You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

The one magazine I still get on paper is Harper’s. It’s a consistently good read, in no small part due to the regular monthly essays by Lewis Lapham. This month, he’s got an extended piece titled The Case For Impeachment: Why We Can No Longer Afford George W. Bush. They’ve published a fairly extended excerpt on the web. It’s well worth the time spent reading it.

If you think that’s good, there’s another terrific piece on the implications of torture on a liberal (in the Lockean sense) society and a short story by T. Corasseghian Boyle. Oh, and the Index.

Today, with all three components of the “axis of evil” — Iraq, Iran, North Korea — more dangerous than they were when that phrase was coined in 2002, the country would welcome, and Iraq’s political class needs to hear, as a glimpse into the abyss, presidential words as realistic as those Britain heard on June 4, 1940.

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Tom Lyons of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune isn’t a happy camper. Why? Let him say it:

Let’s not make this fuzzy: U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris lied.

Rep. Harris took $34K in campaign contributions from MZM, Inc. Mitchell Wade was its CEO. That would be the same Mitchell Wade who has pled guilty to bribing one Congressman and making illegal contributions to two others, helpfully identified in the plea agreement as “Representative A” and “Representative B”. Kind of gives it that Seussian feel, doesn’t it? Harris is “Representative B”.

Apparently she told Mr. Lyons that she had “no idea” what MZM expected to get for the bundles (literally – stacks of $2,000 checks ostensibly from MZM employees) of money being handed to her from a company that has no operations in the whole state of Florida, let alone in her district. Well, it turns out there’s a wee bit of a problem with that. Here’s Lyons with the scoop:

MZM CEO Wade’s plea agreement tells us that he eventually told Harris — referred to only as “Representative B” in the court document — exactly what MZM wanted from her.

Wade, the man who handed her a bundle of $2,000 checks, within the year took our Representative B to dinner at a Washington, D.C., restaurant, Citronelle, and asked her to help the company get a defense contract. It involved work in Navy counterintelligence.

Harris dutifully carried his funding proposal to colleagues in Congress, no matter that she knew little about the proposal or whether MZM could deliver anything of value to the nation.

Let’s be clear: Harris says she didn’t know that the contributions were illegal, and it’s unlikely that could be proven false in a court of law. Though she does have a record of, shall we say, a pronounced ability to believe in the unbridled generosity of people who want to give her money. And, of course, we must remember that this is completely unlike any of the other Republican scandals, each one a complete departure from the norm. Certainly there’s no pattern of misbehavior on the part of Republican officials. It’s just that the majority of them make the few honest ones look bad.

Zogby and Lemoyne College have done a poll of 944 service members currently serving in Iraq. The question: “How long should U.S. troops stay in Iraq?� The answers:

• 23% said “as long as necessary”.
• 72% said US troops should be pulled out within one year.
• of those, 29% said they should “withdraw immediately”

USA Today quickie about Scottie McLyingbastard saying that Democrats should be after the leaker, not the administration, on the NSA wiretapping business. But what did my heart good was reading the comments blasting the administration for ignoring the law over and over again. People are finally beginning to catch on.

Remember the remarks by the Deputy SecDef that opposition to the Dubai Ports deal was giving “aid and comfort to the enemy”? Guess they’re no longer operational. Karl Rove now says that “lawmakers’ concerns about the deal were legitimate and that a short delay of the transaction, which is due to close on March 2, would give Congress time to be briefed fully.”