December
28, 2006
Huffington Post
The
Most Important Story of 2006:
Republicans
Pathetic, Human Collapse
by Rachel Maddow On February 11th, 2006, the top domestic policy
adviser to the president resigned "to spend more time with his
family". Less than a month later, on March 9th, he was arrested in the Claude Allen would buy something, take it out to his car, leave the item
he purchased in his car, then go back into the store, pick out another copy
of the same item he'd just purchased, and "return" the thing he'd
just plucked off the shelves. He'd get the refund for the item he'd just picked
up in the store, and also get to keep the merchandise that was already
secreted in his car in the parking lot. It happened more than 25 times, according to When Claude Allen was accused as the White House
serial shoplifter, he initially denied it. There'd been a "mix-up"
with his credit cards because he'd moved recently; as soon as the facts came
out, Allen would "clear his name". Ultimately, he pled guilty in
August to a single count of shoplifting; he wept and broke down in court, and
got probation. Claude Allen
wasn't the biggest news story of the year, obviously. His convenient
resignation from the White House before his arrest insulated him from intense
media focus. But the sad, quiet disgrace of the president's top domestic
policy adviser can be seen in retrospect as the first creaking floorboard --
an initial sign of rot in the Republican superstructure. In time, this year, Republican Congressman Duke
Cunningham would be in jail, for breaking the all-time American record for
most bribes taken by a sitting Congressman. Republican Congressman Bob Ney would be in jail. Republican uber-lobbyist
Jack Abramoff would be in jail. Republican House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay's mugshot
would grin out at us from the front page of every newspaper in the country.
Republican Congressman Mark Foley would become the new face of pathetic,
closeted American lechery (is he ultimately going to jail?). David Safavian, Chief White House Procurement Officer, would
find himself in prison. Susan Ralston, executive assistant to Karl Rove, would
resign in disgrace. The list of people who pled guilty, resigned, or were
investigated in connection with the hemorrhaging Republican ethics scandals
got long and even tedious: Adam Kidan, Neil Volz, Ed Buckham, John
Doolittle, Conrad Burns, Grover Norquist, Tony
Rudy, Steven Griles, should I go on? Claude Allen's shoplifting humiliation, it turned
out, was the pathetic first bleat of the Republican party being felled in
2006 by the most pitiful and human of failings. Being wrong on The fact that Claude Allen's disintegration was
downplayed by the White House and in the press makes it all the more seminal
as 2006's most important news story. The Republicans, in their arrogance,
never thought that the American people would pay attention to all these
individual feeble human failures. They never thought that Americans at large
would connect the dots and realize that a party ideologically opposed to
government, when handed control of the government, would inevitably find ways
to pervert public resources for their own personal ends.<o:p? The American people did connect those dots, and
in the November 2006 elections, we handed the Republicans their walking
papers in the most significant political uprising since the 1994 Republican
"revolution". 2006 is the year that the Republicans blew it, in
the form of myriad personal, measly, low-tech failures. In retrospect, Claude
Allen's sad downfall at the hands of Target security guards was the first
sign of the small, human, common defeat of the GOP that was to come. Rachel Maddow
is the host of "The Rachel Maddow Show,"
which airs nationwide on Air |
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