Cliff's Corner

The Week That Was: 01/06/06

Another week. More preposterousness to report.

Opponents of holiday trees and kosher eggnog throughout Congress had to momentarily put down their copies of the 450th installment in the Left Behind series to do battle with a force even more sinister than those who would see Christmas turned into a season of joy and tolerance of others...

Jack Abramoff

Yes, this past week in what is being billed as a potential precursor to the largest congressional scandal in a century, Jack Abramoff, dressed in a rented costume from the film Darkman, plead guilty to pretty much being the anti-Christ Jerry Falwell is still searching for in Teletubbies reruns and Woody Allen movies. And considering Republicans over the past 100 years have been the party of Teapot Dome, Watergate and Iran-Contra, they really had to reach for that extra inner Nixon on this one.

Although at present, there is no evidence of anyone receiving a blowjob from a portly intern, so Chris Matthews is having a hard time understanding how any Republican elected official could be implicated and Jonah Goldberg's mother hasn't yet figured out how to peddle books on the subject and land a member of her nuclear family an unearned writing gig.

The Republican lobbyist, Abramoff, who liked to call Native Americans "troglodytes" and "morons" as he was ripping them off to help Hot Tub Tom DeLay and George W. Bush illegally maintain their grip on power in Washington, has said he could implicate as many as 60 members of Congress with his plea-arranged testimony. As he has personally donated money solely to Republicans (contrary to GOP lies trying to implicate Democrats) this should make him about as popular among their caucus as Tom Cruise at a Brooke Shields baby shower.

It also appears that numerous GOP strategists, lobbyists and fellow-travelers will also be caught up in this net of vice, as Abramoff has more contacts to Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist and Karl Rove than gonorrhea to Paris Hilton. So let's just say that Republican rule in Washington increasingly has a better chance of being aborted than a black baby in a nursing care facility run by Bill Bennett.

Speaking of scandals, we now may have more insight into why Caesar Commodus felt the need to bypass the FISA courts that for 72 hours retroactively grant National Security Agency warrants for spying on terrorists. No matter that these magistrates have rejected only around a dozen out of about 19,000 requests over the past quarter century, roughly equal to the percentage of the time President Bush has caught a terrorist he's claimed was a top priority. It turns out that, as has been speculated by a certain proprietor of this site for at least two weeks now, we may now be nearing proof that the Bush Junta was using its Go Go Gadget listening devices to spy on US journalists, meaning none other than Christiane Amanpour, CNN's Chief International Correspondent. At least NBC's Andrea Mitchell intimated as much during an interview with James Risen, the New York Times reporter who broke the NSA spying story. And we also know they bug CNN's Daryn Kagan by attaching a roughly 300 pound, persistently perspiring, listening device called Rush to her every night.

MSNBC responded to Mitchell's "crazy stunt" - you know, honestly discussing what she may know about the lengths of this Administration's corruption in a venue where Americans might hear it - by doing the responsible thing and redacting the online transcript so this unpleasantness would vanish like personnel records at the Alabama Air National Guard. And now we're just left to wonder if Amanpour, and other journalists seeking to report on terrorism (or Nick and Jessica for that matter if Jenna and the other twin are involved) have had all of their conversations bugged.

Which, in Amanpour's case, wouldn't have any serious implications, as her husband Jamie Rubin only worked for the last Democratic President and more recently as a foreign policy advisor to Democratic presidential candidates Senator John Kerry and General Wesley Clark. Kerry you may remember was the guy who tried to defeat President Bush in the last free and fair presidential election, which we for some reason cling so quaintly to in this democracy of ours. But Amanpour and Rubin are only married, so it's not like they would have had occasion to use the same phone.

Finally, there was the tragedy of the mining accident in Tallmansville, West Virginia. Twelve miners were killed, and much of the nation and media were transfixed with the entire saga. There is not too much one can say about such a sad occurrence. Except whether or not this tragedy could have been prevented, knowing that the mine had been cited for 208 safety violations in 2005 is a bit unsettling. As is the fact that President Bush has placed coal industry executives in charge of policing their own (blackie you're doing a heck of a job), a similar occurrence under his reign with all agencies charged with regulating the safety and propriety of the corporate world from the SEC to the FCC. I'm just surprised President Bush didn't climb aboard Air Force One to fly overhead and survey the wreckage. Maybe he would have spotted Jack Abramoff on his way down to Florida for his second guilty plea in as many days, preparing to name names most likely on the White House invitation list.

NOTE: For anyone interested in my take on the Democrats and privacy politics, check out http://www.alternet.org/story/30391/ (and then immediately return to AMERICAblog of course).