This is how the "slime-machine" behind the "Chicken-Hawk-In-Chief" repays their loyal partners in deception, lies and vicious misrepresentations and hope that the voting public will not see through their veil of underhanded untruths!
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Quid pro quo: How Bush pays Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and others
by Mike Pridmore
Mon Aug 16th, 2004
In last weeks LA Times, Ron Brownstein, in the process of discussing Bruce Springsteen's possible political influence, decried partisan politics and held up John McCain as the model of non-partisanship. Mr. Brownstein specifically mentioned the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as the ugliest example of the problem.
But what Mr. Brownstein, and seemingly everyone else in the media, fails to see is that John Kerry is being targeted by the same people for the same reasons they targeted John McCain in 2000:
quid pro quo .
The backers of the ad, like other supporters of Mr. Bush, want the political favors that flow from a Bush administration like water over Niagara Falls. And the pattern of quid pro quo probably dates even farther back than Mr. Bush's days as governor of TX to the days of his iconic predecessor Richard Nixon.
After serving as an attack dog against John Kerry in the waning years of the Nixon administration, recently resurfaced Kerry attacker
John O'Neill was given a clerkship with Nixon's favorite justice, William H. Rehnquist. Perhaps it was not a quid pro quo, but it certainly looks suspicious.
But even if Republicans in Nixon's time were handing out quid pro quos such as the one suggested above, since then they have raised political favoritism to an art form. Friends and family of
Merrie Spaeth, one of the principals of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,
have been big beneficiaries of what certainly appears to be quid pro quo .
Theodore Olson (godfather of Spaeth's daughter ), who was counsel to the right-wing American Spectator when it acted as a front for the dirty-tricks campaign against Clinton known as the Arkansas Project,
is now the solicitor general in the Bush Justice Department.(link)
O'Neill was a law partner of Spaeth's husband at Clements, O'Neill, Pierce, Wilson & Fulkerson , a Dallas firm. With an oil and litigation practice
focused on the defense of major energy and industrial firms, the dozen partners in Clements, O'Neill, Pierce, Wilson & Fulkerson have clout that exceeds their firm's small size. Their corporate clients include Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Reliant Energy, Koch Industries and Eastman Kodak. (link)
An example of quid pro quo (in this case a position given for services rendered) from the same law firm is Margaret Wilson, the former general counsel to George W. Bush during his second term as Texas governor. (She succeeded Alberto Gonzales, who currently serves as White House counsel.) In 2001, Wilson went to Washington with the new president, who appointed her deputy general counsel in the Department of Commerce.
During her tenure as Bush's counsel in Austin, she was implicated in the Service Corporation International funeral home scandal. State government whistle-blower Eliza May accused Wilson of participating in an effort to "intimidate" her from pursuing an investigation of SCI, a major Bush campaign donor. (link)
The web site of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was put up courtesy of
William Franke, a St. Louis businessman with
longstanding ties to Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Missouri Republican Party. Its chief financiers, according to the group's last quarterly IRS filing, are Houston builder
Bob J. Perry and the Crow family, both major Republican donors from Texas. The Crow family, a clan of megadevelopers based in Dallas, are close Bush friends as well as generous backers. Harlan Crow is also a trustee of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation. (link) A recent example of
quid pro quo involving Perry came last year when the TX legislature passed a law that seemed to favor builders like Mr. Perry to the detriment of homeowners. (link)
Other examples of
quid pro quo (in this case favors shown for money given) can be found from the primary season in the year 2000, when John McCain was the victim of similar attacks. "Republicans for Clean Air" produced television ads falsely attacking the environmental record of Sen. McCain in California, New York and Ohio.
Republicans for Clean Air was simply Sam Wyly -- a big Bush contributor and beneficiary of Bush administration decisions in Texas -- and his brother, Charles, another Bush "Pioneer" contributor. (One of the Wyly family's private capital funds, Maverick Capital of Dallas, had been awarded a state contract to invest $90 million for the University of Texas endowment.)
When the secret identity of Republicans for Clean Air became known, spokeswoman Spaeth caught the flak for the Wylys, an experience she recalled to me as "horrible" and "awful." Her job was to assure reporters that there had been no illegal coordination between the Bush campaign and the Wyly brothers in arranging the McCain-trashing message.
Not everyone believed her explanation, including the Arizona senator. (link)
But the quid pro quo system seen here so far is small potatoes compared to the expansive one developed since Mr. Bush went to Washington. His incestuous relationship with Big Oil, part of which is represented by O'Neill's law firm,
shows a troubling pattern of administrative favoritism for campaign donations . (Donations details here) What they got for the donations is discussed here. Here you can see some details of quid pro quo for the prescription drug industry. There are similar quid pro quos for Enron and Halliburton. Enron quid pro quo goes back to Mr. Bush's days as Texas governor but continued after he got to Washington. The insurance industry paid over $67 million for the quid pro quo seen here.(link)
And that's not even the whole picture but enough of it to see why monied interests supported George Bush and opposed John McCain in 2000 and why some of the same monied interests oppose John Kerry now. This isn't really about partisanship. It's about quid pro quo involving power and money. John McCain sees that it is dishonest and dishonorable but he doesn't see the motives and how the quid pro quo works.
And that's what we really need to be talking about.
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Slime purveyors and gutter trash is too kind of a description of these folks!
