Noteworthy corruption among Democrats :
Many people say, G.O.P. corruption is no worse than Democratic corruption. ( "They're all corrupt." ) I challenge anybody to direct me to anything remotely similar to the catalogue of Republican corruption above. Here's a list to get such challengers started. It's very short, because liberal Democrats are nowhere near as corrupt as conservative Republicans.
We all know the $ 60 million dollar campaign to catalogue Clinton's supposed crimes which revealed nothing but a public lie about sexual conduct between consenting adults, which was not even criminal, but only embarrassing.
Former House Ways and Means Chairman, Dan Rostenkowski, lost his seat in Congress and was sent to prison for abusing of the House Post Office by turning in postage vouchers he had not used for Congressional mailings into cash. An investigation revealed that Rostenkowski received $27,425 for postal vouchers from 1986 to 1991. This was not the first infraction for Congressman Rostenkowski. He had previously been required to reimburse the government for $82,000 worth of personal office supplies that he paid for with taxpayer money.
First African-American judge appointed to Florida (appointed by Jimmy Carter to the Southern District of Florida in 1979), Alcee Hastings was impeached and removed from office in 1989 - two counts, perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice, one of only twelve judges in American history to be afforded this indignity. The basis of the two charges was his lying about the fixing of cases in his court. However, even after this impeachment, he is the first African-American be elected to Congress from Florida since Reconstruction, representing Dade and Broward Counties, and several others. He is a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Ironically, this impeachment offers evidence of the moral superiority of the Democratic Party, inasmuch as its members did not hesitate to punish one of its own.
In 1989, the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives took up the case, and Hastings was impeached for bribery and perjury by a vote of 413-3. Voters to impeach included Reps. Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, John Conyers and Charles Rangel. He was then convicted by the United States Senate, which was likewise under Democratic control.
Sen. Gary Hart's presidential campaign crashed and burned after he challenged the media to follow him around to see if rumors of his sexual dalliances were true and he was soon caught by a photographer with a girl in his lap on a yaught called "Monkey Business",
Congressman Gary Condit, one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress at the time, was the chief suspect in the murder of a young intern named Shaundra Levy with whom he had an admitted affair. , Long after he lost his office, Levy's body was found and it was determined that Condit had nothing whatsoever to do with her murder.
See a very interesting article on New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli's downfall in 2001. www.slate.com/id/1007572/
Two years later New Jersey Democratic Governor Jim McGreevey was forced to resign in large part because of his being gay, which apparently caused him to lose his judgment and to appoint his gay lover to an important state position for which he had no qualifications. (which became standard operating procedure in the G.W. Bush administration .)
Former Representative William J. Jefferson, of New Orleans was sentenced in 2009 to13 years in prison for using his office to try to enrich himself and his relatives. [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/us/politics/14jefferson.html].
Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, 60, was convicted of trading government favors for campaign donations when he was governor from 1999 to 2003 and lieutenant governor from 1995 to 1999. [ This "conviction" may well be shown in time to be nothing but a Bush-Rove hit job and be overturned eventually. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Siegelman#Rove_controversy .]
Jim Black, a powerful Democratic House speaker, was sent to prison after pleading guilty to corruption. The state being N. Carolina, how many want to bet that this guy was a liberal vs a conservative?
Another N.Carolina House member, Thomas E. Wright, was convicted on three felony counts of obtaining property by false pretenses and could go to prison for as long as seven years and 11 months.
Although no Republican apologists volunteered a site, I found one that claims to do what I have been challenging Republicans to do. The site proclaims the following:
"Sleaze. Corruption. Breaking the law. And no agenda for the American people. The ethical hypocrisy of today's Democrats knows no bounds. While a discredited partisan hack pushes trumped-up charges against Tom DeLay, the Pelosi/Dean Democrats have become a Caucus of Corruption - name an ethics violation, and they're guilty of it. NoAgenda.org exposes the wrongdoings of more than 70 Democrats who are under an ethical cloud. Learn more about who's doing it and what they're doing."
As of 10 / 06 / 06, a related site, www.caucusofcorruption.com, was promoting the book, Caucus of Corruption, written by Mark Margolis with Mark Noonan, and it featured : "A Glowing Endorsement from Tom DeLay", about which author Noonan crowed:
"I'm excited to report that Caucus of Corruption has received its first endorsement! Our first endorsement comes from Rep. Tom DeLay, a great man and politician who found himself the number one target of Democrats in their phony ethics war."
The authors actually include this part of DeLay's endorsement on their book cover, "a must read for all Americans looking for the unreported motivations behind the Left's political scene."
The NoAgenda.org site is hilarious, Here's are some examples of what this site's author, Matt Margolis, considers examples of outstanding Democratic corruption:
California Senator "Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) funneled $115,000 to Douglas Boxer & Associates, a company run by her son, from her leadership political action committee." (this they view as a major crime while they characterize as "trumped-up charges against Tom DeLay by a discredited partisan hack" the fact that Republican leader Tom Delay "funneled" $490,000 to his wife for "work" she supposedly did from her home, which is being investigated among others by the FBI).
Washington state Congressman Jim McDermott (who is regularly returned to his office with an approval rating of over 80%) is "corrupt" because he has been found guilty of "turning over an illegally taped telephone call to reporters nearly a decade ago". You would think that Margolis would be embarrassed to bring up this matter because the tapes exposed the corruption of Republican leaders, i.e. then Speaker Newt Gingrich and current House Majority Leader John Boehner, but he is counting on the ignorance of his readers, most of whom are Republicans like himself.
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi's crime is that she is now pushing for reform when she "voted against a provision "to prohibit registered lobbyists from giving gifts to members, officers, or employees of the House and Senate," and was joined by the number-two Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer." (This Republican hack can't imagine that Pelosi could have had any other reason to oppose that particular bill at that particular time, save for that provision! Can this guy's readers be as stupid as he obviously imagines them to be?)
Senator Harry Reid "corruption" is proven by the fact that he "acknowledged that he misstated the ethics rules governing his acceptance of free boxing tickets and has decided to avoid taking such gifts in the future." (To see what a joke it is for Republicans to call this an example of Democratic "corruption" see all of the ramifications of Republican corruption that http://www.thinkprogress.org/abramoff rightfully calls the "biggest scandal in Congress in over a century").
I found another hilarious internet attempt by conservative Republicans to whitewash their own corruption by mudding the waters about the supposed corruption of Democrats. At
thePeoplesCube.com they use very elaborate graphics in a hopelessly vain attempt to raise minor examples of corruption (except for Kwame Kilpatrick) to the level of their own Republican corruption and to claim that the MSM (mainstream media) only identify the party affiliation of corrupt politicians when they are Republicans.
Check out the hypocrisy of conservative Republicans expressing all kinds of concern over "voter fraud" when they regularly practice it themselves
in plain view of the public in the Texas legislature.. (The Democrats may be going along with it, but the Republicans are the ones in charge, and the Democrats who were in charge before them were the conservative "Dixiecrat" type Democrats.)
The so-called Barney Frank affair
Republicans love to remind people that as Frank's gay partner for a time , Stephen Gobie, told The Washington Times, he (Gobie) ran a prostitution ring out of Frank's Washington, D.C., apartment and that Frank was aware of his operation.
The trouble with this story is that it is untrue. While Frank admitted to paying Gobie for sex several years earlier and to later hiring Gobie as an assistant, Frank denied any knowledge that Gobie allegedly ran a prostitution ring out of Frank's apartment. Frank maintained that he fired Gobie upon being told by one of his landlords that Gobie was using his residence for his prostitution business. As The Guardian reported on August 30, 1989, Frank actually "asked the House ethics committee . . . to investigate his relationship with" Gobie:
In his letter to the ethics committee, Mr. Frank wrote: 'Questions have been raised about my employment of a personal assistant during a period between 1985 and 1987. I have publicly responded to these questions and I have expressed regret for the mistaken judgment involved. In order to ensure that the public record is clear, I hereby request that the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct [CSOC, commonly known as the ethics committee] conduct an investigation into these matters.'
The House ethics committee launched a 10-month investigation, ultimately finding, as The Boston Globe reported on July 27, 1990, "that Frank had violated House rules by writing a misleading memo that was used in an effort to end prostitute Stephen Gobie's probation on felony charges and by allowing his House privileges to be used to waive 33 parking tickets that Gobie might have received while driving Frank's car." The report recommended Frank be reprimanded for the infractions, and the House voted for such punishment on July 26, 1990.
As the July 20, 1990, CSOC report concluded (Page 18):
'Based upon information obtained under subpoena and sworn testimony, the Committee concludes that the weight of the evidence indicates that Representative Frank did not have either prior or concomitant knowledge of prostitution activities involving third parties alleged to have taken place in his apartment. . . Representative Frank's landlords . . . submitted sworn testimony contradicting Mr. Gobie's assertion. . . . The Committee, therefore, further concludes that no further action is warranted.'
In fact, the report did not conclusively determine whether Gobie was even using Frank's apartment for "prostitution activities." The report repeatedly notes that Gobie's purported evidence that he had been conducting a prostitution ring collapsed under scrutiny. The committee noted that several of Gobie's claims were "repudiated by sworn testimony" from other individuals (Page 18). For example:
Not only have Representative Frank's landlords, Colonel and Mrs. James Daugherty, submitted sworn testimony contradicting Mr. Gobie's assertion, Mr. Gobie's assertion has also been rendered questionable by the fact that his claims of call-forwarding service were contradicted by the telephone company. (Page 7).
The ethics committee concluded "with Respect to the Credibility of Stephen L. Gobie" that:
'While much has been said, written, and speculated with respect to Representative Barney Frank's relationship with Stephen L. Gobie, it is clear that most, if not all, of such media attention has been the product of assertions made by Mr. Gobie. As has been discussed in detail in prior sections of this Report, the Committee went to great lengths in seeking testimony or other information relevant to the assertions. In numerous instances where an assertion made by Mr. Gobie (either publicly or during his Committee deposition) was investigated for accuracy, the assertion was contradicted by third-party sworn testimony or other evidence of Mr. Gobie himself.' (Page 37)
[ source : http://mediamatters.org/items/200610050002 ]
The "Mel Reynolds" affair
Republicans and conservatives claimed for years that despite the fact that Democratic Congressman Mel Reynolds was found guilty of sexual misconduct with an under-aged aide of his,
Reynolds was spared punishment for his crimes, was pardoned by President Clinton and some also claim that Reynolds was then hired by Jesse Jackson as a Rainbow Push "youth counselor".
Now for the truth (from wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Reynolds) :
"In August 1994, he was indicted for having sex with a 16-year-old campaign volunteer. . . On August 22, 1995 he was convicted on 12 counts of sexual assault, obstruction of justice and solicitation of child pornography. He resigned his seat on October 1, 1995.
Reynolds was sentenced to five years in prison and expected to be released in 1998. However, in April 1997, he was convicted on 15 unrelated counts of bank fraud and lying to SEC investigators. These charges resulted in an additional sentence of 78 months in federal prison. Reynolds served all of his first sentence and served forty-two months in prison for the later charges.
At that point, U.S. President Bill Clinton commuted the sentence for bank fraud. As a result, Reynolds was released from prison and served the remaining time in a half way house." And then Jesse Jackson did hire Reynolds, but not as a "youth counselor". He was hired for a position for which he had excellent experience, prison reform. |
