Where Oh Where Will The GOP Look For Leadership?

Art by Hebiclens

The poll that came out a couple days ago showing that what's left of the Republican rank and file don't know where to turn for leadership within the GOP, was further highlighted this morning when Senator Arlen Specter told a radio audience that "neither Rush Limbaugh nor RNC Chairman Michael Steele are worth listening to." And say what you will about Snarlin' Arlen, this is one Republican-- probably the only one-- who won't be groveling to Limbaugh and kissing his pilonidal cyst. (Democrats have an entirely different posture when it comes to Limbaugh, of course.)

So if the drug-addled (and much disliked) Hate Talk Radio clown most congressional Repugs take their cues from and the temporary chair of the RNC aren't the heads of the party, where should Republicans look for leadership? K Street, the old standby from which they always took their marching orders, is iffy now as one Republican operative after another gets dragged before the courts for breaking even the shockingly lax laws against corruption that the political class has written for itself. The latest little right-wingers who will never rise to be Republican leaders are corruptionists Ann Copland and Fraser Verrusio. Of course neither of these admitted bribetakers had any independent power, but Copland is taking the fall for her boss, grasping Mississippi crook Thad Cochran and Verrusio is doing the same for the only Alaska politician more corrupt than Frank Murkowski and Ted Stevens, Don "The King Of Pork" Young.

Tuesday Copland pleaded guilty to trading legislative favors for event tickets and other gifts from longtime Republican Party powerbroker Jack Abramoff. But how does someone like Copland-- or Verrusio-- deliver on "legislative favors?"

I am very disappointed that this case has involved a former member of my staff," Cochran said in a statement that indicated he is not a subject or a target of the investigation.

Only sitting senators and House members can grant "legislative favors" of the kind Abramoff was getting for his clients. They were paying thousands of dollars for earmarks worth millions and, through crooks like Cochran and Young-- not poor schnooks like Ann Copland and Fraser Verrusio-- they were getting them. And yet the list of corrupt Republicans already found guilty in the Abramoff scandal only includes one elected official, sad-sack Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH) and then lots and lots of little fish like Copland and Verrusio. Meanwhile the brains-- and the main beneficiaries-- behind the systemic corruption of the entire Washington political apparatus under the Bush Regime, Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum, Jerry Lewis, Denny Hastert, Duncan Hunter, John Doolittle, Conrad Burns, Katherine Harris, etc, are all, apparently, "untouchable."

There truly are two systems of justice in this country. One for the Ann Coplands and Fraser Verrusios and another for the Thad Cochrans and Don Youngs. I mean any ordinary American citizen that pulled a stunt at an airport like David Vitter's latest would have been arrested-- and in the Bush days, taken down to Guantanamo. But Vitter... he was just slapped on the wrist and sent on his way, the understanding security folks at Dulles Airport probably understanding that he was in a rush to either meet a hooker or get his diapers changed or, more likely, both.