First Ted Stevens’s kid has his office raided by federal agents investigating political corruption and influence peddling. Given the twin GOP passions for nepotism and influence peddling (for instance, ew), that particular confluence only seemed like a matter of time.
Today the FBI carried on the proud GOP tradition when it raided the offices of Karen Weldon, daughter of crazy PA Republican Curt Weldon (Hilzoy explains why crazy is an understatement). To recap the recent Weldon saga, McClatchy reports that the family Weldon is under investigation by the FBI for corruption. Weldon’s office angrily denies it, immediately after which the AP independently confirms the story. At the point the controversy pitted two major news outlets against one of the most credibility-challenged Congressmen in America. Now for the benefit of the two or three people who could not see that Weldon’s staff is operating out of the logic-free limbic system, the FBI itself has weighed in.
***
On a side note, I am sure that Abu Gonzales’s DOJ would love to spend its pre-election October doing something other than generating horrendous headlines for the GOP. A cease-and-desist order is probably out of the question (imagine those headlines) but is it even possible that no Democrats have crossed the line in the last four or five years? The independent DOJ died sometime around January 2001 so let’s spare any nonsense about blind justice. If Abu G could help out in any way he certainly would. Similarly the media is practically starving for something to fill its usual both sides are just as bad pabulum narrative. Loopy as he is William Jefferson can only feed so many headlines.
Amusingly, the GOP itself probably caused the current situation through initiatives which must have seemed like great ideas at the time. At its core Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum and Grover Norquist meant for the K Street Project to cut Democratic access to lobbyist money to the greatest degree possible. Most lobbying firms rotated in Republicans to major positions and those who didn’t got the lash. The general plan was to starve the hated liberals of hard lobbying cash, widely considered the lifeblood of national politics . Realigning the cash spigot would cement a Republican majority sustaining itself through a financial advantage and a willingness to use majority power to maintain that advantage. Like the Iraq war, the idea probably looked great on paper but unintended consequences have a way of biting you in the ass.
Look at it this way. None of us are stupid enough to sit an average politician next to an unguarded cookie jar and expect not to lose a few cookies, the jar and the toaster next to it. A few politicians go into the biz purely out of love for the common good, sure, and some even keep that idealism for longer than the time it takes to unpack their bags. But on average an unflinching personal rectitude just doesn’t list that high on a politician’s list of needed skills. That is why we have Inspectors General offices in every major federal department, ethics committees in Congress and DOJ lawyers who specialize in campaign and influence peddling laws. You don’t leave the cookie jar unguarded unless you plan to lose it.
Seen in that light the current wave of GOP scandals is not actually a bug but a feature. Republicans aggressively cut off as much Democratic access to conventional power as they possibly could while expanding it for themselves and dismantling any possible outlet for meaningful oversight. In essence the GOP put fat padlock and an angry Doberman on the cookie jar for Democrats while eliminating the jar altogether for themselves. The Dems did not become righteous people and Republicans didn’t suddenly become a tavern of whores (no more than usual anyway), human nature simply followed its course in a system where only the GOP had any power to abuse.
Dems will soon have Congress and probably the White House, and for a while anyway the Right will go back to angrily denouncing the depredations of intrusive government. I would counsel those guys not to worry; just wait until the Dems start to hobble Ethics Committees and aggressively steer the money spigot in their own direction. Once that happens a news cycle as overwhelmingly schadenfreude-rich as this one is only so many years away.
Pb
I’m going to just make a blind assertion refuting this, and I’d like to see evidence to the contrary. My blind assertion is that the Democrats were never this corrupt in 1994. But I could be wrong–who knows, maybe they stole billions of dollars in stamps back then!
jaime
From Freeperland:
The Party of personal responsibility indeed.
Tim F.
That is certainly true. The point here is not that the majority party automatically becomes corrupt. The point is that if you strip away every form of oversight and block the minority party from the usual outlets of political power then as sure as water flows downhill you will get a wave of criminal scandals largely emanating from one side of Congress. As I said, if the Dems start dismantling the basic checks and balances like the GOP did then we can look forward to mess of ugly Dem scandals.
jcricket
But Democrats are never organized, egotistical and corrupt enough to do that. Seriously, that’s why corrupt Democratic politicians are usually caught and punished, even during Democratic administrations. Now the media makes it look like it’s all “equally as bad”, but I think it’s clearly not. I don’t think we’ve recently (last 50 years) seen a tidal wave of Democratic corruption like this at the National level.
The lesson here is if you put all your trust in your “permanent majority” and your “rightness”, and then attempt to eliminate as much oversight oversight as possible the inevitable result is massive corruption and your eventual ousting.
At least one hopes so.
Pb
Tim F.,
I’d agree with that, I guess I didn’t see the ‘if’ there…
Hmm, that looks more like a ‘when’ rather than an ‘if’. I’ll assume that an ‘if’ should have been implied, then.
jcricket
I wonder for how many years after Bush is out of office we will continue to indict + prosecute people in his administration for criminal acts.
For Democrats the complete party fealty + eliminated oversight the GOP has presided over the past 6 years may end up being the “gift that keeps on giving”.
jcricket
Sorry, here’s the link: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/business/4262761.html
Punchy
It’s become Republican Mad-Libs.
“It is now obvious that ______ (proper noun, something/one that just pissed you off, no matter how ridiculous) is an arm of the _______ (adjective, suggestions: Demobrats, Demoncrats, Dumbocrats, DemoCANTS, libs, liberals, fib-erals, or fuckstain) Party”
Tim F.
It was a very sarcastic ‘if.’
Tsulagi
Looking at the Freeperland comments above, sometimes you have to stop laughing and really wonder. They don’t have to be in an echo chamber, they carry their own personal one on top of their shoulders. Nothing to stop the sound bouncing around between their ears.
Yeah, Abu Gonzales at the top of the DOJ and FBI is a deep-cover Democrat plant now showing his true colors. Only thing that makes sense. I guess like the brilliant thinker over at NRO who was arguing gay Republican staffers are really covert closet Democrats with a secret liberal agenda to destroy the GOP. That’s why Foley was covered up and timed to be exposed now. I bet Spongebob was in on this too.
Punchy
And Weldon finally grabs the reins, embraces the “blame everyone else cuz their Dems”, and runs with it
Here’s the crux:
This is just too f’in funny for words.
Tulkinghorn
Heh. Indeed.
What I want to know is how we Democrats managed to infiltrate and take over the FBI considering 18 of the last 24 years have been controlled by Republicans. If this is correct then Howard Dean has an amazing covert ops program.
KCinDC
What I like is how the Democratic FBI and the gay moles in Congress cleverly waited until Bush had been in office six years before springing their trap. Clearly it would have been just too obvious to reveal these things back in 2004, even though it might have spared us two more years of disastrously incompetent leadership.
The thing that amazes me is that Rove and company haven’t been able to dredge up a single Democratic sex scandal. Among 200-odd Democrats in Congress surely there must be somebody. Maybe they’re waiting until closer to the election, but at this point some people are already voting, and revealing it earlier would have allowed the media to go into “both do it” mode and saved Hastert a lot of grief.
yet another jeff
Maybe the FBI wouldn’t have raided his daughter’s offices if Weldon was able to get his message out? Damn the Vast Left Wing Media Conspiracy! They probably blackmailed the FBI into doing this.
demimondian
KCinDC, it’s amazing, isn’t it? The Defeatocratic discipline is amazing! The master criminal Harry Reid is carefully assisted in doing all those terrible things without profiting a cent, and without gathering any political power. CREW has all the pressure points of Washington wired, just so that the FBI, the Washington Post, and the New York TImes will release exactly the stories that will hurt the GOP most at the most inconvenient times. You all remember how they carefully held the story of the warantless wiretapping for a year, until well after the 2004 election, in order to help John Kerry by strengthing George Bush.
And that George Soros. Some international man of mystery he is, eh? Amassing a vast fortune, while pretending to be a normal thief, just so that he could betray his natural allies in his declining years.
Truly, the Democrats are an amazing apparatusm, aren’t they?
Thomas
Tim somehow manages to twist the remarkable independence and professionalism of the Bush DoJ into an attack on the Bush DoJ. Remarkable, but not surprising.
This in particular is something that the administration has done right. The Bush DoJ has not once pulled a punch in investigating corruption in the Republican party. Not once. I’ll leave it to others to refresh their memory of the behavior of the previous administration, and the protection racket run by their AG. In this administration, when we heard allegations concerning those closest to the president, the reaction was to sic an independent pit-bull prosecutor–a man who had built his career in part on his willingness to prosecute Republicans–on the case. There hasn’t been any effort to slow these prosecutions down, or even to minimize the electoral effects of the investigations.