As an assistant
to President Reagan, I met Abramoff when he was a fresh, brash,
smart, energetic man anxious to aid the anti-Communist causes
in Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua. But the Jack Abramoff who
walked out of federal court after pleading guilty to felonies
that can put him away for a decade looked like a Mafia don with
nothing more on his mind than letting out the contracts on those
who had sent him there.
While Abramoff
is being painted as the embodiment of evil, he is only an exaggerated
example of what Washington has become, a souk where the
U.S. government is bought and sold at auction.
Bribery
is hard to prove, so the body count of legislators who fall beneath
a prosecutor's sword may be few. But careers will be cut short
and reputations ravaged, most of them deservedly so.
For unlike
the NSA eavesdropping charges against President Bush, congressmen
who turned tricks for favors received cannot say they acted to
protect the national security. Unlike the "Scooter"
Libby affair, this is a scandal Middle America can understand
and one that will cause even tired blood to boil.
Saturday,
Jeffrey Smith of The Washington Post reported that a
"public advocacy group," the U.S. Family Network, with
ties to Tom DeLay, took in $1 million from a now-defunct London
law firm whose partners have had a memory loss as to who gave
them the check.
One of the
operators of U.S. Family Network, an ex-chief of staff to DeLay,
reportedly says the signers of the check were a pair of Russian
oil executives with ties to Abramoff. After the check landed,
DeLay led the charge to reimburse the IMF for a bailout of Russia,
an unfamiliar front for a right-wing Texas Republican to be fighting
on.
DeLay denies
a connection. Fine. But the agenda of the Family Network was to
advance "moral fitness." Yet, it received a check for
$500,000 from the owners of textile companies operating in the
Marianas and $250,000 from Choctaw Indians in Mississippi, two
big Abramoff clients. And DeLay turned up in the vanguard of the
fight to defend the right of the textile boys not to raise the
peon wages of their workers and in the battle to prevent U.S.
taxation of the gambling income of the Choctaws.
DeLay denies
any link between the fat contributions and his official actions.
But such stories are going to be pouring out of the prosecutor's
offices, and the stench in this city will be detectable by even
insensitive nostrils far, far away from Washington, D.C.
For what
the Abramoff story is all about is the pandemic and endemic corruption
of an imperial capital that spends one in every five dollars of
an economy of $12.5 trillion and holds the power to reward, punish,
tax and destroy. Honey attracts flies.
To influence
the 535 members who decide where the trillions are spent and how
the power is used, 35,000 lobbyists prowl the halls of the Senate
and House office buildings and Capitol. Former Cabinet and sub-Cabinet
officers, congressional representatives, senators, White House
aides and congressional staffers endlessly work ex-colleagues
to influence decisions on behalf of clients. No company is too
corrupt, and no regime has so unsavory a reputation on human rights,
that it cannot find, for a fat-enough fee, a famous friend at
court.
What Abramoff
dispensed -- skybox tickets to Redskin games, trips to St. Andrew's
for golf, junkets, steak dinners at Signature's and the directed
contribution of tens of millions in campaign cash to friends who
did his bidding -- will be revealed. This nervous town knows it.
Already, from the White House to the Capitol, a bipartisan stampede
is underway to return, with appropriate indignation, any contribution
that can be traced back to Jack and his Indians.
Democrats
call it a Republican scandal redolent of a "culture of corruption."
Republicans note how many good liberal Democrats also got perks,
gifts and campaign contributions.
Prosecutors
will investigate and leak. Journalists will expose and editorialize.
Pundits will pontificate. Politicians, survival at stake, will
rat one another out. This is a case where self-interest and an
instinct to survive will work to cleanse and cauterize the infection
before another is discovered, as it surely will be, for the virus
of corruption is ineradicable from the capitals of decadent and
declining empires.
Abramoff
is a curable symptom. Abramoff is not the disease from which the
republic is dying.
