Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[niteowl]

The betrayal of the conservative cause

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/1/13711/9648

"Read this op-ed and you'd think it was written by any number of liberal columnists or editorial writers.....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/opinion/01continetti.html

In the week before Mr. DeLay's indictment, David Safavian, a White House official in the Office of Management and Budget, was arrested in connection with the Justice Department investigation into the lobbying practices of Jack Abramoff, the conservative activist and Republican Party fundraiser. It was the first arrest in the 18-month inquiry, but it is probably not the last. Grease from the Abramoff scandal has rubbed off on conservative stalwarts like the antitax activist Grover Norquist;Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition; and Republican lawmakers like Representative Bob Ney of Ohio, Senator Conrad Burns of Montana and - here's that name again - Tom DeLay.

Meanwhile the Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing to issue subpoenas in its inquiry into the finances of the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist. And a grand jury investigation into who in the White House leaked the identity of a C.I.A. officer to the press two years ago lumbers toward completion [...]

Led by Mr. DeLay in the House, Rick Santorum in the Senate and Grover Norquist downtown, Republicans worked not just toward the partisan realignment of the country, but of the influence industry, too. They tracked which lobbyists were Democrats and which Republicans, refused to meet with the Democrats and pressured business groups and law firms to hire the conservatives. Their strenuous efforts to blur the boundaries between corporate America and the Republican Party came to be known as the K Street Project.

It was an incredible success. By 2002, if you look at numbers from the Center for Responsive Politics, industries that had long made bipartisan campaign contributions largely abandoned the Democrats, leaving Republicans with an overwhelming edge in corporate donations. By 2004, the lobbyists themselves gave the Republicans $1 million more than they gave Democrats. The number of Republican lobbyists grew. And so did the number of lobbyists, period - from about 9,000 when the Republicans took power to more than 34,000 today.


But then the big surprise:


Young conservatives in particular will react to the new, post-DeLay reality in different ways. I know I have. First, looking at your party's troubles, you see perverse confirmation of conservatism's animating idea: that as the sphere of public decision-making expands, so do the opportunities for graft and wrongdoing. Next you note, with sadness, that while political power helped bring about some achievements - welfare reform, pro-growth tax cuts, an assertive, moralistic foreign policy - it may have also exhausted conservatism's fighting spirit, lowered the movement's intellectual standards and replaced a healthy independence with partisan water-carrying.

But then you take solace in the idea that the Republican Party has once again bested the Democrats, who after all took 40 years to sprout the warts of power.



The author is a staff writer at the conservative Weekly Standard. And we can laugh at the so-called "pro-growth" tax cuts and "moralistic foreign policy", the former which has given us trillions in red ink, the latter which has imbroiled us in a quagmire of a foreign adventure. But those are ultimately policy differences. Corruption is something altogether different. Dirty government is not a partisan issue, it stinks whether the culprits are Republicans, Democrats, or anything else.

Shocking that so few conservatives will admit that."