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Sunday, January 15, 2006

WaPo Bats 1000



I love seeing Ralph Reed tied to Jack Abramoff in print, really I do. And today's WaPo includes this delightful quote:
Similarly damaging has been a torrent of e-mails revealed during the investigation that shows a side of Reed that some former supporters say cannot be reconciled with his professed Christian values.

"After reading the e-mail, it became pretty obvious he was putting money before God," said Phil Dacosta, a Georgia Christian Coalition member who had initially backed Reed. "We are righteously casting him out."
But would someone like to explain to me how it's possible to do a three page article on Reed's ties to Abramoff and never once mention what exactly Reed did for Abramoff that made him worth millions?

It's really quite simple. Reed had the fundies in his hip pocket and he used them to bang the anti-gambling morality drum so loudly that then-Texas AG, now US Senator John Cornyn shut down the casinos who were competing with those run by Abramoff's clients. In a series of emails he also took credit for "choreographing" Cornyn. That's not complicated. It's a fucking paragraph.

Cornyn is Rove's hand-picked boy and he continues to get an inexplicable free pass on this from the press. He accused Reed of being a liar last week on Meet the Press. It really does not take a great deal of intelligence to see that this is going to be at the heart of any quid-pro-quo Reed controversy, and any journalist has to be either remarkably stupid or remarkably craven to fill up three pages without even alluding to it.

As neokneme said in the comments, "the WaPo would be alot more useful if it were printed on hemp."

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