"Heard something really interesting from a Republican Hill staffer. That it was Mrs. Ledeen, a staffer to Sen. Santorum, who got the tip from a non governmental source that led to the Hoekstra/Santorum press conference last week about the WMD in Iraq. Hmm. Who was the source?"* weldon - still crazy
* laura:
"AEI's Norm Ornstein:* emptywheel:
...In all my years of watching Congress, I have never seen anything quite like what we have now. It may be a cliché, and it may be a partisan attack term, but it is also true: There is a culture of corruption across Capitol Hill.
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But the problem is palpably worse. While there is plenty of illegality here — and I believe a wave of indictments will hit in the coming months — it is not what is illegal that is the outrage, to use the old phrase, but rather what is legal.
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Hastert made nearly $2 million from rural land purchased in his district, done in part through a series of transactions involving a land trust he set up with partners. The land had no major access road nearby when the Speaker purchased it — apparently, according to his office, on impulse, for $2.1 million when he drove past and saw a house on it that he admired.
But soon after the purchase, the Speaker muscled through $207 million in earmarks to build a highway and interchange five miles or so from his property. Not long after the earmark, the land trust sold some of the property to a developer for $5 million, handing the Speaker a windfall of $1.8 million."
"Here's how it's going to work. In record time (say, by next week sometime) we'll have our (NY/SWIFT) damage assessment. We'll hear terrible stories about terrorists who didn't make that wire transfer, who stopped calling their mother in Dearborn. We'll even hear stories about how said terrorist was mid-terrorist plan, but now he got away and he's out there stalking us, all because James Risen and Eric Lichtblau ruined Cheney's favorite spying program. We'll see them ratchet up the One Minute Hates some more, because the NYT has personally compromised our safety.
But I don't think it'll work... Which means they're going to have to make it up. They're going to have to invent a story by next week about all the evil doers the NYT has let escape.
And the problem, for them, is that their stories aren't working anymore. The best story they've invented lately involves seven poor men looking to scam free boots off an FBI informer. That story was immediately laughed into disrepute. And we now know their other big stories--the danger of Zarqawi, the importance of Abu Zubaydeh--were all cruel hoaxes.
This story will be no better. And the more they keep telling these transparently stupid stories, the more their own credibility will suffer."
2 comments:
Hats off! to laura and emptywheel. That felt good to read, kind of like when you hit a nail on the head thing.
Do you think Eddie Murphy and Dan Akroyd could do a James Bond flavor "Trading Places" with the Miami 7?
OMG. Re: Laura on Weldon and Dave Gaubatz. They simply haven't got a clue as to what they are getting themselves into.
Laura gives DG the OK. She says "I found Gaubatz to be sincere and credible." He says "I only want to protect America and more specifically I do not want our children to ever again experience a terrorist attack like September 11th or worse. I will do my part to prevent an attack even if I have to experience ridicule from people who believe WMD was never in Iraq."
The only thing that troubles me greatly is that if DG has been fed bogus information about sites where WMD is to be planted and found just prior to the November elections, he is far more likely to end up causing another 9/11 type incident, rather than preventing such a thing.
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