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January 6, 2006
Spying as usual? Politics as usual?
It turned rich people's inheritance taxes into death taxes. It turned Saddam Hussein into Osama bin Laden. It turned the failed Whitewater Development Corp. of rural north-central Arkansas into Oval Office sex. (Well, yes, Bill and Monica helped with that.) It turned John Kerry's legitimately heroic war exploits into grandstanding fraud. Now the GOP propagandists are challenged anew. With midterm elections looming, they need to turn the Bush administration's illegal warrant-less electronic eavesdropping on American citizens into spying as usual. And they need to turn the revolving door between House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and guilty-pleading Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff into politics as usual. They're having undeserved success on the presidential spying. But the Abramoff scandal evades as yet even them. By now you've heard it said a thousand times, earnestly, vigorously, matter-of-factly - Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton signed executive orders to eavesdrop without warrants, too. Not exactly. Carter signed such an executive order only as it would apply under existing certifications by the attorney general, which stipulated that the eavesdropping was for foreign intelligence purposes and could not "contain the communications to which a United States person is a party." Clinton's executive order had to do with "physical searches" for foreign intelligence, and it, too, required the attorney general to certify that the searches did not involve "the premises, information, material or property of a United States person." At the time, "physical searches" were not specifically covered by the 1978 law setting up a secret court to issue warrants for electronic eavesdropping. The next year, Clinton agreed to changes in that law to include physical searches. Bush has ignored the secret court altogether, not to mention the statutes and the Constitution, and wiretapped Americans without any check or balance whatsoever. The GOP propagandists' success in lumping that with the Carter and Clinton actions is one of their finer pieces of magic. Abramoff's sleaze run amok poses a much more difficult challenge, to wit: - Tom DeLay ascends to Republican House leader. He lays out smug if unwritten rules commonly called the "K Street Project." The name refers to K Street in downtown Washington, which is lobbyists' row. DeLay dictates that Republicans will work on public policy only with friendly lobbyists who ante up to the Republican side of the aisle. - Members of DeLay's staff go to work for Abramoff, the king of contemporary K Street. DeLay's aides take trips with Abramoff. Then DeLay does the same himself for golf at historic St. Andrews in Scotland. - DeLay says he thought his trip was paid for by a nonprofit group. But Abramoff has so many financial sources to tap that it becomes hard to tell where the clean money ends and the dirty money begins. Among his sources to tap are Indian reservations, from whom Abramoff takes massive fees to advance and protect gambling monopolies. He does so by lobbying friendly Republicans who were sent to Washington by so-called values voters who somehow found their polling places even with all that wool over their eyes. - All the while, Abramoff is doing things for which he is now either pleading personally to federal charges or implicating others in a plea-bargain arrangement. It is true that Washington is generally corrupt on a bipartisan basis, owing to the incestuous relationships of politicians and lobbyists and the influence of money. But Abramoff's brazen extravagance represents exponential filth that sullies Republicans almost exclusively, because they were his pals and they were in control and nearly all his money went to them. It implicates DeLay in particular, because of his and his staff's associations and his own arrogance of power. Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com. |
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