Friday, August 14, 2020

Those Who Can't Remember History Are Doomed to Be Conned By It


I'm just guessing Caroline Bryant is not old enough to remember Ralph Reed 15 years ago.  Then again, it seems like the whole world is not old enough to do that.  To refresh your memory:

Later in 1999, Abramoff enlisted the help of another Republican friend, Ralph Reed. The Choctaw needed to defeat a bill in the Alabama State Legislature that would allow casino-style games at dog racing tracks. This would have resulted in competition for their casino business. Reed had recently contacted Abramoff via email, looking for some help in establishing new business.

"Hey, now that I'm done with electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts! I'm counting on you to help me with some contacts."
— Ralph Reed to Jack Abramoff, via email, November 12, 1998

Reed proposed to Abramoff some work which he and his firm, Century Strategies, could perform. Reed could access "3,000 pastors and 90,000 religious conservative households" in Alabama, as well as "the Alabama Christian Coalition, the Alabama Family Alliance, the Alabama Eagle Forum, [and] the Christian Family Association." Reed wanted a $20,000 per month retainer for his services.

On April 6, 1999, Abramoff got Preston Gates to approve hiring Reed as a subcontractor, and told Reed to "get me invoices as soon as possible so I can get Choctaw to get us checks asap."

By May 10, 1999, the Choctaw had paid $1.3 million to Reed via Preston Gates, for various grassroots activities relating to the dog-track bill, as well as opposing an Alabama state lottery.

The tribe discontinued paying the money through Preston Gates when Abramoff suggested that they use Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform as a conduit, to which the tribe agreed. Although the anti-gambling effort was not related to ATR's anti-taxation activities, ATR passed checks of up to $300,000 from the Choctaw to Reed's firm, in one case taking $25,000 as a "management fee". Later in 1999, Abramoff used Reed's services again to oppose the federal Internet Gambling Prohibition Act, on behalf of eLottery, a corporate client.

That's just part of the Wiki entry, to remind you of the sins of Ralph Reed.  If you want more contemporary reporting (and please note it took up to 7 years from 1998 for some of this stuff to hit the mainstream press), I have a short catalog for you:

Ralph Reed's Other Cheek

On the casino issue, Scanlon’s company, Capitol Campaign Strategies, paid Reed to help assemble anti-gambling coalitions in Louisiana and Texas. Among other things, those coalitions backed a lawsuit filed by Texas’ attorney general that early in 2002 succeeded in shutting down two Texas casinos that posed competition to the Coushattas’ highly lucrative operation.

Reed says he has not wavered from his anti-gambling convictions and points out that his company was paid by Scanlon’s firm, not the tribe. “We have never been retained by a casino to serve their interests,” he says. But antigambling activists say that argument doesn’t wash. “When you get paid big money, it’s got to be gambling money,” says Tom Grey, a Methodist minister who runs the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling. “Ralph Reed with all his sophistication should have known where the money came from.”

Ralph Reed Attracts Indian Casino Cash, Hypocrisy Charges

As executive director of the Christian Coalition in the 1990s, Ralph Reed toed a hard line against the spread of legalized gambling. Reed took the common Religious Right view that gambling is anti-family. He once called it, “a cancer on the American body politic” that was “stealing food from the mouths of children.”

Nowadays, as a high-paid political operative and consultant, Reed is apparently singing a different tune – in whatever key those who pay him request. The Nation magazine reported July 12 that Reed has been working to help a Native American tribe in Louisiana eager to fend off competition from another tribe that wanted to open a casino.

Ralph Reed used 'wackos' to fight tribes

"Lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a longtime friend of Reed who became known in Washington as "Casino Jack" for representing so many Indian casinos, also found [Ralph] Reed useful. If anybody tried to open a casino that might compete with Abramoff's tribal clients, Reed's job was to block it by ginning up Christian conservative opposition.

Abramoff's partner, Michael Scanlon, described the process in pretty rough terms in an e-mail made public in a Washington corruption scandal:

"Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them," Scanlon wrote. "The wackos get their information [from] the Christian right, Christian radio, e-mail, the Internet and telephone trees," all of which Reed was expert at deploying.

However, Reed also wanted to pretend that he wasn't being paid with gambling money, so he and Abramoff arranged to have millions of dollars laundered through a series of nonprofits. The transactions got pretty complicated. In one e-mail exchange from March of 2001, Reed bugs Abramoff for a missing check, complaining that funds have run dry."

The Sins of Ralph Reed (the subhead there says Reed "is finally losing his Teflon luster.")

All of those links are 15 years old or older.  Ralph Reed never lost his "Teflon luster," and he never stopped being a very successful hypocrite.  In his dreams, Donald Trump imagines he's Ralph Reed, because Reed has been much more successul at manipulating evangelical Christians.  Indeed, Reed is Donald Trump with a better knowledge of the Bible (yes, I know, damning with faint praise).  He's so good at it, in fact, that Caroline Bryant doesn't realize what a hypocritical liar Reed is:

Writing an entire book about why Christians should put their faith in Trump, however, suggests that Reed doesn’t believe his own message. 

Oh, he does; but you missed the message.  Reed's message is Trump's message:  gull the shills.  His message has never been a Christian one.  Reed's only message is:  get the money and get away. I mean,  I know the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but good Lord, do some research, will ya?

Reed’s rosy-eyed view of Trump’s courtship of the evangelical movement is also laughable. 

It's your rosy-eyed view of Reed that's laughable.  Ralph Reed isn't a dewy-eyed choirboy about anything!  That's his "Teflon luster," not his soul you're seeing.  Ralph Reed would steal the pennies off his dead grandmother's eyes and still profess with puppy-dog eyes that he just loves Jeebus.  That's why he's a con-man.  And he has you conned:

There is a third problem, too: Reed denies the most plausible argument, which is that the relationship between Trump and his evangelical supporters is purely transactional from both ends.

Denies it?  Hell, of course he denies it!  He's counting on it! That's his con!  Reed never met a human relationship he didn't understand in purely, and solely, transactional terms.  He's Elmer Gantry without the sex scandal!  Hell, he's better than Gantry.  He walked away from the Abramoff scandal without ever so much as seeing the inside of a courtroom, and he's flushed it so deeply down the American memory hole even his current critics don't remember and are still being fooled by him.

I know Ms. Bryant thinks hers is a scathing critigue of Ralph Reed.  But he's laughing all the way to the bank, and she's wondering how she missed him at point blank range.  Truth is, she never even saw the target.

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