Political Cortex: More on Christian Right & Abramoff

More on Christian Right & Abramoff

By Frederick Clarkson
02/03/2006 04:23:04 AM EST

What did James Dobson know, and when did he know it? That's what Max Blumenthal writing in The Nation wants to know.

Christian Right consultant and now, Georgia GOP pol, Ralph Reed and former GOP super lobbist Jack Abramoff, and now admitted felon, persuaded Christian broadcaster James Dobson to use his national radio broadcast in part of a complicated scheme to help one of Abramoff's clients.

At stake was the possible opening of an Indian casino in one state. Abrammoff's client, a tribe that owned a casino in a neighboring state didn't want the competition. So they hired Abramoff, who in turn hired Reed to whip up the Christian Right to stop the casino. Dobson claims he didn't know he was shilling for gambling interests. But Blumenthal points out that he isn't taking questions.

In a January 6 press release issued three days after Abramoff's indictment, Dobson declared, "If the nation's politicians don't fix this national disaster, then the oceans of gambling money with which Jack Abramoff tried to buy influence on Capitol Hill will only be the beginning of the corruption we'll see." He concluded with a denunciation of vice:
"Gambling--all types of gambling--is driven by greed and subsists on greed."
What Dobson neglected to mention--and has yet to discuss publicly--is his own pivotal role in one of Abramoff's schemes. In 2002 Dobson joined a coterie of Christian-right activists, including Tony Perkins, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to spearhead Abramoff's campaigns against the establishment of several Louisiana casinos that infringed on the turf of Abramoff's tribal clients. Dobson and his allies recorded messages for phone banking, lobbied high-level Bush Administration officials and took to the airwaves. Whether they knew it or not, these Christian soldiers' crusade to protect families in the "Sportsmen's Paradise" from the side effects of chronic slot-pulling and dice-rolling was funded by the gambling industry and planned by the lobbyist known even to his friends as "Casino Jack."

Much more.

: James Dobson, Ralph Reed, Jack Abramoff

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More on Christian Right & Abramoff | 3 comments (3 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

More on Christian Right & Abramoff (none / 1)

Good Morning!

I have responded to Max Blumenthal's article, so I want to share my questions with you. I have been trying to research Abramoff since 1996, just after I ran into Chip Berlet online at Compuserve after the Murrah Building. Chip helped me to head in the right direction (no pun intended) and I ended up reading a lot about the Council for National Policy and its members. That's where I discovered Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. I was very curious about why a so-called Orthodox Jew would be hanging out with the faux Christians, like Edwin Meese III and Pat Robertson, etc.

I have not been very successful in creating a timeline on Abramoff from Brandeis to 1996, except that I know about Savimba in Angola and apartheid in South Africa and John Singlaub. I have not been able to discover the "moneybags" that paid for all that for such a young man. I suspicion that it was Richard Mellon Scaife, but I have no evidence on which to base my "woman's intuition".

Why don't you and/or Max Blumenthal write an article about those days, because that was the beginning of Abramoff's relationship with the extremists and those of us in the Christian Left would love to know about it.

Thanks for all your good work all these years. You, too, have taught me a lot!

copperqueen

by copperqueen on 02/03/2006 11:15:08 AM EST

You've taught me (none / 0)

much as well, amigo.

Thanks for keeping us abreast of this pathetic, incestuous bucket of bile.

Ralph Reed is a rising star on the right and it is important that we mitigate his rise by exposing the truth that hounds him.

Political Cortex -- Brain Food for the Body Politic

by Tom Ball on 02/03/2006 01:41:25 PM EST

I (none / 0)