Steve LaTourette used to be a congressman from Ohio who was closely aligned with Speaker John Boehner. Now he runs a Super PAC called “Defending Main Street” that tries to serve the Chamber of Commerce’s interests against the nihilists in the Tea Party who don’t even want to maintain our roads and bridges. As part of that gig, he writes articles (see, e.g., Politico). Despite taking money from people to do something that he can’t actually do (beat back the nut-jobs) he has decided to divide the GOP into two factions, one of which he disapprovingly labels “the grifters.”
Historically, grifters have taken many shapes. They were the snake-oil salesmen who rolled into town promising a magical, cure-all elixir at a price. The grifter was long gone by the time people discovered the magical elixir was no more magical than water. They were the sideshow con men offering fantastic prizes in games that were rigged so that no one could actually win them. They were the Ponzi scheme operators who got rich promising fantastically high investment returns but returning nothing for those sorry investors at the bottom of the pyramid.
Over the last few years we have seen the rise of a new grifter—the political grifter. And the most important battle being waged today isn’t the one about which party controls the House or the Senate, it’s about who controls the Republican Party: the grifting wing or the governing wing.
Today’s political grifters are a lot like the grifters of old—lining their pockets with the hard-earned money of working men and women be promising things in return that they know they can’t deliver.
There are distinctions between the swindlers in the Republican Party, that is true. There’s a difference between the paranoid ramblings of Michele Bachmann, Steve King, and Louie Gohmert and the fundamentalist stylings of real thieves like K Street Project organizer Rick Santorum and U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce Freedom Support Award winner Sam Brownback. The first group acts crazy and gets a bunch of small donations. The latter group acts like pious little brats while they’re lining their pockets with massive corporate donations, if not outright bribes. But, it’s okay, because they’re more religious than you are.
They’re all grifters.
Government spending is where they seem to differ, with the first group looking to cash in by not spending federal cash and the latter group looking to direct that cash into private sector entities that reward them with big donations and lucrative second careers. But the record shows, both under Reagan and under the latter Bush, that the GOP deficit spends like mad when they have the power to control where that spending goes. Will the next time be any different?
Not if Steve LaTourette and his benefactors have anything to say about it.
And, yet, the traditional Republican type of grift, where you decry federal spending until the moment you actually control it, is vastly preferable to the new kind of grift which is based on paranoia and a more virulent kind of racism.
I’d tell you to pick your poison, but you don’t get to decide.
Let’s connect the dots.
When the grift is to take public office in order to “direct that [public] cash to private entities,” that is called corruption.
Corruption is, it seems, a word that is either too over-used or cliched to the point that no one in public discourse uses it.
It needs to be the sharp point of the investigative wedge.
I don’t think it’s necessarily corruption.
If I want federal money to be directed to cleaning up SUPERFUND sites and improving nutrition in our public schools, that doesn’t make me corrupt if I get elected and steer more money that way. This is still true even if environmental and child advocacy groups have given me donations because they support my priorities.
I don’t expect politicians or political parties not to reward the coalitions that back them financially, and I think it only becomes corrupt when you choose to, say, grant a child nutrition contract to one group over another because you got paid to make that decision.
There is a difference between taking union money and voting for pro-union legislation or taking money from businesses and voting for anti-union legislation, and engaging in illegal quid pro quo behavior.
Also, in my experience, government actually works best when there is a low-grade kind of corruption to it rather when we try to get too puritanical about it. So, for example, earmarks were always kind of a semi-corrupt kind of procedure but they greased the wheels of government and made it much easier for folks to work across the aisle. You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours. That actually works better than eliminated all earmarks.
Similarly, big city machines are notorious for things like patronage jobs for your deadbeat cousin. But, in the big picture, those machines may have been horribly inefficient and nakedly corrupt, but they did a really good job serving our immigrant populations and integrating them into our economy and our political culture. Things are not simple, and giving your deadbeat cousin a job doing nothing at the sanitation department keeps him out of trouble and off the dole.
I prefer good government, but I’m not utopian about it.
When it gets corrupt is financially rewarding those group directly or indirectly just because they backed you financially. Especially when those groups load their executive suites with expensive overhead and seek to turn everything they do into a non-profit self-financing profit center to the neglect of their mission. Classic examples: the post Liddy Dole Red Cross. AARP.
I agree, but that’s not what I was trying to say.
To be clear: when a politician believes that only private (usually corporate) entities are the only ones capable of doing anything in the economy, then this lack of an essential belief in the government’s ability to accomplish anything leads to public money getting diverted.
I don’t mean a politician that wants to fix roads and bridges and then procures money for construction companies to do this work (unless we have straight-up crony corruption). I’m talking about structural diversion based on ideology.
But worse is the fundamental notion by most of today’s GOP that government is illegitimate and private business/industry is always legitimate. What this gets us is no governing except in order to keep the rich from having to participate in civil society. AKA: low or no taxes and low or no regulation.
If Nate Silver is to be believed the grifters will control both chambers next year. At that point they could just outright rob the place blind.
Nate is hedging a lot, and he’s also making every assumption (where he is not confident on the data) in favor of the GOP.
So, Begich is up, but he doesn’t believe it. Hagan is up, but he doesn’t believe it. The only decent poll has Pryor up, but he doesn’t believe it. Landrieu is up, but he predicts that she will lose anyway.
Now, we all know Nate is very good at what he does, but he’s making a lot of assumptions right now. Partly that’s because the data is thin and often of poor quality. But what Nate’s good at is sorting good from bad data, and until he has more samples, his predictions are not high quality.
I don’t believe anything before Labor Day. Nothing of importance happens now. The campaigns will begin in earnest on Sept 7, and by Sept 15, the narratives will mostly be written, and to a large extent the die cast.
It seems to me that Nate is expecting that people will vote party ID. That’s certainly going to happen, but to what extent? Absent other information, that’s a very reliable indicator this far out. However, party ID is less important when an incumbent is involved.
He went to Washington on a family-values platform. He had a wife and 4 kids in OH. He didn’t move them to Washington. He got involved with a lobbyist, and divorced his wife.
What a low-life piece of crap. I don’t care about the infidelity. Happens all the time. The divorce is and was a huge failure of his personal and ethical makeup.
A sign that the Palin grift is running out of steam:
The almost a virgin and once teen single mother, Bristol Palin’s earnings power plummeted to zero almost two years ago. Guessing her contract preaching virginity to teens wasn’t renewed and the novelty of watching her shake her booty in a dance contest hit its expiration date.
Mama’s gonna have to hire her to reprise the failed Life’s a Tripp for her new web-TV channel for the nanosecond it will be around.
Does Mr. LaTourette favor us with a list of names of those he considers to be political grifters? Or is he just satisfied with creating a definition, and leave it to his readers to decide who he might be slagging on?
In which case, I’ll go (once again) the Doyle Lonegan route and observe that not only is LaTourette a cheat, but he’s a gutless cheat as well.
When it comes to grifters, it’s hard to beat Pat Robertson and his multi-billion-dollar religio-educational-political empire. And he sucked in a little campaign cash a few times to finance it. But mostly he cons elderly ladies with money who watch religious programs on the TV.
And does gold mining deals with scum like Charles Taylor.