

Fitzgerald revealed that his investigative team “learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.”

A recent audit by the Office of Administration showed that as many as 5 million emails were lost. What is unclear now is whether the White House was fully truthful with Fitzgerald about the scope of the missing emails.

The timing of this is interesting, since the capo de capo of the FBI/DoJ, Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzales, is testifying before Congress today about charges that he and Pres. Bush may have obstructed justice by firing federal prosecutors who were investigating GOP corruption:

The FBI searched the Virginia home of Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.) last Friday in its investigation into ties between the congressman and his wife, Julie, and disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to law enforcement and other Congressional and K Street sources.

The search took place on the same day that his former chief of staff, Kevin Ring, abruptly resigned from his lobbying firm. Ring left Doolittle’s office to work for Abramoff at the law firm Greenberg Traurig and may have played a role in Abramoff’s decision to hire Julie Doolittle’s consulting firm. After the Abramoff scandal broke, Ring went to work for the lobbying firm, Barnes and Thornburg.

Doolittle came within three percentage points of losing his election in November after facing months of scrutiny over his relationship with Abramoff, who is in jail for an array of fraud, bribery and money-laundering charges. The lawmaker has denied any wrongdoing.

Throughout his campaign, Doolittle refused to return an estimated $50,000 he received from Abramoff clients, mostly tribes, between 1999 and 2004. Abramoff also personally donated $14,000 between 1999 and 2004 to Doolittle’s congressional campaigns.

Doolittle used Abramoff’s luxury sports box for a fundraiser without initially reporting it to the Federal Election Commission.