Abramoff pleads guilty
- Thread starter Renata
- Start date
Kayak
Partisan
And his guts go back a looong way. I did hear somewhere that this could touch quite a few law makers on all sides.
El_Tigre
Prince
On all sides? I thought he worked only with Republicans?
Such sanctimoniousness makes me
SeleucusNicator
Diadoch
Uh oh. Lots of people are gonna go to jail.
Kayak
Partisan
He worked primarily with republicans. But he gave plenty of cash to some Democrates as well. Byron Dorgan(sp?) was mentioned. Everyone is returning donations like crazy.El_Tigre said:On all sides? I thought he worked only with Republicans?
Such sanctimoniousness makes me
Pontiuth Pilate
Republican Jesus!
Kayak said:
The guy was a Bush Pioneer. He raised six digits of dough for the GOP in the last election season, bupkis for Democrats.
Now, the guys who worked for him, and the rotten company he kept, did spread the money around to anyone who would take a slice. But it still ended up being over two thirds GOP. The K Street Project which has directly produced the likes of Scanlon and Abramoff is a partisan Republican venture.
Chris Matthews called this fellow a "lone wolf." Well, yeah. And then there's Tom DeLay who is going to court for corruption and moneylaundering. And Bill Frist who will have to answer to the SEC for insider trading. And Randy "Duke" Cunningham who resigned from the House of Representatives after admitting he laundered bribes through real estate deals and took a cool 2 million in kickbacks from military contractors.
It kind of begs the question - how many lone wolves does it take to make a pack?
If you really want a measure of Washington today there's a funny (but 100% true) story about a defense attorney who was defending a guy who funnelled money from Colombian drug kingpins into America, laundering it through the precious metals market. He was convicted and started serving multiple life sentences. The kicker - he paid his defence attorney in, get this, bars of solid gold. Gee, I wonder where he got them! The defence lawyer took half a million in fees, "of course" never once suspecting it was drug money. Then the feds caught up with him and forced him to cede about half of it. He got to keep the other half.
I guess he figured, "How can I top that incident for sheer chutzpah?" because his next stint was to volunteer as Karl Rove's lawyer in the Plame case. Small world, Washington. So if you're wondering about the so called "culture of corruption" there's your answer.
SeleucusNicator
Diadoch
Pontiuth Pilate said:
The guy who was arrested for robbing a vending machine and paid his bail in quarters apparently has a brother.
Kayak
Partisan
Pontiuth Pilate said:
Its a pack of lone wolves!No, This will be a case of great theater watching a bunch of evangelizing moralist hypocrites squirm.
SeleucusNicator
Diadoch
Kayak said:
That's exactly true.
None of these crimes involved the Republican Party. Rather, it was a series of solo crimes committed by individuals who happened to be members of the same party.
There's a fancy name for the logical fallacy that you commit when you go from these crimes to saying that the Republican Party is criminal.
~Corsair#01~
Deity
What's the likelihood of this guy spending more than 3 years in prison? Astronomically high, I'll bet.
Che Guava
The Juicy Revolutionary
SeleucusNicator said:
I guess for some reason they just found themselves comfortable in that particular party. I guess an old elephant just has a lot of room for parasites...
SeleucusNicator said:
not exactly true...these crimes DID involve members of the republican party, and as this investigation goes on, we'll get more and more names. The front page of my hometown paper, the Columbus Dispatch, shows that rep. Bob Ney, an Ohio Republican, got hundrdeds of thousands of dollars in BRIBES from ol' Jack. Ney could go to jail.
Abranoff said that he could name up to 20 US congressmen. Almost all of these will be republicans. Yeah...i think we have a case for saying one party is more corrupt.
Pontiuth Pilate
Republican Jesus!
SeleucusNicator said:
I would agree except the characterization "solo crimes" is misleading on two counts. First, these are not ordinary members of the Republican Party, but people in leadership positions, whether as backbenchers and influence peddlers (the Reed-Abramoff-Norquist triumvirate) or elected officials (DeLay, Ney, Burns). Second, the mainstream press is starting to report what blogs uncovered long ago, that all these crimes are almost hilariously interconnected. It's quite incestuous, e.g. the #2 guilty pleader in the Abramoff case is a former DeLay aide, etc. So it's not that the Republican Party is inherently criminal... rather there is most definitely a "culture of corruption" which encourages, aids, and defends criminality. Heck, this is the party that took Nixon excons and made them into talk show hosts; they took Reagan contrascandal hasbeens and plugged them back into power.
skadistic
Caomhanach
Now lets not start saying one party is more corrupt then the next. They are all liers, corrupt, and can bought for the right price.
EdwardTking
Deity
~Corsair#01~ said:
If he can finger that many people,
he will more likely end up dead.
Pontiuth Pilate
Republican Jesus!
In that fedora and trenchcoat, maybe the real gangsters will bump him off just for cramping their style:
This guy was a Bush pioneer; he raised 127k for Bush in 2004; he is a close friend of Tom DeLay, he exchanged daily emails with conservative icons like Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist; for chrissakes he is a former Chairman of the national College Republicans. Any claim that he is not in the inner circle of the Republican Party, and not a hardcore Republican partisan, is horsehockey plain and simple.
This guy was a Bush pioneer; he raised 127k for Bush in 2004; he is a close friend of Tom DeLay, he exchanged daily emails with conservative icons like Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist; for chrissakes he is a former Chairman of the national College Republicans. Any claim that he is not in the inner circle of the Republican Party, and not a hardcore Republican partisan, is horsehockey plain and simple.
Kayak
Partisan
And what is your price?skadistic said:
I say this to point out that to somehow divide polititians from the rest of us is not realistic.I mind the Republicans more at the moment because just 10 short years ago they were preaching how they would restore moral values and integrity to Washington.
That lasted for as long as it took the American people to swallow it and then they took power...SeleucusNicator
Diadoch
~Corsair#01~ said:
He's spending 10 years in prison under the agreement he made with the prosecutors.
I wonder if there is anywhere you can place bets on how many high ranking elected officials will be indicted in the next few months.
The whole thing makes me sick and I will be even sicker if some heads don't roll. Corruption is one of the greatest threats to an established democracy, and should not be tolerated in even the slightest degree. Maybe some of the more honest members of congress will even look into making 'lobbying' illegal, as it should have been all along.
And I wouldn't expect all of the people he fingers to be Republicans. They are no more dishonest than the Democrats (with maybe a couple exceptions), and I am sure Abramoff got to a few of the Democrats as well.
And if DeLay doesn't end up in prison I'm going to be very disappointed in the supposed equality of our justice system.
The whole thing makes me sick and I will be even sicker if some heads don't roll. Corruption is one of the greatest threats to an established democracy, and should not be tolerated in even the slightest degree. Maybe some of the more honest members of congress will even look into making 'lobbying' illegal, as it should have been all along.
And I wouldn't expect all of the people he fingers to be Republicans. They are no more dishonest than the Democrats (with maybe a couple exceptions), and I am sure Abramoff got to a few of the Democrats as well.
And if DeLay doesn't end up in prison I'm going to be very disappointed in the supposed equality of our justice system.
