REPUBLICAN PARTY HACKS AND GREEDBALLS CORRUPT EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH. THEY'RE SELLING OUT THE COUNTRY

Although I've picked the hapless and pathetic GOP closet queen from Florida, Mark Foley, as "The Bad," almost any Republican congressman would have fit nicely between Virgil Goode, Jr and Katherine Harris in Adam's slight update of Clint Eastwood's classic THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY. Today's WASHINGTON POST is too polite to mention that the gay-bashing gay caballero is gay himself but they also chose to use Foley as an example. Foley, a total rubber-stamp Republican-- who brags on his own website that he has supported Bush 90% of the time-- made a big hysterical splash for the media and the folks back home (the same way that Long Island loudmouth Peter King and countless other GOP scared-shitless hypocrites did) about how he would not allow Bush to get away with endangering our national security by selling off the ports to Bush family crooked business associates in Dubai. Of course now they're all buying into the fake "compromise" Bush and Frist have worked out which basically calls for a "cooling off" period (so Republicans and their media allies can calm down the public) before the deal can go through. (They already exerted pressure on CNN to shut Lou Dobbs up.)

But, although this has caught the public's attention in a big way, it is business as usual for the George W. Bush, his thoroughly corrupted, rubber-stamp GOP allies in Congress, and the Republican Party of today. Matt Stoller has a very pointed piece at MyDD called Republicans Are the Ethics Problem and, of course, he's entirely correct: they are. And their sense of non-accountable power-- they do have an iron grip on control all 3 branches of government-- only heightens their sense of self-entitlement. But I think Bush and his rubber stamp congress have finally been noticed by the public and the mass media with their fingers in the cookie jar not because people are concerned with "ethics," a term many people don't fully understand, but because it is finally clear that whatever they touch they corrupt. The Republican office holders' extreme dishonesty and boundless avarice is finally being noticed by the public.

The cavalcade of Republican congressmen taking bribes from the Jack Abramoffs, the Mitchell Wades, the Tom Kontogiannis, the Tom DeLays (a kind of a switch-hitter when it comes to bribes, taking and giving depending on the circumstances), the Thomas Noes and from the countless K Street lobbyists who have become a virtual third house of Congress under DeLay, Frist and Santorum, is almost as shameful as what BushCo is systematically doing to thoroughly loot the nation-- regardless of consequences-- in a way that no president has ever done in our history.

Think graft and corruption today and the mind reels from images of admitted bribe taker/right-wing extremist Randy "Duke" Cunningham, as well as plea bargain-bound Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, Jerry Lewis, Katherine Harris, Virgil Goode, Jr, Duncan Hunter, Richard Pombo, Conrad Burns, John Thune, Rick Santorum, Bill Frist, Roy Blunt, John Doolittle, Tom Feeney, Sam Johnson, Frank LoBiondo... and on and on. And that's not to mention the unbelievably corrupt Republican Party machines in Ohio and Kentucky which are operated like full-fledged criminal organizations. But for all the millions and millions of dollars squeezed out of the system by the DeLays and Cunninghams and Frists, et al, this is almost penny ante in relations to the generational wealth being created for the Bush family and their retainers. Whether through the criminal excesses of Enron or the hundreds of billions of unaccounted for dollars being raked in by Halliburton and Carlyle Group-related entities, BushCo is feathering the nests of its principles in ways undreamed of my any criminal enterprise in the history of man.