Joe Klein Claims McCain Is Not A Crook, Not Breaking Any Laws, But...

In commenting on today's shocking story in the NY Times about McCain's ties to the gambling industry, Time Magazine's Joe Klein writes that McCain isn't actually breaking any laws. What he leaves out is that McCain and the rest of the crooked members of Congress write the laws to make their own patterns of behavior "legal." Keep in mind, for example, that so far this year Big Oil has "donated" $22,543,340 to members of Congress, almost all of it to Republicans and to nominal Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party (DNC and Blue Dog garbage like Dan Boren and Mary Landrieu). McCain, who is Big Oil's great white hope for a continuation of the policies that have enslaved American workers and consumers to their whims (and high prices), has accepted $1,663,590 from them. Even though these gargantuan sums-- more than the combined contributions Big Oil has made to their half dozen most devoted Republican shills who always push their agenda, John Cornyn (R-TX- $535,200), Steve Peace (R-NM- $283,034), James Inhofe (R-OK- $270,050), Miss McConnell (R-KY- $238,000), Pat Roberts (R-KS- $148,700), and Joe Barton (R- $146,441)-- are clearly bribes, the way Congress has written the bribery statutes, there is nothing illegal about McCain being financed by Big Oil, by lobbyists ($843,216 this year alone), by the booze industry ($466,036, their favorite member of Congress by far), by the crooks who brought us the mortgage crisis and Wall Street Meltdown (over $30,000,000) ... or by the gambling industry ($260,025). But...

A lifelong gambler, Mr. McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table. He was throwing dice that night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party’s evangelical base, opponents of gambling. Mr. McCain was betting at a casino he oversaw as a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and he was doing so with the lobbyist who represents that casino, according to three associates of Mr. McCain.

The visit had been arranged by the lobbyist, Scott Reed, who works for the Mashantucket Pequot, a tribe that has contributed heavily to Mr. McCain’s campaigns and built Foxwoods into the world’s second-largest casino. Joining them was Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s current campaign manager. Their night of good fortune epitomized not just Mr. McCain’s affection for gambling, but also the close relationship he has built with the gambling industry and its lobbyists during his 25-year career in Congress.

As a two-time chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, Mr. McCain has done more than any other member of Congress to shape the laws governing America’s casinos, helping to transform the once-sleepy Indian gambling business into a $26-billion-a-year behemoth with 423 casinos across the country. He has won praise as a champion of economic development and self-governance on reservations.

...Mr. McCain portrays himself as a Washington maverick unswayed by special interests, referring recently to lobbyists as “birds of prey.” Yet in his current campaign, more than 40 fund-raisers and top advisers have lobbied or worked for an array of gambling interests-- including tribal and Las Vegas casinos, lottery companies and online poker purveyors.

When rules being considered by Congress threatened a California tribe’s planned casino in 2005, Mr. McCain helped spare the tribe. Its lobbyist, who had no prior experience in the gambling industry, had a nearly 20-year friendship with Mr. McCain.

By attacking the Times, which endorsed McCain in the primary and has given him years of unwarranted heroic coverage, as being biased against him, McCain has been able to bully them into pulling their punches against him over and over. For example, they refer to his disgraceful role in whitewashing his Senate colleagues in the Abramoff scandal as burnishing his image as a reformer. McCain's committee would have us believe that Abramoff was a horrible briber-- which is true-- but that he bribed... no one in the Senate. McCain is a crook and has been from the very beginning of his career. He's taken and continues to take, immense sums of money from special interests to vote for their initiatives at the expense of the taxpayers. The media, including the Times thinks nothing of regurgitating his hype machine's epic deceptions. Finally, the Times has started doing its job in exposing some of McCain's hypocrisy:

... interviews and records show that lobbyists and political operatives in Mr. McCain’s inner circle played a behind-the-scenes role in bringing Mr. Abramoff’s misdeeds to Mr. McCain’s attention-- and then cashed in on the resulting investigation. The senator’s longtime chief political strategist, for example, was paid $100,000 over four months as a consultant to one tribe caught up in the inquiry, records show.

McCain, of course, claims he stands up selflessly for Indians at grave risk to his career, exactly what he claims, blinking furiously, whenever he's caught with his greasy fingers in the cookie jar. But as public support for tribal casinos has diminished, Senator Selflessness has backed away. "But he has rarely wavered in his loyalty to Las Vegas, where he counts casino executives among his close friends and most prolific fund-raisers," some of whom have raised millions of dollars for McCain's efforts to capture the White House. No one expects McCain to turn the White House into a casino but "in May 2007, as Mr. McCain’s presidential bid was floundering, he spent a weekend at the MGM Grand on the Las Vegas strip. A fund-raiser hosted by J. Terrence Lanni, the casino’s top executive and a longtime friend of the senator, raised $400,000 for his campaign. Afterward, Mr. McCain attended a boxing match and hit the craps tables."

DWT has covered McCain's serious gambling addiction before. The Times had steered clear until today, although they soft-peddle the seriousness of his behavior.

For much of his adult life, Mr. McCain has gambled as often as once a month, friends and associates said, traveling to Las Vegas for weekend betting marathons. Former senior campaign officials said they worried about Mr. McCain’s patronage of casinos, given the power he wields over the industry. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity.

“We were always concerned about appearances,” one former official said. “If you go around saying that appearances matter, then they matter.”

The former official said he would tell Mr. McCain: “Do we really have to go to a casino? I don’t think it’s a good idea. The base doesn’t like it. It doesn’t look good. And good things don’t happen in casinos at midnight.”

“You worry too much,” Mr. McCain would respond, the official said.

Now, back to Joe Klein. "We've known for months," he writes, "that McCain was a high-rolling craps player. What we didn't know about was his extensive ties to the lobbyists who work the Indian gambling issue, his willingness to do their bidding, take their money and advice. There is nothing illegal here. McCain even bucks the gaming interests at time-- opposing betting on college football games in Vegas, for example. But there is much that is unseemly." Much more-- and "unseemly" certainly doesn't come close to defining McCain's life of corruption.

Some of the most amazing stuff is the etymology of the Jack Abramoff investigations--which was apparently dumped in McCain's lap by a lobbyist who was one of Abramoff's competitors.

... Finally, the notion that McCain loves craps-- as opposed to skill games like blackjack or poker-- is just too perfect. As a sometime novelist, I can assure you that you couldn't create a character whose public behavior is marked by wild, peremptory gambles and whose private avocation was shooting craps. It would be too obvious. The question is, will McCain's weird public risk-taking-- the nomination of Palin, the bizarre "suspension" of his campaign last week-- come to be seen as a problem for him as a prospective President. But his behavior as Chairman of the Indian Affairs Subcommittee is certainly disappointing-- and about as far from being a maverick, or a reformer, as you can get.