Tornado Alley (PROG)

[My Dime]

The Republican racket (which isn't tennis)

By MOLLY IVINS


AUSTIN - Sometimes it helps to draw back from what's going on, to see if any patterns emerge from the chaos of daily events.

In the news biz, attempts to see the Big Picture are known as thumbsuckers and regarded with appropriate contempt. On the famous other hand, it's also sometimes the only way to see the much bigger stories that seep and creep all around us without anyone ever calling a news conference, or issuing talking points, or having gong-show debate over them.

Everybody and his dog in the political commentating trade now agrees that the Bush administration is experiencing hard times -- the going is getting tough, and George W. Bush is getting testy.

It seems to me what we are looking at was put best by noted journalist Billy Don Moyers, formerly of Marshall, who was home recently 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 flimflam, 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.

Abramoff is the close ally and college roommate of Grover Norquist, a key right-wing political activist and major leader of the "movement conservatives" in Washington. Abramoff has also bragged that he contacted Karl Rove on behalf of Tyco.

Washington 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?

Equally, the arrest of David Safavian -- former head of procurement at the White House Office of Management and Budget -- on grounds of having impeded justice by lying or covering up material facts opens up all kinds of lines of inquiry. Safavian was previously a partner in Norquist's consulting firm Janus-Merritt Strategies. Safavian also worked with Abramoff at another law-lobbying firm.

One definition of Establishment journalism is relying solely on news conferences held by people with public office and power. With the exception of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, the Washington press corps appears to be standing around waiting for word from the official investigation. Why aren't they ahead of the official investigators?

Seems to me we have all mourned the descent of politics from the noble (if messy and comically picturesque) doings of democracy into a system of legalized bribery. Taking huge campaign contributions from special interests and doing legislative favors in return is so common that one barely blinks at it.

Rep. Roy Blunt, the man whom Republicans chose to replace DeLay temporarily while he's under indictment, tried to alter a Homeland Security bill in 2003 with a last-minute provision to benefit the cigarette company Philip Morris. Philip Morris had not only contributed heavily to Blunt's campaign -- it also employed both Blunt's girlfriend, whom he married in 2003, and one of his sons.

DeLay gets indicted, and the Republicans replace him with another DeLay.

The scandals seem to be a new and more sinister level of corruption.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/12852363.htm