Bipartisan BS

by digby

The media is working hard to make this into a bi-partisan scandal but that is simple bullshit. Ed Henry on CNN, for instance, couldn’t stop talking about Byron Dorgan being implicated in this scandal. I don’t know if Dorgan’s going to be swept up, but let’s just say that if he is he probably deserves it because he would be the stupidest man in the world. He’s the top Democrat on the Indian Affairs Committee and even Steno Sue writes:

Dorgan has asked some of the toughest questions in the committee hearings probing the $82 million Abramoff and Michael Scanlon charged their tribal clients.

I suppose some people would think this is a normal thing for a man on the take to do, but I would suggest that it’s unlikely. Here’s a good rundown on the Dorgan connection (and the media’s predictably bad reporting on it) from Media Matters.

Fasten your seatbelts. The press is surely under tremendous pressure from the Republicans to report this as a bi-partisan scandal and they are already buckling under. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a GOP operation from the get — and they know it.

I wrote a piece a few months back about Abramoff and his two college Republican lieutenants Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist called Nixon’s Babies in which I discussed just how important Abramoff is to the “movement.” And I highly recommend reading Nina Easton’s Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Ascendacy Anybody who looks at Jack Abramoff and sees anything but a hard core GOP influence peddler who was paid very well to finance the GOP machine is either a shill or a fool.

I just saw CNN’s Henry again say that this was a bi-partisan scandal and that Democrats were going to find it very hard to make the “culture of corruption” charge. This was not “he said/she said” — he was editorializing in his piece and his opinion is either uninformed, myopic or biased. This piece was followed by another from William Schneider in which he helpfully points out that while the public indicates that it thinks Democrats are less corrupt than Republicans that’s only because the public understands that it’s because the Republicans are in power and have more opportunity.

Bullshit. The reason people think this is because every few years we find out that Republicans leaders have no respect for the law. It’s like clockwork. If they aren’t selling themselves outright to big business on the floor of the congress they are claiming the constitution allows them to break any law they choose. Just in the past couple of weeks we’ve had news reports about legal trouble for corrupt Republicans George W. Bush, Ken Lay, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Duke Cunningham, Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff. Lot of dots there. Is it too much trouble for the media to connect them?

This characterization of the scandal as being “bi-partisan” is typical bad mainstream journalism, particularly the emphasis they are placing on the very small handful of Democrats who’ve even been mentioned (much less included in any legal procedings.) Not only are they creating some equity and illegality where none exists, by doing it they are missing the real story, as usual.

This isn’t a story about power corrupting or about a few bad apples. This is about a corrupt political machine — a system of money laundering and public corruption on behalf of one political party. It’s about a party that has used every tool at its disposal to legally and illegally enrich itself and enhance its power. It’s right there. It’s unravelling before our eyes.

And all Dana Bash and Ed Hanry can say is that Jack Abramoff lent his skybox to Democrats and Republicans alike. Which he did. He lent it 1% of the time to Democrats and 99% of the time to Republicans. That makes all of them equally corrupt.

Update: Crooks and Liars has some great Tweety spin footage. Seems it’s not partisan because Abramoff is Satan.

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