A Guide to Some of the Sleaziest Creatures inhabiting the Washington Swamp
Part I
Lee Atwater and Protegee Karl Rove- inseparable teacher and student, both well known for race baiting, blackmail, illegal White House communications and their generalized sociopathic approach toward politics. Rove was involved in the purposeful destruction of more than 5 million illegal emails transmitted between himself and the White House in defiance of a U.S. Justice Department order to produce them. Later, he ducked a Congressional Committee subpoena to appear regarding the framing of innocent political foes by blackmailing the committee chairman’s wife. The failure to prosecute Rove and George W. Bush for the destruction of millions of illegal emails was almost certainly the basis for FBI Director Comey’s carefully worded statement that he did not believe that any prosecutor would go after Hillary for destroying a relatively few hundred emails.
It was during the 2000 South Carolina Republican presidential primaries that Rove showed his true colors, using his beloved mentor, Atwater’s slimiest techniques. Under the auspices of his boss, “W,” he arranged for his henchman to infiltrate McCain’s rallies shouting racial epithets and accusing McCain of being a “N---er lover,” of sleeping with “N---er prostitutes,” and of fathering a “N---er baby.” All of Rove’s and Bush inspired rhetoric was based on McCain’s adoption of a beautiful baby from Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh.
Later, in 2006, Rove, with the help of his partner, William Canary, Canary’s wife, Alabama federal prosecutor and designated legal lady of the night, “his girl,” Leura Canary, in a bogus case brought before disgraced wife beater and chairmen of Siegelman’s gubernatorial opponent’s campaign, Judge Fuller, managed to frame Democratic ex Governor Don Siegelman for Honest Service Statute violation, bribery, and other bogus charges. Never mind that previous bogus charges brought by another member of William Canary’s legal brothel, Alice Martin, had been laughed out of court by legitimate Federal District Court Judge U.W. Clemon who called it “the most unfounded criminal case which I presided in my entire judicial career.”
Ken Blackwell- ex Ohio Secretary of State and Ohio Republican Party Chairman was found to have used his own company’s doctored voting machines in the “Middle Man” scheme to divert results to intermediate servers, falsifying actual Ohio vote counts in the 2004 presidential election. Along with Karl Rove and Republican National Committee intelligence technology expert Michael Connell, he was under investigation for the manipulation of the election. The investigation was eventually abandoned with Connell’s convenient “accidental” airplane crash in 2010. Blackwell, like Rove, skated on both counts, the fixed election and the possible murder of Connell, with the suppression of the airplane crash investigation. The crash site was examined in the dark of night and the investigation terminated, apparently, before daylight. Connell’s blackberry was found “missing” from the bag in which his wife claimed that he always kept it. She also claimed that her husband kept all of his important information in the device.
Leading up to the crash, Connell had received death threats from unknown sources. He had also received threats of lesser “blackmail” type from Karl Rove, threats to his family, which were reported and apparently ignored by Michael Mukasey, Bush’s attorney general. The entire case was apparently swept under the rug by our next reptilian.
Eric Holder- Mr. Holder, sometimes referred to as “Uncle Tom Holder,” is probably as enigmatic a subject for Democrats as Karl Rove is for Republicans, but for different reasons. In Rove’s case, he continues to participate in blatant criminal activities and through “friends in high places” and blackmail has consistently escaped prosecution. Holder has apparently escaped by playing both sides of the fence. All through the Clinton administration Holder had been accepting a 2 million dollar a year salary from a Republican law firm, in fact the same firm that ended up defending President Bush in the 2000 presidential election recount, a clear conflict of interest which could potentially have cost him some 16 million dollars in returned salary.
What made the situation even slimier, however, was the fact that Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Election Supervisor Katherine Harris had committed a Rovian crime by arbitrarily transferring the names of some 10,000 innocent, mostly black voters onto the roll of felons in order to deliberately rob them of the right to vote. In the meantime, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno had to resign due to illness with Assistant Attorney General Eric Holder replacing her. Holder, afraid that he would forfeit 16 million dollars in salary, conveniently neglected to pursue any case against fellow reptilians Bush and Harris, even though he served for months into the Bush presidency. Later, Holder tried to divert attention from the issue by stressing the need to let ex-felons vote.
Indeed, it’s been said that Holder never seemed to prosecute anyone who was guilty or defend anybody that was innocent. His most famous private case was that of defending a major drug company that had been producing extra Oxycodone that was sold on the black market. Meanwhile, bragging that they were going after physicians, under his supervision as Assistant Attorney General, his henchmen framed multiple physicians for Medicare fraud, while giving laboratories special treatment in trade for false testimony. As Attorney General, his minions defended the framing of innocent defendants by police and prosecutors, even for murder, as well as going out of their way to justify many of Karl Roves bogus political prosecutions.
Scott Pruitt- This serpentine creature, recently appointed to head the deconstruction of the EPA as well as the environment itself, lacks the intellectual capacity of a Karl Rove or an Eric Holder.
Owned body and soul by the oil and gas as well as the banking industry, his actions have always been crude, obvious and not too bright. After California Republicans had proposed a really stupid voting initiative inadvertently conceding that Gays had the right to marry but that voters could deprive them of that right, the Supreme Court ruled that Gay marriage was now officially legal. Despite the obvious ruling, Oklahoma Attorney General Pruitt authorized the same initiative for voters in his state. After the same decision by the Court, to verify his incompetence, he authorized a wasted “one man, one woman” marriage bill. When that failed, he even considered a bill abolishing all marriage!
Pruitt, too intellectually deprived to write his own letters, had energy companies write letters for him, sending the letters to government agencies on his office stationery. Most observers believe that Pruitt is a freak of nature, passing the Bar Exam and becoming an attorney without knowing how to read and write! In fact, this may be the reason that Pruitt didn’t know that China and India had signed the Paris Climate Agreement or that the agreement could save potentially trillions of dollars world wide. Obviously, someone on his staff forgot to read the message to him. Also, he remains confused on the effects of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its detrimental effects on climate change and therefore must be in constant contact with oil companies whom he depends on to explain scientific “facts” to him while he is sleeping.
Paul Manafort- This creature, along with partners Roger Stone and Lee Atwater has been a lobbyist for many of the worst international dictators, from Eastern Europe to Africa. He and his associates have represented Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs as well as developing propaganda programs designed to endear foreign dictatorships to the U.S. government. For a five month period, Manafort was chairman of the Trump Campaign, but resigned as soon as the news media began to report his sordid relationship with international criminals.
Roger Stone- Stone, who professes to have repented from his “evil” past, none the less, may have been the inadvertent source of an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible involvement with the Russian government. In what he claimed was a “two martini tweet,” he bragged that he had been in touch with Mr. Assange and Wikileaks. He has since denied the veracity of the tweet.
Tom DeLay- see Tom DeLay’s Hard Drive, Sam Tanehaus, July, 2004 (Vanity Fair)- There is virtually no data available to confirm that DeLay is actually human. A really durable, sociopathic specimen, he seems to be half dragon and half horse (obviously the back half). DeLay and fellow “Ratf**ker”Karl Rove (see Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal American Democracy, David Daley, 2016), Karl are the pioneers of modern gerrymandering technology, the creation of artificial voting districts designed to win a majority of House congressional seats with only a minority of votes. In addition to this, DeLay is responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars in overpayments by Part D of Medicare. With the help of fellow Texas congressman, Billy Tauzin, in 2003 he criminally extorted enough votes from House and Senate members to pass a reconciliation bill depriving seniors of the right to negotiate fair prices for pharmaceuticals. He was eventually convicted of accepting illicit campaign donations but the conviction was later reversed on appeal. Meanwhile, the Justice Department lost interest and never did indict him for illicit dealings with the infamous Jack Abramoff involving fraudulent labor practices in the Marianas. To this day he claims that we are better off without any national healthcare plan, that things were fine in the old days when he still had his hand in the till and hundreds of thousands of his victims were going bankrupt due to catastrophic medical bills.
Billy Tauzin- see article: The Legacy of Billy Tauzin, Paul Blumenthal, Feb. 12, 2010- I don’t really know if Tauzin qualifies as a “swamp creature.” It depends into which category one places a “bacterium.” I guess we ought to call him a “micro-swamp organism.” Half of the hundreds of billions in overpayments due to Medicare Part D are courtesy of Tauzin, who, while arranging for the pharmaceutical lobby to finish writing the fraudulent Part D bill, was also negotiating his contract to become the next president of the lobby. The U.S. Justice Cartel never bothered to prosecute Tauzin for Honest Service violations or the lobby for bribery.
Bill and Hillary Clinton- To be fair, other Democratic swamp creatures have been known to pollute the Washington swamp, but only the Clintons can compare in intellect, talent, and elusiveness to the likes of Karl Rove, Tom Delay or Ken Blackwell. While Bill, who, despite so many of his accusers meeting coincidentally untimely ends, despite a past strewn with who knows how many women he has abused and demeaned, most paid off or coerced to drop charges against him, and having expedited generous “gifts” of our high technology to the Chinese, continues to wreak havoc on both parties qualifies as some creature from the deep lagoon, Hillary’s “sins” hardly rate a passing grade on the swamp creature scale, maybe a “C” at most. That is, compared to the menagerie above. The Clinton Foundation is currently under investigation for influence peddling and misuse of donations and in the final analysis will be the true measure of the extent to which both of its founders have polluted the Washington swamp.
I’ve saved perhaps the slimiest creature in the Washington sewage system for last because he, like a spoiled brat or a cute pet, has always been protected by his colleagues and virtually all the major segments of government. Clarence Thomas skated past a corrupt Senate committee investigation, open Senate hearings, and a Senate vote despite extensive testimony alleging his repeated sexual misconduct against his assistant. Not only were charges purposely ignored, but a deliberate attempt was made by Senate members to slander his accuser.
Lacking the intellectual capacity to legitimately sit on the Supreme Court, Thomas seldom seems to make cogent legal decisions and seems generally unable to author meaningful opinions of his own. His diminished capacity is evident in the fact that while his wife is a Republican lobbyist receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying for issues on which her husband rules, Thomas can see no reason why he should recuse himself on these issues, nor did he find it necessary to even declare to the Court the illicit income he had received through his wife’s efforts. His clear incompetence as well as his violation of the Honest Services Statute has consistently been ignored by the Republican as well as Democratic House swamp organism leadership as well as the U.S. Justice Cartel and four presidents. His continued dishonesty does not exactly lend credence to his original denials of sexual misconduct during his Senate hearings. His continued presence on the Supreme Court and the absence of indictment or impeachment proceedings against him or even a threat of disbarment attest not only to Thomas’s actual phylum, genus and species, but to the true depth of bipartisan depravity that exists in the Washington swamp.
To be continued... Too many creatures and too many questions, for example:
-Steve Bannon- Has he been in Washington pond scum long enough to consider it as home?
-Should “W” supplant Clarence Thomas as the slimiest of the swamp creatures?
-Where does Dick Cheney rank?
-Considering Barack Obama’s protection of his friend “W’s” sadistic “Justice” Department policies and his appointment of Eric Holder as AG, where does he rank on the swamp scale?
-Many other candidates are eligible for membership in the “Swamp Club,” and any suggestions , along with suitable resumes are certainly welcome!
Allen Finkelstein, 3/29/17