This country is an embarrassment. We can’t do anything right, least of all corruption. Look, when Venezuela’s populist demagogue Hugo Chavez died, word was he’d somehow accumulated an estate worth $2 billion. In the old days when the PRI party ruled Mexico uninterruptedly, every president got a single six-year term — and promptly retired at its close as a billionaire.
And that was when a billion was real money.
In rich countries and poor countries, dictatorships and democracies, politicians who wet their beaks usually do so in ways that at least seek to close the financial gap between them and the people from whom they’re taking the bribes.
But among the many distressingly low-rent qualities our politicians possess, none is more contemptible than just how cheaply they are willing to sell themselves. People who get caught in what appear to be open-and-shut corruption scandals are doing so for pennies on the dollar — pennies on the dollar, I tell you!
Remember Abscam, in which FBI agents posed as Arab sheikhs looking to buy influence from congressmen and senators back in 1979? Do you know the amounts they were talking about? Richard Kelly, a Republican representative from Florida, was videotaped stuffing $25,000 into his pockets. “Does it show?” he asked the fake sheik.
Granted, that $25K would be $77,000 today, but seriously? The man was a congressman, for Pete’s sake. Surely he could have held out for more from people he thought were oil-rich billionaires.
What about William Jefferson, the congressman from Louisiana who went to jail in 2009 after he was caught with his hands in the cookie jar? They found $90,000 in a refrigerator.
Ninety thou? Surely a close vote on a weapons system is worth far more than that!
Or consider the case of Duke Cunningham, a war hero who became a congressman and then a key member in the last decade of the House appropriations and intelligence committees. These are serious money-generating, contract-producing committees, the first dedicated to allocating federal spending money and the second overseeing the expansion of America’s capacity after 9/11.
Cunningham was convicted of taking $2 million in bribes. Now, that sounds like it’s getting there, but remember, on these two committees (and on defense matters) he played a role in the dissemination of trillions.
Now we come to this week’s news out of our own glorious city and state. The Post’s revelations about the attempt to grease the entry of a Democratic senator into the Republican mayoral race — with the collusion of one of the few Republicans on the City Council — have been jaw-dropping. The audacity of the scheme is dazzling; so too is its hare-brained quality.
And that’s what’s so disappointing. I mean, there’s no chance even if the plot had worked like clockwork that Malcolm Smith (the Democrat) would have ended up getting elected mayor. First of all, it was redirected from the get-go by an undercover FBI agent.
Second of all, and how can I say this delicately, Smith is bonkers. (Just to make it clear this is not a partisan assault, I will add that his partner-in-alleged-crime, Republican Dan Halloran, is wacko.) Even if things had progressed as he might have hoped, Smith would have done something weird that would have derailed his cross-party candidacy long before voters would have had a chance to derail it for him.
Money was also tossed around to two Republican Party power-brokers in Queens and The Bronx — notwithstanding the fact that the very notion of GOP power-brokers in those boroughs is oxymoronic, with an emphasis on the moron. They were allegedly bought for no more than $25K also.
And it just keeps on coming. Now we have two Democratic assemblymen in The Bronx getting nailed on a different corruption matter by US Attorney Preet Bhahara — one, Eric Stevenson, indicted, and the other, Nelson Castro, not indicted because he dropped the dirty dime on Stevenson.
And what did Stevenson allegedly get? Twenty-two grand. Twenty-two lousy grand. That’s what one of the real-estate developers who are accused of trying to buy him off might spend on the kiddush at the family bar mitzvah.
I mean, can’t anybody here play this game?