Hypocrisy on Parade

Several items from Newsmax grabbed my attention yesterday.

--Senate Minority Leader "Dirty Harry" Reid, who joined in the Donkpile on House Majority Leader Tom DeLay this week, has used his position to put his entire family on the federal gravy train:

In recent days, the [#2] House Republican has been accused of having his family work on his campaigns - a charge that has Democrats clamoring for his scalp.

But there's been nary a peep of protest about a report that Reid's sons and son-in-law cashed in on Daddy's connections - a story first reported by the Los Angeles Times two years ago that was unearthed by [Rush] Limbaugh last week.

It turns out that while more than a few congressional relatives derive financial benefit from their proximity to power, Harry Reid, the Times said, "is in a class by himself."

In the last four years alone, firms with Reid family ties have collected more than $2 million in lobbying fees.

"So pervasive are the ties among Reid, members of his family and Nevada's leading industries and institutions that it's difficult to find a significant field in which such a relationship does not exist," the paper said.

For instance, the Nevada Democrat once sponsored an environmental bill that he touted as a bipartisan measure to protect the ecosystem and help the economy in America's fastest-growing state. But as the Times reported: "What Reid did not explain was that the bill promised a cavalcade of benefits to real estate developers, corporations and local institutions that were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees to his sons' and son-in-law's firms, federal lobbyist reports show."

The Howard Hughes Corp. alone paid $300,000 to attorney and son-in-law Steven Barringer to push a provision allowing the company to acquire 998 acres of federal land near booming Las Vegas. According to the Times, other provisions of Reid's legislation were intended to benefit a real estate development headed by a senior partner in the Nevada law firm that employs all four of the Senate minority leader's sons.

Seldom have so many close relatives directly profited off their familial connection to a powerful politician.

But as the Times noted, there's more: "The governments of three of Nevada's biggest cities — Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Henderson — also gained from the legislation, which freed up tens of thousands of acres of federal land for development and annexation. All three were represented by Reid's family members who contacted his staff on their clients' behalf."

Reid's response to the obvious conflicts of interest?

"Lots of people have children, wives and stuff that work back here," he insisted. "It is not as if a lot of cash is changing hands."

--At least one House Dem has abruptly become a lot more forgiving of Congressman DeLay - once his own "questionable" globetrotting was exposed to public scrutiny.

Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel said Thursday that GOP House Majority Leader Tom DeLay did nothing wrong by taking several trips abroad and having the costs picked up by lobbyists, and even praised the top Republican - after he was confronted with NewsMax's report detailing his own congressional junkets.

Asked about [these] junkets, which - as NewsMax reported on Wednesday, included stays in first-class hotels in San Juan, Las Vegas, Wyoming, Florida, New Orleans, London and Jerusalem - Engel was unapologetic.

"These people that talk about congressional trips - it's really silly," he insisted. "They're really saying that people in Congress shouldn't take trips at all."

The Bronx Democrat said that unless members of Congress are allowed to have their travel expenses picked up either by the taxpayers or private groups, only wealthy members who can afford to travel will be able to go on fact finding missions.

"I don't think it's good to only have multimillionaires in the United States Congress" able to travel, he told WWRL. "Some of us come from working families and we can't pay for these trips ourselves."

Asked to explain why he took wife, son and daughter on some of his fact-finding missions, Engel explained: "I'm a good father."

I guess Harry Reid is a "good father" as well.

--Carl Ford, self-described "loyal Republican" who blasted U.N. ambassador-nominee John Bolton as a bully in congressional hearings this week, turns out to be a financial backer of the Democratic Party.

Former CIA and State Department intelligence officer Carl Ford's account was ballyhooed by the media largely based on his alleged GOP credentials.

But as the Washington Times reported yesterday, starting six years ago, before he joined the Bush Administration, Ford donated thousands of dollars to Democrats sharply critical of the White House, including President Bush's 2004 opponent John Kerry [$500 in 1999].

Other Democrats favored by the "loyal Republican's" political generosity include Representative Charlie Rangel [$1,000] and Representative Jane Harman [$1,000]. Before he joined the CIA, Ford also served as a staffer for Senator John Glenn, an Ohio Democrat.

...Ford's description of himself as a "loyal Republican" left some of his associates dumbfounded.

"To the best of my recollection, Carl always considered himself a Democrat," Gary Jarmin, a longtime Washington lobbyist, told the Times. "If he is now a self-described 'loyal Republican,' then he must have had a fairly recent conversion."

You know, I'd like to say that what offends me about the Democrats' gutteral partisanism isn't the gutteral or the partisanism but the rank, pervasive, pathological dishonesty that permeates it. But I can't, because the fact of the matter is that that without that dishonesty the Democrats would have nothing to say because they don't have any substantive critiques to make of Tom DeLay or John Bolton or the President's appellate court nominees or his Social Security private account initiative. They know that each of these items is a death blow aimed at the heart of their lustful drive for regaining power, and that drive is the only thing that animates them.

It's the only thing they stand for anymore. It's all they know how to do.

Besides tell more lies.

One cannot help but wonder whether even the GOP's capacity for tolerating these mendacious defamations will finally be overwhelmed.

For some, it can't happen too soon.