loosie: words: Clanton's Rant

Clanton's Rant

Abramoff turns rat, but will it matter?

by Clanton McNeese | 2006.01.05

There’s a pithy punch to “Stop Snitching” unmatched by the impact of “Stop Blabbing,” “Stop Tattling,” or “Fuggedaboutinforming.” The sound and the sentiment sell well in certain quarters, much to the displeasure of the tiresomely predictably righteously outraged. But in the corridors of power, “Stop Snitching” T-shirts are less in demand. As the heat increases, ratting out your buddies has become the rage.

More than two years ago, reacting to the Bush administration’s infatuation with prevarication, Sen. Robert Byrd observed that “truth has a way of squeezing out through the cracks, eventually,” despite concerted efforts to suppress it. Over the next six months, expect the cracks to widen. The slow ooze of the truth will never become a tidal flow, but we can anticipate a babbling brook.

Jack Abramoff alone has half of Congress scrambling for high ground, many of them flinging back money as they go. If campaign contributions carry finger prints from Abranoff or the casino tribes he manipulated, they’re poison. Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana leads the rankings of the suddenly circumspect: he returned $150,000. His statemate, Sen. Max Baucus, refunded $19,000. Sen. Byron Dorgan, who sits on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which is belatedly investigating Abramoff, is giving back $67,000. At least credit the sleazy Abramoff with bipartisanship: Burns is a Republican while Baucus and Dorgan are Democrats. Regardless of party, all pols love money, the gift that always fits.

Why is Abramoff snitching? Simple. He’s been snitched on himself, first by an aide, then by a former partner. Never mind the relative small fry who have already, in various hilarious statements, proclaimed their innocence while divesting themselves of dirty dollars. Everybody knows that Abramoff, a Bush Pioneer and longtime GOP insider, is one of Tom DeLay’s “closest and dearest friends.” DeLay may soon be reevaluating the warmth of their connection.

To label Ken Lay a Bush pioneer is to drastically understate the depth and duration of the Enron CEO’s relationship with the president. Abramoff is a mere pioneer; Lay is freaking Daniel Boone. Enron was Bush’s number one sponsor, donating more than half a million bucks over the years, employing his father’s former cabinet members, and helping build the new home for the Houston Astros. In return, from George Bush, Part 2, they received, well, everything they wanted. What has brought “Kenny Boy” Lay to his present precarious position? His accountant is now the latest in a succession of snitchers. Only Lay and Jeff Skilling are left to stand trial.

Enron is just the best known of the crooked corporations whose leaders have been brought down by plea bargaining peers or subordinates. Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, indicted on charges which could net him 420 years in prison and $42 million in fines, learned this week that a former Qwest executive vice president will be among those testifying against him. Marc Weisberg has become Mr. Snitch.

Such disloyalty is hardly surprising. A lot of much tougher guys, mobsters and gangbangers, have turned witnesses for the prosecution when they saw years of incarceration stretching before them. Attica and Auburn are pleasant enough towns to drive through, but you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in a tiny apartment in either one. Neither do criminals.

Still, there’s precious little satisfaction for the rest of us, even if the Abramoffs and Nacchios, the Lays and the DeLays, all get nailed. Pensions won’t get restored, and corporations won’t play fair, and politicians won’t become honest. And when snitchers have finally told the whole world how a band of liars sent this country to war, the dead Americans and Iraqis won’t come back to life. As Byrd continued, when truth takes so long to come out, “the danger is that at some point it may no longer matter.”