John Laesch Lost It.

* john laesch joined FDL for a chat. the sugestion over there is that Hastert will soon resign and there'll be a special election.

Which reminds me of this conversation at DKOS last week (via miguel):

DocGonzo:

"If John Laesch, the Democrat who "challenged" Hastert for the IL seat, had told his constituents about how Hastert worked for Turkish Qaeda drug dealer bribes, Hastert would probably have lost. Instead, Laesch relied on the Foley story in Florida to hand him a seat in Illinois. And he failed.

Now we have to watch Hastert either occupy a few chairs in the House, or hand off to some other Republican stooge who couldn't get elected, unless maybe they ran against Laesch. And Hastert will get away with his crimes, including working for our Qaeda enemies."

Len Larga:

"Sibel has pointed at Turkish involvement with Bin Laden, pre-9/11, and at Turkish corruption of U.S. officials dating back to 1997, but I think it would be overblown to call them "Qaeda bribes".

I don't agree with the decisions Laesch and n0madic made not to at least make a public call for Hastert to release all his campaign records to disprove the charge. I believe when you are running an unknown candidate against the Speaker of the House, you have to use every possible weapon in your arsenal.

But I think what's really going on here is that Laesch was afraid of endangering any future aspirations to public office by being labeled a 'conspiracy monger'."

DocGonzo:

"The Turkish bribers are said to be drug dealers who fund the Qaeda. If I were running against Hastert, I'd use any chance to call him "Qaeda" that legitimately could. Since the Qaeda is a network of terrorists, not a country or even a single group, Hastert is legitimately Qaeda himself, if he either took those bribes or changed his policy to their request, since he's just another node in their network.

If people aren't going to investigate conspiracies when there's witnesses/evidence, and the stakes are this high (Speaker seat and its partnership with our enemies), of course many more conspiracies will run rampant. The "coincidence theories" that merely deny the real conspiracies are the best defense of the conspiracies, and the widest complicity.

It's not like we're talking about UFOs, or even who killed JFK. If an intel operative gets gagged, but says she heard live conspiracies by foreigners to bribe the Speaker with drug money as campaign contributions shared with Qaeda operations, and that there's tapes, then certainly an investigation is warranted. And when Democrats with a stake in the investigation finding the truth cry "conspiracy theory", then they're acting suspiciously. If they lose the election without some other position of power, then they look really suspect. They look complicit in the coverup of the Qaeda network.

It might not make me popular, or help my future aspirations to public office, but I'd say that such complicity makes them part of the Qaeda network. If you understand such decentralized "movement" networks, you understand that there are degrees of "membership" that don't even require the members to know their status. Patsies are useful members. If bin Laden was actually right about the 9/11/2001 hijackers not knowing they were really suicide bombers until the last minute, then those patsies are some of the most important parts of the Qaeda network.

We're all in it together. And my job is just to push for people to do the right thing when we can. For that, I got patronized by Laesch's campaign, disappointed, and now called "crazy". Taking their criticism from where it comes, losers who squandered the truth, it doesn't bother me much. My conscience is clear, and my strength unflagged."

LenLarga:

"You Are Correct If The Qaeda-Turkish Connections are true. And I believe they are. However, the Vanity Fair article does not mention the Turkey, al Qaeda connection, so it becomes more convuluted and difficult to draw a line from the money Hastert received to al Qaeda drug money. And then you get into the debate as to who and what is al Qaeda.

I think what Laesch should have done is publicly call for Hastert to fully disclose his small-time contributors, and disclose any relationship he had with Turkish groups/Turkish officials. When Hastert stonewalled, Laesch could have started pounding him on it "what are you hiding"?

In other words, Laesch didn't have to accuse Hastert of anything. He should have demanded, however, that Hastert release the records that would "put the voters minds at ease".

I strongly disagree with n0madic on this. But I was not working on the campaign, so it was not my call to make."

n0madic:

"As long as all you've got is the testimony of Sibyl Edmonds to tie Hastert into this claim of yours, Doc, you have nothing but an intriguing possibility, at best. No serious candidate could possibly make the charges you take for granted as true without having hard evidence to back them up. And the fact that you keep attacking Laesch for failing to promote your tale of "how Hastert worked for Turkish Qaeda drug dealer bribes" when you don't have anything but hearsay and speculation to offer yourself suggests you've never given a damn one way or the other about whether he won or not. All you've ever cared about is whether somebody would promote your conspiracy theory. If you've got the goods on Hastert, please share. I'm sure we would all love it if you were proven right. But if all you've got is more hot air about these alleged Turkish bribes, don't blame Laesch for failing to see the wisdom of your campaign strategy. Nobody in their right mind would take your advice."

DocGonzo:

"It wasn't just a "conspiracy theory" when Laesch personally assured me he would get to it.

I certainly do care more about exposing that conspiracy than I do about Laesch winning. Or about Hastert getting taken down, though that's a pretty big one. If Laesch had been true to his word, we would have had all three.

The better question is why you're so complacent that you'll dismiss Sibel Edmonds' story and the evidence corroborating her as a "conspiracy theory".

You know, the mere assertions that people with evidence of serious conspiracies among the people who conspire daily to work against the country are "crazy" is really unacceptable. All you've got is pure denial. To support your coincidence theories. Which protect the conspirators. Pretty poor work, if you're not getting paid the way they are."

LenLarga:

" It's Not A 'Conspiracy Theory'

It's quite simple allegation-bribery of a public official by foreign nationals.

No hard evidence exists to say the payoffs actually took place, but evidence does exist that Hastert was less than forthcoming in releasing his campaign records to disprove the charges.

But here's the sticking point, if Hastert was actually bribed, he was bribed to support the Clinton Administration's policy on Turkey. And I think this, more than anything else, is why the Democrats don't want to go after Denny Hastert on these bribery allegations."

JohnLaesch:

"Doc,

Hey Sibel is gagged

I called Sibel and she can't speak out and expose the truth.

The good news is that we have a Democratic Congress that can investigate these claims and listen to those tapes.

That will be progress."

DocGonzo:

"She's gagged, but you weren't. Now you'll be ignored.

You know, I wouldn't feel as disappointed by you if you and your campaign staff hadn't told me on DKos, in public, that you'd get to it. "If/when the Foley noise dies down". It did. You had your chance to tell what you do know, and create legitimate (further) doubt of Hastert's integrity on an issue more substantial than his Foley coverup. But you didn't. And you lost.

Your own .sig says "Why yes, yes I am running against the Speaker of the House :)". So I expected you to campaign on more of those national issues, like Hastert's work on Abramoff's criminal conspiracies. And his likely Qaeda connections. But you didn't. So I find that little smiley at the end of your .sig to be out of line.

Good luck. You'll have more chances to help investigate Hastert if he stays in his seat. If he resigns, and your governor appoints you his replacement, you'll have even more power. We'll see if you in fact complete the duty you swore as an intel professional, and owed as a candidate. So far, all I can do is keep waiting for another "accountability moment"."

n0madic:

"I would love for Sibel's story to check out. Nothing would make me happier. And I know Laesch's campaign looked into it because I'm the guy in the campaign who did the looking. Nobody--NOBODY--presented us with ANY "evidence" to back up what Sibel heard discussed on the FBI surveillance tapes. Assertions were presented as fact by a couple of people who wanted the campaign to jump on this issue, but nothing remotely resembling evidence that a bribe actually took place was ever produced. Sibel herself was cc:ed on the correspondence. And an underfunded, understaffed insurgent campaign in a gerrymandered Republican district against a ten-term incumbent, who also just happens to be the sitting Speaker of the House, can't afford the luxury of devoting resources to doing for you what you can't seem to do yourself, namely, produce evidence. Even if it turns out one day that you were right all along, at the time there was nothing solid enough for a candidate to base an accusation on, and no reason to believe anything solid was likely to turn up in the immediate future, so we moved on. I wish there would have been enough hours in the day for us to endlessly investigate every interesting story we heard that could have made a difference in the campaign, but there wasn't. There never is.

I haven't denied the bribe happened; I don't know whether it happened or not. And I'm not asserting that "people with evidence" are crazy. What I'm asserting is that you don't have any evidence it happened. None. At. All. Not even the Vanity Fair article said Sibel had evidence the bribe actually happened. The article said she heard people make claims that Hastert had been bribed. That's all I need to know to want to know more, but not even those tapes are evidence it happened, and Sibel's assertions alone, without any more than that to go on, are simply not the kind of thing a candidate can run on. If you can't see that, then there's no reasoning with you. If you have evidence that Hastert was bribed, go public with it! Otherwise, you have no credibility. And it doesn't help to keep suggesting that anyone who won't buy into your obsession with this story is on the take. It just makes you sound like a crackpot, and what's worse, it undermines Sibel's chances of ever getting a fair hearing."

DocGonzo:

"You could have gotten local news to cover the fact that Edmonds is gagged. You could have gotten them to cover the status of the FBI tapes.

You're not trying those bribes in a court of law. You're trying them in the court of public opinion. Since all you have for certain is credible allegations of Hastert taking bribes, the record of his receipt of the many anonymous small donations, and the likely existence of the tapes in FBI custody, that's all you have to claim. It's enough to make an election issue. Especially when the target is discredited for covering up Foley, but people have stopped talking about Foley. And when there are so many other stories of directly related Hastert corruption, like riding herd on Abramoff's "Conservative paradise" in Saipan.

It's no "obsession", it's just a priority for me. Whenever I saw Laesch poke out his head into DKos, of course the first thing I thought was "what about exposing Hastert/Qaeda"? And therefore I posted. When I got reassurances from your campaign that you'd get to it, I deprioritized it. Then, when the end approached, and it slipped away - even though you were headed to certain defeat - of course I reprioritized it.

So I'm not impressed by your saying I'm "obsessed", or a "crackpot", or what is my credibility. I'm talking to someone with legitimate campaign gold who squandered it, and with it the chance to bring justice to an essential issue of national security. You're talking to someone who cares about the truth. Your selfserving opinion doesn't mean that much to me, when you use it to baselessly insult me while losing the election, and the truth."

(i don't know who DocGonzo is)