Pay for play:
The Sunday Times reports Stephen Payne, a Bush pioneer and a political appointee to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, was caught on tape offering access to key members of the Bush administration inner circle in exchange for “six-figure donations to the private library being set up to commemorate Bush’s presidency.”
In an undercover video, Payne is seen promising to arrange a meeting for an exiled leader of Krygystan with Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice. (Not President Bush because “he doesn’t meet with a lot of former Presidents these days,” Payne says. “I don’t think he meets with hardly anyone.”) All it will take for him to arrange this high-level meeting, says Payne, is “a couple hundred thousand dollars, or something like that…”
No doubt Republicans in Congress and right-wing bloggers will agree on a criminal investigation, right?
The Grand Panjandrum
Right after they agree to try these guys for War Crimes.
I just hope the rumors of Obama making all the “hard working real Americans” enter through the back door of the Presidential Palace (formerly know as the White House) aren’t true. THAT would be an outrage. An OUTRAGE, I say!
VidaLoca
Isn’t it kind of ironic to be setting up a private library to commemorate Bush’s presidency, while Bush himself is living in Paraguay?
Oh, and BTW, just want to get my chip down as being the first in this thread to say that item #1 in the Bush Memorial Library should be “My Pet Goat”.
scarshapedstar
Item #1 out of 1, you mean.
John Harrold
Can anyone explain why people in these positions of power will go to these lengths to get what amounts to small sums of money? Don’t get me wrong, a couple hundred grand is a lot to me, but for people like this it’s nothing. It’s like me risking everything to steal a TV from Best Buy. I mean I could do it, but I could just as easily buy the damn TV as well.
The Grand Panjandrum
The August 2001 NIE should be part of the collection as well. Who knows, he may actually have someone read it to him. (Hey! It could happen.)
Elvis Elvisberg
After this, I can’t see what else they could do to surprise anyone with their corruption and incompetence.
And McCain has Schmidt, Gramm, and Fiorina running the show for him.
The GOP shouldn’t be trusted for a generation with anything resembling responsibility for anything more important than naming the food in the House cafeteria.
Scott H
An exile from Kyrgyzstan might not understand “pay for play,” but “AH! Baksheesh!“
Jay C
Doesn’t meet with “hardly anyone”?? WTF?
So what does our Cretin-in-Chief do with his time in the Oval Office, then? Netsurf? Play Solitaire? Talk to the paintings on the wall a la Nixon?
Tara the anti-social social worker
“Stephen Payne, a Bush pioneer and a political appointee to the Homeland Security Advisory Council”
I sure am glad that the country’s security is being entrusted to people chosen on the basis of merit.
Who are they going to get to fill this job now? Hey, I hear Michael Brown’s available.
PeterJ
They will need to hire at least one person to remove all the copies of “My Peat Goat” that people will sneak into the “library”… ;)
rachel
I hope so.
Jay C
Actually, I imagine that George W. Bush spends a lot of his time down in the White House bunker, wearing a helmet (probably a chromed one like George C. Scott in “Patton”), and pushing little plastic ships and missiles around a map-table of Iran, while making “whoosh!” and “boom!” noises.
My biggest fear would be that his minders might get careless with the links on the bunker laptop, and we’d end up with a scenario like the movie War Games…
El Cid
There is no scandal here. No one has yet mentioned anything about Payne’s counter-tops nor his child’s health problems.
Dave_Violence
Oh, come on, plenty of Bush Admin folks are under investigation – in public, no less. Scooter’s in jail, isn’t he? People are getting caught, prosecuted, convicted, etc. That just doesn’t happen in a police state, does it?
Anyway, if this is true, then jail is certainly an option. And rightfully so.
EL
Document the apologists: American Thinker
So though they admit it is “shocking to hear,” they are falling back on the oldies – Clinton did it, it’s not illegal, etc.
To me, the tape sounded pretty quid pro quo.
Just Some Fuckhead
It won’t be long before we see a Bush Pioneer in a Sasha Baron Cohen production.
jake
But if a Democrat gets a campaign donation from someone who isn’t 100% on the up-and-up (ie another Democrat):
OMG! THE TERRIST R WINNING!
Oh look, it is our old friend post hoc, ergo what the fuck:
Christ. Bush could skull fuck a basket of kittens while bludgeoning choir boys (or vice versa) on national TV and the Fluffer Nutters would be right there to tell us how it is almost the same as Clinton’s BJ only worse because he lied about it.
El Cid
BTW, the Bush family will not be retiring to Paraguay. Ranch land theories or not, Paraguay’s about to be led by a leftist liberation theologist ex-bishop by name of Lugo elected with an unprecedented majority. Not the kind of gov’t the Bushites would prefer.
scarshapedstar
Hell, I’ll super glue a “complimentary, please take only one” sticker to the wall in the gift shop and leave a big stack of NIEs next to it.
Brachiator
Of course, neither the people soliciting these bribes, nor the people making the payoffs are risking much of anything. Between corruption and cronyism in the Bush Administration, and diplomatic immunity, these goons are sitting mighty pretty.
The sad thing is that many conservatives eagerly eat this stuff up. They hate and fear the Democrats, so everything they do is wrong. They love Republicans, so anything they do is forgiven in advance.
jake
We must liberate the Paraguayans from the despotic grip of liberal fascism. Heh.
TenguPhule
CIA Drones + Hellfire Missiles.
Obama could raise America’s rep with one okay.
DougJ
What about all the exiled leaders of former Soviet Republicans who aren’t being offered access to the White House in return for donations? How come we never hear about them?
There are some, presumably.
John Cole
No one could have predicted that Rick Moran would defend this.
I am sure this has been covered before, but is there a more inappropriately named website out there beyond the American Thinker? The name, considering the content, is tragic.
J. Michael Neal
No one who defends the Bush administration has any business criticizing the Marc Rich pardon. They engage in tortured interpretations of the Constitution to find Presidential powers that Congress can’t interfere with on every topic imaginable.
Now, go read Article II, the pardon power specifically. It’s pretty unambiguous, and there are pretty much no restrictions put on it. Anyone who follows the Bush line must conclude that Congress can’t put any restrictions on it. Hence, they can not make it illegal to sell a pardon. Really, it didn’t need to be a donation to the library; Clinton could have sent out a mass e-mail, saying, “Pay me $1 million, and I’ll pardon you.”
At any rate, that should be their position, if they had any desire to be consistent about Article II powers. Fortunately, they have no such inclination, thus preventing their heads from exploding.
Phoebe
Bush doesn’t meet with anyone because nobody would pay real money to meet with him because they know he isn’t the real decider. He’s a puppet of Cheney’s. He might not be entirely aware of it; Cheney does the Obi Wan thing, “these are not the droids we’re looking for”, and Bush thinks he thought of it. But it’s not as smooth because Bush puts it in his own words, and it comes out kind of mangled and stupid.
1jpb
A side note:
Apparently BHO was talking about his surprise that there was a flat screen TV on the wall in the Lincoln Bedroom. He thought it detracted from the history of the room. Rush was acting upset because BHO may remove the TV from the wall. But, of course, he spent plenty of time telling us about his own experience as a guest at the White House. He’s sooooo important, and his listeners better not forget it, he’ll make sure of that.