The political decadence of late-stage conservatism

by digby

“I was basically so busy winning that I didn’t see what I was doing.” Jack Abramoff

There you have it. Winning is the only thing they really care about and the only thing they know how to do. Governing, as we’ve just had graphically illustrated, was not part of the program.

Jack Abramoff is one of the anointed princes of the second wave of the conservative movement. He came of age politically during the go-go Reagan years, along with his good friends Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist. They were renowned for saying things like:

“I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag.” (Reed: Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, November 9, 1991)

Abramoff’s personal credo was “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.” As we know, Norquist just recently said: “Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don’t go around peeing on the furniture and such.” (All of us in the blogosphere have had to put up with the puerile troll taunt that begins, “Maybe when you start winning elections you can….” fill in the blank.)

This is the real modern Republican party in all its glory. It raised these guys from pups, nurturing their selfishness, their immaturity and their greed. They wanted to win by any means necessary and when you believe that you allow people like Reed and Abramoff to do what they need to do to make it happen. If you can skim some cream off the top, so much the better.

It’s great that they are all being exposed, but let’s not kid ourselves. They may be decadent and corrupt, but they do know how to win. I wouldn’t count on them just folding up their tent and going home. Winning is, after all, the only thing they know how to do.

Still, there is good reason to hope that they are going to start turning part of their firepower on each other, which is the best way to beat people like this. The Dubai port deal shows a huge divide between the rank and file who believed that crap about “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” and the big money boys who have already progressed past this old fashioned notion of the nation state to embrace the new borderless corporation paradigm. That crack in the coalition is becoming a fissure. There are a bunch of them.

But the crack that intrigues me the most is this one:

As the Jack Abramoff scandal unfolds, it is becoming increasingly clear how extensively he collaborated with the Christian right to advance his casino schemes. Ralph Reed was paid no less than $4 million by Abramoff and his Indian casino clients to serve as a liasion to the Christian right.

Reed managed to lasso Focus on the Family President James Dobson into a series of campaigns to stamp out competition to Abramoff’s clients. Though Senate subpeonaed emails seem to confirm that Dobson was manipulated by Reed and Abramoff, he and his employees have repeatedly claimed that his activism against rivals to Abramoff’s clients was a complete coincidence.

While I wrote about this for the Nation and Media Matters, there has been very little mainstream press interest on Dobson’s role in Abramoff’s schemes. So far, some of the best — and most adversarial — reporting on the Abramoff/Reed/Dobson saga is coming from the Christian media, namely from Marvin Olasky’s World Magazine. As the former welfare guru to Gov. George W. Bush, Olasky coined the phrase, “compassionate conservatism.” When Bush moved into the White House, he became the intellectual author of the Faith Based Initiative. Olasky’s World Magazine is one of the largest evangelical publications in the country.

On February 4, World published a critical expose of Dobson’s role in a 2002 Abramoff campaign to stop expansion of competition to his client, the Coushattas. A World reporter grilled Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery about Dobson’s involvement. Minnery responded incredulously that Abramoff was “trying to take credit for” what Focus was supposedly already doing in Louisiana. He refused to criticize Reed, even though Reed clearly manipulated Dobson.

Two weeks later, Minnery and Dobson took to the airwaves in an attempt to defuse the conflict. Minnery claimed once again that “as it happens, we, Focus on the Family, we’re fighting this new Indian casino in Louisiana at the very same time. Not because Ralph Reed asked us. Not because Jack Abramoff asked us.” And he once again refused to criticize Reed. In fact, Minnery defended Reed, calling him “A wounded brother,” who “regretted what he did, that he wouldn’t do it again, and realizes that it was wrong.”

I was criticized once before for writing that this rift could potentially push some of the evangelical voters back to the non-voting population. These worldly complications, it seemed to me, might make some of these folks ask themselves if they really wanted to devote all this time and energy to something so morally flawed as politics. Some readers felt that I was suggesting that we “suppress” the evangelical vote. Well… I would never try to stop somebody from voting. But I am certainly not going to go out and drag Republicans to the polls. These voters provide a huge, built-in GOP political machine through those churches and it is in our best interest to see that machine break down. As far as I’m concerned if a fight between Olasky and Dobson helps that happen, then I’m all for it. They are always welcome to vote for Democrats, of course.