ABRAMOFF, BUSH, ROVE, INDIAN TRIBES, SEX SLAVES IN THE MARIANAS, BRIBES, CASINOS...

Were you one of the few Americans who believed Bush when he said he doesn't know Jack Abramoff? (Presumably that would make you one of the 32% of Americans who still thinks he's doing a good job.) I wasn't. So last week when I heard that the Secret Service was being forced by U.S. District Judge John Garrett Penn to turn over a record of Abramoff's White House visits to a public interest group, Judicial Watch, I was eager to see how the Bush Regime flacks would spin it. And yesterday was the day.

This guy who Bush claimed not to know-- who raised at least $100,000, and probably a lot more, for the 2000 campaign, and who Bush appointed to an Interior Dept job in his transition team-- seems to have had more access to the White House staff than anyone else-- ever! If Bush still wants to claim he didn't know him, he's apparently the only one in the White House who didn't. Abramoff's lobbying team for just one client alone-- the GOP set-up experimental slave colony in the Northern Marianas Islands-- were inside the White House for almost 200 meetings during the first 10 months of Bush's regime! Or, as Keith Olbermann put it on his MSNBC show last night, someone from Abramoff’s firm was at the White House every business day for 10 months through October 2001. And this doesn't even get into the little issue of Indian tribes who Abramoff and his Republican congressional and Interior Department conspirators bilked for something like $82 million! This is very different from Bush claiming that Abramoff may have attended "a few staff-level meetings" at the White House, as well as a couple of Hanukkah parties.


Abramoff pleaded guilty 4 months ago to federal charges stemming from an investigation into his corrosive ties with members of Congress and the Bush Regime. He also pleaded guilty to fraud charges in Miami concerning a multimillion-dollar purchase of SunCruz Casinos gambling fleet in 2000, a case that involves the Mafia-style murder of an Abramoff enemy by several Abramoff "consultants."

Now Bush and Abramoff are both proven liars and neither can ever be assumed telling the truth about anything. In fact, at this point, neither seems to even know fact from fiction. But a few days after Bush publicly claimed to not know his pal Abramoff-- the way he had done with Enron Chairman Ken Lay (his biggest single briber contributor) and the way Judas may have done with Jesus-- the scorned lady Abramoff said he was surprised at Bush's faulty memory. He told the WASHINGTONIAN magazine that he had personally met with Bush nearly a dozen times and that Bush knew him well enough to joke with him.


Of course Abramoff had to deliver for his high-paying clients so he spent more time with his even closer friend-- the one who could get much more done than the bumbling and incompetent Bush-- Karl Rove, who well may have benefited tremendously from his relationship to the sleazy Republican lobbyist and rainmaker.