VirusHead

“Political consultant” Ralph Reed, who was in charge of President Bush’s southeast regional campaign last year and who also once ran the Christian Coalition, is seeking Georgia’s second-highest office in the 2006 election – Lt. Governor.

Ok, that’s it. That’s it. I somehow didn’t realize that this was happening. Ralph Reed? Ralph REED?

From The Nation:

When Ralph Reed was the boyish director of the Christian Coalition, he made opposition to gambling a major plank in his “family values” agenda, calling gambling “a cancer on the American body politic” that was “stealing food from the mouths of children.” But now, a broad federal investigation into lobbying abuses connected to gambling on Indian reservations has unearthed evidence that Reed has been surreptitiously working for an Indian tribe with a large casino it sought to protect–and that Reed was paid with funds laundered through two firms to try to keep his lucrative involvement secret.

Reed’s involvement with the casino effort followed his departure from the Christian Coalition in 1997 and his reinvention of himself as a corporate lobbyist and campaign hatchet man. One of his first clients was the Enron Corporation–a deal arranged by Karl Rove when George W. Bush was starting to think about running for President in 2000. Rove wasn’t ready to put Reed directly on a campaign payroll but presumably wanted to cultivate good will from Reed toward the coming Bush candidacy. Enron paid Reed’s Century Strategies more than $300,000 to generate support for energy deregulation. In the 2000 GOP presidential primary, Reed justified his big Enron fee by helping to smear John McCain during the South Carolina primary. Now McCain’s Indian Affairs subcommittee is investigating Indian gambling in the context of lobbying abuses, kickbacks and money laundering, with public hearings scheduled for early September.

Reed is in charge of Bush’s 2004 election campaign in the Southeast, including Florida. In 2000, he was paid almost $3.7 million for helping Bush. In 1995, when he was still exploiting intolerance and fear, Time did a story on him that included the cover line “The right hand of God.” Today God’s right hand seems to be holding dice and a bloody political hatchet.

According to the New York Times, Mr. Reed wrote in his book “Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics” that Mr. Abramoff was “a conservative firebrand.” The men became so close that Mr. Reed sometimes slept on Mr. Abramoff’s couch and later introduced Mr. Abramoff to his future wife.

AmericaBlog also has some serious questions about why he was being paid by Microsoft.

Oh, no… uh-uh. No way. Not gonna happen. Not if I have to scream “wake UP, wake UP, wake UP” in people’s faces.

How can this happen? Don’t give me that trauma-theory about 9/11. People in New York voted for Kerry. don’t give me the scapegoat theory – Republicans have been misdirecting anger for a long time. What is it? The dumbing-down, infotainment, bad education? What is it? How can so many American’s have willed themselves blind? When they finally open their eyes, will it be too late? There is already so much corruption and thuggery.

Will there be a country left to recover?