Molly I: Looking at the Big Picture in DC [View All]

[struggle4progress]

<snip> It seems to me what we are looking at was put best by noted journalist Billy Don Moyers, formerly of Marshall, Texas, who was home last week and observed that the Republican right came to Washington to start a revolution and stayed to run a racket. It has become a game of ideological flim-flam, a scam in which all manner of distracting hoo-hah - abortion, judicial activism, even “the war on terra” - is used to obscure the fact that the government has been taken over by people who are using it to make money for themselves and their friends.

In the business world, this is called “control fraud,” and it refers to an organization, like Enron or Tyco, that is rotten at the head. One of the key figures in this web of malfeasance is Jack Abramoff, the super-lobbyist, top fund-raiser for Bush’s re-election and close buddy of Rep. Tom DeLay, himself the architect of the “K Street Strategy” to convert the entire business lobby into the fund-raising arm of the Republican Party in return for whatever legislative favors the major donors want. <snip>

Think about it. Bush now proposes to put in as second in command of the Justice Department, which is investigating this whole mess, the man who is Tyco’s lawyer and who hired Abramoff. If Flanigan is confirmed, that will mean the five top appointees at Justice have zero prosecutorial experience among them. But Flanigan does have the only quality that truly matters in a Bush appointee: absolute loyalty to the administration.

Washington, D.C., is theoretically covered by the largest concentration of journalistic talent anywhere in the world. This is just a straight, old-fashioned corruption story of the sort theoretically uncovered by many Washington reporters earlier in their lives at various city halls. Did everyone forget how it’s done? <snip>

http://www.freelancenews.com/opinion/contentview.asp?c=170032