Posted on 09/16/2004 1:03:15 AM PDT by Liz
TRENTON — A fund-raiser for New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey pleaded guilty yesterday to charges he solicited $40,000 in cash and campaign donations as part of a shakedown scheme in which the governor has been implicated.
David D'Amiano, 44, entered his plea to two fraud charges 10 weeks after being charged with extortion, bribery and other offenses in an indictment that also said an unidentified state official used the code word "Machiavelli" to show that political officials were helping.
McGreevey acknowledged he is the state official referred to.
But he insisted he did nothing wrong, and said the mention of Machiavelli was an offhand literary reference. He has not been charged.
The donations were solicited after McGreevey was elected.
The D'Amiano matter is one of several scandals swirling about the McGreevey administration.
Last month, McGreevey announced he is gay, had an extramarital affair with a man and would resign Nov. 15.
Earlier, his top contributor, developer Charles Kushner, pleaded guilty to violating campaign-donation rules and admitted retaliating against a witness he knew to be cooperating in a federal investigation — his sister — by having a prostitute seduce her husband.
Officials said D'Amiano solicited the $40,000 from a dairy farmer in exchange for helping him get a better price from the county for his land. After D'Amiano got involved, the county's offer of $3 million rose to $7.4 million, according to the indictment.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
ping
Our ship of state sank long ago.
(Sniffle) McG's a "victim" (sob).
It's evidence of pervasive Dumbocrat political evil that these thieves used Machiavelli as a code word.
Machiavelli has long been discredited as the purveyor of "the end justifies the means" philosophy that Western civilization has universally decried paricularly b/c of its utilzation by historic criminals like Hitler.
Now crooked Dumbocrats rally around it.
Think politics of the Clintons for its purest version.
I don't know what the 'code word' Machiavelli is. But wow on the search returns.
http://www.soros.md/docs/rep01en.pdf
That's right. He isn't just gay, he's a "gay American." How cute that he should make it sound so very politically correct.
I think the homosexual part is a smokescreen for the real story of his resignation announcement. Only in Post-Clinton America does the populace see nothing at all wrong with an affair between a person and someone who must report to that person in employment (e.g., between a supervisor and employee/intern/lower-ranking person). People used to understand that there's no way such an interaction could be truly consensual, as consent cannot freely be refused in a relationship of that sort. Now, that point seems lost to many (and it's especially interesting how radical feminists--who focus so much on "power" in relationships--looked away).
Note that Clinton evaded the question of his possible perjury -- or, at a minimum, misleading a grand jury -- regarding his alleged criminal behavior toward Paula Jones, by the MSM focusing on the SEX aspect of the Lewinsky story. I believe that now McG has done a similar thing by evading the corruption question -- and the "abuse of power" question -- by leading the MSM to focus on the homosexuality question, which also distracts the right and left into old debates about that issue, rather than his own sleaze. People just fell right into it, and ignore the real way he has demonstrated that he's totally unfit for office right now.
Does anyone agree?
"Welcome to New Jersey, where we like our taxes high and our politics corrupt!"
I thought it was 'fitting' for the word machiavelli to be used in a pro-kerry article........
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KerryOkies > Thom Hartmann Articles
"What Would Machiavelli Do? - The Big Lie
Lives On"
Posted by KerryAdmin on Monday, August 30,
2004 (CST)
From Thom's newsletter: "There is nothing new
about the Swift Boat ads. German filmmaker Fritz
Kippler, one of Goebbels' most effective
propagandists, once said that two steps were
necessary to promote a Big Lie so the majority of
the people in a nation would believe it."
There is nothing new about the Swift Boat ads.
German filmmaker Fritz Kippler, one of
Goebbels' most effective propagandists, once said
that two steps were necessary to promote a Big Lie
so the majority of the people in a nation would
believe it. The first was to reduce an issue to a
simple black-and-white choice that "even the most
feebleminded could understand." The second was
to repeat the oversimplification over and over. If
these two steps were followed, people would
always come to believe the Big Lie.
In Kippler's day, the best example of his
application of the principle was his 1940 movie
"Campaign in Poland," which argued that the Polish
people were suffering under tyranny - a tyranny that
would someday threaten Germany - and that the
German people could either allow this cancer to
fester, or preemptively "liberate" Poland. Hitler
took the "strong and decisive" path, the movie
suggested, to liberate Poland, even though after the
invasion little evidence was found that Poland
represented any threat whatsoever to the powerful
German Reich. The movie was Hitler's way of
saying that invading Poland was the right thing to
do, and that, in retrospect, he would have done it
again.
The Big Lie is alive and well today in the United
States of America, and what's most troubling about
it is the basic premise that underlies its use. In
order for somebody to undertake a Big Lie, they
must first believe Niccolo Machiavelli's premise
(in "The Prince," 1532) that the end justifies the
means.
Hitler, after all, claimed to have based everything
he did on the virtuous goal of uniting Europe - and
then the world - in a thousand-year era of peace,
foreshadowed in the Bible. If you believe that a
thousand years of peace is such a noble end that
any means is justified to reach it, it's a short leap to
eugenics, preemptive wars, torture of dissidents
and prisoners, and mass murder.
Believing that the end justifies the means is the
ultimate slippery slope. It will ultimately kill any
noble goal, because even if the goal is achieved, it
will have been corrupted along the way by the
means used to accomplish it.
In fiction, it's the story of Mary Shelley's good
Doctor Frankenstein's attempt to conquer
mortality, of Darth Vader's misuse of the Force,
and of the tragic consequence of the inquisitive Dr.
Jeckyll's attempt to understand good and evil going
tragically wrong when, as Robert Louis Stevenson
notes, he wrote, "I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I
had awakened Edward Hyde."
In real life, it's the story of the many tinpot
dictators around the world who quote Jefferson
while enforcing a brutal rule, of power industry
executives pushing for lax mercury rules to "help the
American economy," of the legion of lobbyists who
work daily to corrupt democracy in the good name
of GMOs, pharmaceuticals, and the insurance
industry (among others).
Gandhi, Jesus, and Buddha all warned us about
it, as did Tolstoy, Tolkien, Hemmingway, and
Kafka.
Be it "small sins" like Nader getting into bed with
Republicans to get on state ballots, or "big sins" like
George W. Bush repeatedly asserting that he had
to invade Iraq because of WMDs and because
Saddam "threw out the weapons inspectors"
(something Saddam never did - inspectors were
removed by Clinton in 1998 and by Bush in 2003),
trying to accomplish a "good" by using the means of
an "evil" like a Big Lie inherently corrupts the good.
Now the Bush campaign and its allies are
encouraging a new series of Big Lie techniques to
assail John Kerry's Vietnam War record. With a
smug assurance of damage done to the enemy,
George W. Bush refused to address specifically the
misrepresentations in the ads, and called for "the
end of all 527s," a goal he cynically knows
unachievable in this election cycle.
Defenders of the Bush campaign are overrunning
the media, trying to imply equivalence between the
Swift Boat ads and the many "attack" ads run by
anti-Bush 527 organizations over previous months.
But the Bush campaign has never disputed the
truthfulness of charges against him (loss of jobs,
ruinous Iraq policy, environmental despoliation,
etc.) in previous 527 ads.
Thus, there is no equivalence between the
MoveOn (and other) ads and the Swift Boat ads,
moral or otherwise. Truths and issues - however
unpleasant - cannot be weighed on the same scale
as lies and character assassination, explicit or
implicit.
This is why the Kerry campaign is not
complaining about attacks per se - those are to be
expected in politics - but about Big Lie techniques
used in these particular attacks. Techniques,
interestingly enough, that have an uncanny
resemblance to character smears used by the Bush
family against Michael Dukakis in 1988, against
Ann Richards in 1994, against John McCain in
2000, and against Max Cleland in 2002.
Lee Atwater, on his deathbed, realized that the
"ends justifies the means" technique of campaigning
he had unleashed on behalf of the Bush family was
both immoral and harmful to American democracy.
"In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I 'would
strip the bark off the little bastard' and 'make Willie
Horton his [Dukakis'] running mate,'" Atwater said.
"I am sorry for both statements: the first for its
naked cruelty, the second because it makes me
sound racist, which I am not. Mostly I am sorry for
the way I thought of other people. Like a good
general, I had treated everyone who wasn't with me
as against me."
But Atwater's spiritual and political protégé, Karl
Rove, soldiers on. Big Lies are emerging from
Bush allies with startling regularity, and old Big Lies
are being resurrected almost daily, most on
right-wing talk radio.
The most alarming contrast in the election of
2004 isn't between the conservative Bush and
liberal Kerry. It's between those who will use any
means to get and hold power, and those who are
unwilling to engage in the Big Lie.
History tells us that, over the short term, the Big
Lie usually works. Over the long term, though, the
damage it does - both to those who use it, and to
the society on which it is inflicted - is incalculable.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a
Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and
host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk
show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are
"The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal
Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the
Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To
Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?:
A Return To Democracy."
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"What Would Machiavelli Do? - The Big
Lie Lives On"
From Thom's newsletter: "There is
nothing new about the Swift Boat
ads. German filmmaker Fritz
Kippler, one of Goebbels' most
effective propagandists, once said
that two steps were necessary to
promote a Big Lie so the majority
of the people in a nation would
believe it."
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