Simply Politics & News

[Paule]

Donkey Cons: Behind the Book

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and her friends are squawking a lot these days about how Democrats will win control of Congress in 2006 by campaigning against a Republican "culture of corruption." But Nancy has a problem: Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party proves that the Democrats are lying.

Donkey Cons was conceived more than two years ago, when no one outside Washington had heard of a lobbyist named Jack Abramoff. How? As journalists who scour state and local news every day, we noticed something: It seems almost any crime can be excused or ignored as long as the perpetrator is a Democrat:

• A married Democratic mayor can be caught smoking crack cocaine with a prostitute and, even after he is convicted and sentenced to prison, get reelected.

• A married Democratic senator who leaves a party with a single young woman and gets into a drunk-driving accident that kills her does not merely avoid jail time, but retains his Senate seat and indeed goes on to become one of the most powerful politicians in his party.

• The entire Democratic Party is caught accepting millions in illegal foreign campaign donations and Chinagate, the biggest influence-peddling scandal in U.S. history, morphs into a bipartisan referendum on campaign finance reform!

Being a Democrat is often like holding the "get out of jail free" card. And this has been going on for more than 200 years.

When we conceived the idea for this book, we researched the topic and were surprised to find that no book like it had ever been written. There were plenty of ideological attacks on this or that aspect of liberalism, and lots of books about this or that wrongdoing of the Clinton administration.

But no one had ever tried to fit all the scandals of the Democratic Party into a single book. Once we started doing it, we quickly discovered why. The problem wasn't a shortage of Democratic cheats and crooks, but an astounding abundance of them-a veritable cornucopia of corruption, a direct line of scandal all the way back to the 1700s.

After just a few days of digging up Democratic scoundrels, it began to appear that the main difference between the Democrats and the Gambino mob is that Democrats qualify for federal matching funds.

Here are a few of the amazing stories we discovered:

• The forgotten role of the killer and traitor Aaron Burr in founding the Democratic Party and turning a New York social club into the most powerful and enduring political machine in American history, Tammany Hall.

• How gangsters wielded influence over the Democratic Party for much of the twentieth century, helping to elect three of the past six Democratic presidents.

• The brazen corruption of big-city Democrats-from Chicago to Atlanta to Philadelphia to New Orleans to Detroit-who preside over empires of graft and fraud while their policies bring nightmares of crime and squalor to the inner-city poor who are among the Democratic Party's most loyal supporters.

• That Democrats have, since the party's founding, routinely used election fraud to win -- and continue to do so today.

But Donkey Cons is more than a laundry list of Democratic scandals. Inside you will four essential points:

1) The Democratic Party has a 200-year history of urban corruption, treason and subversion, mob control, alliance with corrupt unions, and aiding and abetting criminals, that has no parallel in the GOP.

2) Corruption is as old as politics and it will always be present in both parties. But when corruption occurs in its ranks, Republicans generally clean house. Democrats, on the other hand, cover up.

3) Over the past 30 years in Congress, there have been three times as many Democratic crooks as Republican ones. (We took the trouble to actually count and it's all documented in more than 650 end notes.)

4) There is a media double-standard for covering Republican and Democratic scandal, which results in the false impression that both parties are equally corrupt.

Nancy Pelosi's "culture of corruption" canard is a straight-up lie -- and Donkey Cons proves it.

If Democrats try to make "corruption" the central issue of their 2006 campaign, they'll surely lose-and we'll probably sell a lot more books.

Come to think of it. Hey, Nancy: You go, girl!