A Fish Rots From the Top

Even as it fills its ranks with Abramoff golf-junket partners, political flunkies and underemployed relatives, the administration silences those who, like Sherron Watkins at Enron, might blow the whistle on any Kozlowski or Ebbers or Rigas fleecing or betraying the taxpayers. Three weeks before Mr. Safavian’s arrest, the Army Corps of Engineers demoted another procurement official, Bunnatine Greenhouse, who was a 20-year veteran in her field. Her crime was not obstructing justice but pursuing it by vehemently questioning irregularities in the awarding of some $7 billion worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq to the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root.

has been chastised three times by the chamber’s ethics committee, and a Texas grand jury recently indicted a political action committee he had organized.

the Vanity Fair article has opened a floodgate of new information, as author Rose was able to obtain leaks from congressional sources and FBI officials present during Ms. Edmonds classified testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The article reveals for the first time that one of the elected officials that bin Laden-connected Turkish nationals claimed to have on their payroll was none other than Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, to whom bribes and illicit campaign contributions may have been funneled in order to get him to pull a House Resolution on Armenian Genocide from the House Floor in 2000. It also reveals that these same Turkish nationals claimed to have bribed several State Department and Defense Department officials to facilitate illicit conventional and nuclear arms trades, and had infiltrated U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories in order to sell U.S. technology to the “highest bidder” (al Qaeda, North Korea, Iran?)

Charlie Cook of the independent Cook Political Report said the Frist news comes at a time of sagging approval ratings and other problems for the Republican Party. “You wonder if it’s death by a thousand cuts,” he said. “All these little bitty scandals. Individually they don’t amount to much. Collectively they sort of add up.”

“The biggest toll,” Cook said, “is for Frist’s presidential aspirations. They were already on the ropes. He’s not gotten good reviews as the Republican leader in the Senate. . . . The guy is pretty damaged merchandise in terms of presidential aspirations.”