[Politics]

The Dems and Corruption

I just breezed over to the RNC website and did a search on "Abramoff." Care to guess how many results I found?* The GOP strategy to deal with this scandal is NSA-level secret: try to link the Dems with Abramoff, too. After all, the GOP base already distrusts government, so what's to lose?

There are two truths and a lie here. The first truth is that Dems are just as prone to corruption as the Republicans. We know this because most of the famous political machines have been Democratic.

The second truth is that right now, the Republicans are the corrupt party, and it's a national-scale, coordinated effort to defraud Democracy. The Dems are bush leaguers compared to what's going on in Washington in the new millennium. Republicans, so intent for so long on graft, have managed to remove most legal protections, so now corruption is written into the law. Look at any appropriations bill in the last five years. Vote buying is now standard operating procedure for K Street and the US legislature. For Abramoff and his idiot elected cronies to have broken their own laws of allowed corruption is astounding.

The lie, which the stealth campaign is promoting, is that this scandal is equally shared by the Dems. It is yet another insult to the intellect of American citizens--but one that will probably pay off. With the exception of a few leaders on the Dem side, lobbyists have pretty much blown off giving to them. Why would they? Dems aren't allowed in conference to craft legislation, they aren't allowed to amend--or even read--GOP-drafted legislation, and as the minority, they can't stop it. But as I wrote yesterday, I doubt seriously that our electorate will rouse the energy needed to discover these truths, and meanwhile, that behemoth of right-wing propaganda will continue the stealth campaign on the GOP's behalf.

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*Oh, come on--it was a rhetorical question. On a PR site, you don't talk about things that embarrass the base. Hillary Clinton, smelling salts for old white men, gets you 138 results.