ROLLING STONE: Abramoff ‘Lurking in Background’ of Ohio 2004, Diebold, HAVA Issues

Brad Friedman

April 14, 2006, 2:55pm
PT

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Before I register my complaint here with Matt Taibbi’s otherwise excellent article on the background of “Mr. Republican” Jack Abramoff and “The secret history of the most corrupt man in Washington,” as published in the April 6th edition of Rolling Stone, I’ll point to this smart graf amongst many such smart grafs in a very well-researched and informative piece:

One of the ugliest developments in American culture since Abramoff’s obscure Cold Warrior days in the Eighties has been the raging but highly temporary success of various “smart guys” who upon closer examination aren’t all that smart. There was BALCO steroid scum Victor Conte (“The smartest son of a bitch I ever met in my life,” said one Olympian client), Enron’s “smartest guys in the room” Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, and, finally, “ingenious dealmaker” Jack Abramoff. Somewhere along the line, in the years since the Cold War, Americans as a whole became such craven, bum-licking, self-absorbed fat cats that they were willing to listen to these fifth-rate prophets who pretended that the idea that rules could be broken was some kind of earth-shattering revelation — as though they had fucking invented fraud and cheating. But to a man, they all turned out to be dumb, incompetent fuckups, destined to bring us all down with them — not even good at being criminals.

Taibbi’s piece covers in detail some of the many scams that Abramoff and the rest of the nationwide Republican Network of dishonest, opportunistic players who now comprise the power structure of the Republican party — or the “vast rightwing conspiracy” as Hillary correctly described it. It’s an ugly, but accurate portrait of those who have hijacked all that America was supposed to have stood for while an otherwise distracted and/or media-whipped public was trained to look the other way — or otherwise give the benefit of the doubt to some very very bad guys who have earned no such benefit.

Those bad guys now run the country, its government, its corporations and its media virtually in its entirety. And more shamefull still, they’ve got goons played for suckers who are so daft and gullible that, to this day, they run around and play apologist for these people who — I guess they don’t realize it — are fucking them hard up their own asses with their own hard-earned money and blindly offered good-will. You’ll find many of those dopes repeating Fox “News” and Limbaugh-isms over Thanksgiving dinners everywhere, and otherwise plying their foolish and self-destructive trade wherever they can. A stroll through some of the most trollish comments left here at The BRAD BLOG reveals these people have left only the dimmest of connections to Reality as it exists in 2006 on the planet Earth.

With those accolades for Taibbi’s work now out of the way, allow me to point to this earlier graf in his piece (emphasis added)…

All along, Abramoff was buying journalists, creating tax-exempt organizations to fund campaign activities and using charities to fund foreign conflicts. He spent the past twenty years doing business with everyone from James Dobson to the Gambino family, from Ralph Reed to Grover Norquist to Karl Rove to White House procurements chief David Safavian. He is even lurking in the background of the 2004 Ohio voting-irregularities scandal, having worked with the Diebold voting-machine company to defeat requirements for a paper trail in elections.

“Lurking in the background” must be MSM code for: Reported by BRAD BLOG but otherwise ignored.

We’re glad to see Taibbi pick up on some of our reporting as he writes…

And now it comes out that Diebold, the notorious voting-machine company, paid some $275,000 to Abramoff’s firm, Greenberg Traurig, with the apparent aim of keeping legislation requiring paper trails in the voting process from getting into the Help America Vote Act. Conveniently, Abramoff pal Bob Ney, one of the HAVA architects, blocked every attempt to put paper trails into law, even after the controversial electoral debacles of 2000 and 2004.

…But it would certainly help to keep such bad guys from affecting so much corruption and damage for so many years before they actually get busted, if Taibbi would be kind enough to point out some of the sources — independent, alternative, “blog” or otherwise — who have been trying to blow such whistles for so long.

With appropriate credit and recognition from the mainstream, as we opined a several weeks ago, reporting such as ours and many others would likely have the effect of stopping the bad guys before they manage to wreak quite as much havoc on our once-great American democracy.

We’d hope that even the usually independent-minded Rolling Stone would keep such important points in mind by choosing to give appropriate attribution where possible in their future reporting. As we’ve said before: It matters.

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Categories: Diebold/Premier Election 2004 HAVA Jack Abramoff Mainstream Corporate Media

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