All opposed?
Bob Ney (previous entry), the soon-to-be former Republican congressman from Ohio, has plead guilty to charges of accepting bribes from the Jack Abramoff apparatus. His plea was strictly pro forma, an attempt to salvage some dignity under the weight of a mountain of evidence — “At least I told the truth that one time, in court!”
He invoked the popular “But I’m an alcoholic!” defense. His alcoholism made him accept gifts from Abramoff, and, apparently, cash from a Cypriot aircraft parts manufacturer. Next time I’m having a beer, I need to remember whether it makes me solicit bribes and then attempt to carefully cover my tracks. Quoth the Times:
Another person familiar with the department’s investigation said at least one of the criminal charges in Mr. Ney’s guilty plea would involve the accuracy of his claim in a House financial disclosure statement that he won $34,000 in a private London casino during a trip in 2003.
Those winnings were also under scrutiny by the Justice Department, in part because the amount of the winnings coincided to a surprising degree with the amount of debt outstanding on Mr. Ney’s credit cards. Mr. Ney’s host on that trip was a Cyprus-based aviation company that was seeking Congressional support for sales of airplane parts to Iran.
That’s what alcohol does to a man. Certainly it couldn’t have been the case that Bob Ney had been lulled into hubris by a long career of not being caught accepting inducements beyond what is appropriate? Nope! Obviously it was the alcoholism, which is a real medically recognized disease. Bob Ney is wholly lacking in character flaws!
And there’s no chance that he had come to believe that his seniority in our government insulated him from consequences — a belief bolstered by our seniority-based legislative rules and electoral regulations bent to ensure re-election. No, Ney isn’t a tyrant wannabe - he loves freedom and the democratic ideal, but he’s sick, can’t you see?
The good news is that the increasing popularity of the “But I’m an alcoholic!” defense (as invoked recently by Mark Foley) correlates strongly with more freshmen entering Congress. It’s great when people choose to Vote Freshman; it’s even better when every candidate for an office is a freshman!
update 16 Oct: Jeff Rowland weighs in on “But I’m an alcoholic!” at Overcompensating.
Ken:
Incumbency is the devil of politics. The McCain-Feingold incumbent protection plan has spiked incumbency rates to what..98% or so? I think Locke summed up how I feel about politicians “I have no reason to suppose that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else.”
*hugs mr man*
13 October 2006, 12:14 pmColin:
I’ve never been clear on why McCain-Feingold isn’t viewed for what it is: the second-worst piece of legislation (just after USA “PATRIOT”) of the last ten years, in terms of damage not just to the Constitution but also to the principles of liberal democracy. It’s not clear to me it would survive a 1A challenge before the Supreme Court, and I wonder what it would take to get one of the radio personalities (e.g.) recently targeted under it to run up the black flag.
13 October 2006, 3:41 pmKen:
People don’t believe in rights that are either inherent or inalienable anymore. What the masses believe and what they want are privileges granted to them by their benign protector government. Doing all the work so they don’t have to and all the thinking because they no longer can.
Sad state of affairs our affairs of state are.
16 October 2006, 7:08 amentirely safe and fun » Blog Archive » Bob Ney said something smart!:
[…] CNN, reporting on disgraced former Ohio Congressthing Bob Ney, carried this poetically economical confession in their story on Ney’s recent sentencing (30 months, which I believe is probably not enough to deter his former colleagues, given the rewards to be reaped from corruption at that level). In a previous post, I said that Ney’s “But I’m an alcoholic!” defense was thin cover, and that the real root of corruption was hubris — his belief that, as a protected incumbent, he was beyond the reach of the law. The story can now be amended a bit to say that he was within the reach of the law, but the law’s grip was not strong enough to really hurt him. […]
19 January 2007, 8:35 pm