WILL NEY AND NOE BE PRISON ROOMIES?

It's funny that we didn't even bother to cover Tom Noe's sentencing yesterday, funny because DWT started with the dual purpose of going after Republicrooks Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Ohio Republican kingpin Noe. But yesterday when he got his two years and change it all seemed a little anti-climatic. And besides, he should have gotten 27 years, not a 27 month wrist slap. And this was only for the illegal Bush contributions. The big trial, for all the millions of dollars he funneled into the Republican Party from the Ohio Workmen's Compensation Fund isn't til next month. We'll cover that in the hopes that he gets a firing squad.

But speaking of crooked Ohio Republican officials, remember powerful bewigged GOP Congressman Bob Ney who screamed his head off all last year about how he was being persecuted and how innocent he was and blah, blah, blah... like Cunningham and DeLay and like Abramoff and Conrad, et al? Yesterday, just after Special Election polls closed (so his hand-picked crooked successor, Joy Padgett, wouldn't be hurt by her close proximity to the filth) he agreed to plead guilty, probably today! He hasn't announced whether or not he will resign the House seat from which he operated his criminal activities. And no one is saying whether or not the plea bargain includes a jail term. And there has been no discussion of Ney's involvement with the Mafia-style slaying of Abramoff associate Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis.

One of the posterboys for the Republican Culture of Corruption that completely enveloped Washington in the wake of the unchecked/unbalanced right-wing takeover of the government, Ney is no more guilty than Tom DeLay, Jerry Lewis, Dirty Dick Pombo, Duncan Hunter, Dennis Hastert, John Doolittle, Katherine Harris, Ken Calvert, Virgil Goode and dozens of other crooked Republican politicians who have abused the public trust unheard of in the history of our country. Slowly, slowly, slowly the wheels of Justice turn, although it is widely expected that Bush will pardon them all in return for their silence on his own participation in the systematic looting of the nation.


AFTERTHOUGHT: THE CULPRIT IS REVEALED

So it wasn't the Republican Culture of Corruption. It wasn't the greed and selfishness inherent in today's Republican Party. No, Bob Ney's legal team has come up with something else to blame entirely in their client's quest for avoiding personal and political responsibility for his career of crime. "Representative No. 1" of the Abramoff indictments, according to today's Washington Post will use alcoholism as an excuse. He even checked into a rehab clinic yesterday.


UPDATE: TIME MAGAZINE MAKES A WILD STAB ON THE NEXT REPUBLICROOK TO GO DOWN IN THE ABRAMOFF SCANDAL-- NO SURPRISE HERE

When you try to figure out who are the most corrupt of the Republican House members, your head can just spin. I mean between Tom DeLay, Jerry Lewis, Bob Ney, Dirty Dick Pombo, John Doolittle, Dennis Hastert, Virgil Goode, Duncan Hunter, Katherine Harris, Don Young, Ken Calvert... where does it stop? And they all stink so bad how do you ever figure out where the worst smell comes from. The Senate is a bit more genteel, though and TIME speculates-- based on some inside info, of course-- that the next Republicrook to be arrested will be... you like, the worst criminal in the history of Montana politics.


OCTOBER 21 UPDATE: THROW AWAY THE KEY?

The real question in the Noe criminal trial is how much of the Ohio Workmen's Compensation Fund found it's way into Republican Party coffers and how much of it found it's way into the pockets of corrupt Republican political hacks like Noe, Ney, Taft, Blackwell, Montgomery, DeWine, Voinovich, et al.