Vietnam and Cambodia - some tragic figures about to be released say over 2 percent of Iraq's people have died - 600k - thanks to bush - I don't have a subscription to WSJ, but here's the lead:
Republican misdeeds have given us a clear choice
October 18, 2006 4:30 AM | Capitol Hillbillies | 3 Comments
By MARTIN SCHRAM
For once, voters have it easy on Election Day.
Usually, citizens must wade through the bombast and braunschweiger of political TV ads hoping to discover how a candidate might vote on all the big issues.
So many votes, so much braunschweiger, so little time.
But this year citizens only need to focus on the one key vote: The first vote each representative and senator casts in the new Congress will be by far the most important. It is the vote that determines who will be House speaker or Senate majority leader _ in short, who will be controlling Congress.
Luckily for voters, the party now in power in the House has made this year a no brainer for voters. Republicans, who have controlled the House with an iron fist, have made themselves into poster pols for greed and corruption. Now it is clear that conscientious voters of all ideologies must vote the no-longer Grand Old Party out of power. It is the only way House Republicans will clean up their act and regain their once enviable moral compass.
Idealistic conservatives in Washington who are not officeholders recognize this and have said so publicly. Opportunistic Democrats who are in office dream and scheme to make it happen, but haven't demonstrated the vision that should be evident in advance of power. Still, Democrats have made a virtue out of powerlessness. They haven't been caught splashing, Gene Kelly-like, in the gutters of corruption that line Pennsylvania Avenue and K Street. Maybe in this town that's all the virtue we can expect.
For years, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay mastered the art of amassing money to gain and perpetuate power. DeLay made Dennis Hastert the House speaker; a grateful Hastert sought to protect DeLay, looking away as the House Ethics Committee withered. DeLay became the ignoble enabler of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who for years was Washington's only kosher deli proprietor whose specialty was pork. The owner of Stacks deli spread corruption like cream cheese, smearing it up and down congressional corridors of power and K Street; and tried mightily to do the same inside the Bush administration's agencies.
For months, the Bush White House conned the media into conveying the impression that Abramoff had just a few contacts with White House aides; they pretended to be reluctant as they released a White House photo showing Bush with a native American and Abramoff as a distant flyspeck in the crowd. Now it turns out that Abramoff's records and e-mails show a bit more than four or five contacts _ 485 contacts between Abramoff's firm and the White House, including key adviser Karl Rove.
In one, Rove OK'd an endorsement for Abramoff's client in an obscure election in the Mariana Islands. Rove's top assistant, Susan Ralston, e-mailed Abramoff: "You win." (Did I mention that her previous job was as Abramoff's assistant?) Now DeLay is gone. So is Rep. Robert Ney, R-Ohio, who admitted taking money for doing favors for Abramoff, and a number of tainted GOP aides. And so is Rep Randy Cunningham, R-Calif., who pleaded guilty to charges stemming from receiving $2.4 million in bribes.
Hastert and his Republican leaders retired the cup for hypocrisy. They courted voters who cherish family and Christian values. But faced with proof that a Florida Republican congressman was making improper overtures to boys who were House pages, they took no action that might jeopardize a safe GOP seat _ just bowed their heads as Rep. Mark Foley preyed.
While House Republicans leaders have betrayed their public trust, over in the Senate, what is right is far less clear. Some senior Senate conservatives grasp the difference between wielding a gavel and a hammer, understanding that power and principle need not be mutually exclusive. Most recently, Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner, R-Va., had the guts to call for a new course in Iraq, even as his House counterparts did little more than act as a Bush-Cheney-Rummy rubber stamp. But the Senate's nominally top Democrat, Harry Reid of Nevada, casts no shadow as a newsmaker, except for a hugely profitable land deal, tarnished by slipshod documentation and maybe worse.
But voters face a clear call to duty when it comes to their House races. If your representative is a Republican who is one of the bad ones or a blind-to-morality follower, give your rep the hook. If your representative is solid and a hard worker but still determined to vote again to keep Hastert and his failed leaders in power, respectfully give your rep a gold watch that says it is time to retire.
Those House Republicans, by their own misdeeds, have relinquished the right to reign. |
