Too Absent Herald

*NB

Ralph Reed… Ralph Reed couldn’t get elected Lt. Governor of Georgia.

“… and the angels sing…”
At least “the better angels.”

There is a wonderfully thorough piece in GQ, of all places. It details Ralph’s “story” as well as detailing Jack Abramoff’s major discretions.

Regarding Reed, who had planned on being “installed” rather than elected Lt Governor (which would have led to a Pres run in 2012 [swallow that!]). Instead he’s out on his ass. Here’s the narrative with regards to the Indian Casinos:

Abramoff’s most lucrative racket, the one that earned him the nickname “Casino Jack,” was representing Indian tribes with gambling interests, either in closing down competing casinos or in expanding their own operations. Also, he and his partner, Michael Scanlon, swindled those tribes with inflated invoices, which might explain why Abramoff referred to his clients in e-mails as “fucking morons,” “monkeys,” and, once, “mofos [who] are the stupidest idiots in the land for sure.” Total take: $65 million, minimum.

Reed was brought in to get his contacts on the Christian Right to vote against a Casino. The problem is that the motivation for this was to protect another Casino. They were stealing from both sides.

The richness of the story is to see how the people that speak for the “moralists” actually think of their so-called constituency:

Simply put, Abramoff crony Scanlon wrote in an e-mail to one of the Coushattas’ lawyers, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. The wackos get their information [from] the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet, and telephone.

And that’s what Reed was paid to do: froth up the wackos on behalf of the morons and the monkeys.

Really brilliant.

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*Why isn’t this about writing or pictures? —

This is what’s nice about the internet, to me:

I got a new “theme” or layout for the site. It’s called Hemingway and it was designed, I think, with a better focus on reading (thanks, Kyle).

So I get that going, and I of course want to tweak it a bit. This involves joining the “Discussion Forums” for said new Theme (thanks again, Kyle).

From there I find others who also use this theme. One of whose sites is [this savage art]. And he just happens to have links to screenwriting sites all over the place, which I have been deeply enjoying.

I don’t want to write so much about political things anymore. It’s just too miserable, frankly. I’ll be talking about things as the elections approach (especially RE: Dog-boy Santorum). But for now, I’m keeping my eyes on the walls of the cave.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 2:03 pm and is filed under the small stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.