MB Civic

By Harold Meyerson | Wednesday, October 4, 2006 | The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/03/AR2006100301106.html

Long-time Congress watcher Harold Meyerson writes about the “panic” currently gripping House Republicans in the wake of the Mark Foley page scandal. He connects the dots superbly, noting along the way that the chairman of the committee that runs the page program, Rep. John Shimkus (R – Illnois) “…neglected to bring up the Foley issue with Michigan’s Dale Kildee, the one Democrat on the committee that oversees the page program.”

But the really good stuff comes in the second half, when Meyerson looks at how this sordid matter exposes the deeper, continuing patterns of self-interest and self-advancement and power hoarding which are fundamental strategies of the current crop of Republican legislators:

“…the larger purpose of the Republican Congress has been to enrich the rich and to cling to power by all means necessary — with the financial assistance of the grateful rich. Purging Hastert, like dumping DeLay, does not signal any shift in these priorities…in not sharing what he knew about Foley with Kildee, Shimkus was merely following the Republicans’ practice of cutting the other party out of all legislative deliberations and running the House of, by and emphatically for themselves.”…BS