Looking back to Abramoff's youth (permanently remove the left from power)

[UpInArms]

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/01/08/looking_back_to_abramoffs_youth/

With his menu of guilty pleas this week, the lobbyist Jack Abramoff seems a high-profile embarrassment for former friends in the GOP leadership. But party veterans from the Reagan era recall that Abramoff's Washington career was actually launched, in part, by creating headaches for top GOP brass.

In the early '80s, when the Republican National Committee was controlled by moderates allied with Vice President George H.W. Bush, Abramoff infuriated party leaders by transforming the College Republicans into a hard-right version of a communist cell -- complete with loyalty purges and missions to destroy political enemies.

''We probably made it very dictatorial," Abramoff later conceded in an interview. ''But we wanted the College Republicans to remain conservative."

Abramoff was chairman of the College Republicans, and his lieutenants were Harvard graduate Grover Norquist, who rose to political fame as president of the American Taxpayers Association, and a young Georgia student named Ralph Reed, who would later become the face of the Christian Coalition.

In a memo from the time, Abramoff counseled his troops: ''It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently."

...more...

[tularetom]

1. These guys just love the war metaphors

but somehow you never hear of them actually BEING in any war.

[McKenzie]

2. "Our job is to remove them from power permanently."

Now if that is not a fascist manifesto...

The question is did he start his campaigning from an ideological position or is there more to it than that? The fact that he managed to get so far into the political machinery suggests he was not just a lone extremist. His aims must have been known to the power brokers...maybe Abramoff's rationale was, indeed, ideological; at first anyway, but it's equally possible that what he was doing fitted nicely with the agenda of others.

[UpInArms]

4. A Look at "College Republicans" - HUGE CLUE (Abramoff/Atwater/Rove)

http://www.nndb.com/org/770/000079533/

Name		 Occupation	Birth	Death	Known for	
Jack Abramoff	
Government
28-Feb-1958	 	Lobbyist, friends with Tom DeLay	
Lee Atwater	
Politician
27-Feb-1951	29-Mar-1991	RNC Chairman 1988-90	
Morton C. Blackwell	
Activist
16-Nov-1939	 	Influential conservative activist	
Phil English	
Politician
20-Jun-1956	 	Congressman, Pennsylvania 3rd	
Bobby Jindal	
Politician
10-Jun-1971	 	Congressman, Louisiana 1st 2005-	
Patrick McHenry	
Politician
22-Oct-1975	 	Congressman, North Carolina 10th 2005-	
Grover Norquist	
Activist
19-Oct-1956	 	Washington lobbyist, anti-tax crusader	
Ralph Reed	
Activist
24-Jun-1961	 	Former head of the Christian Coalition	
Karl Rove	
Government
25-Dec-1950	 	Turd Blossom

[ikojo]

3. If the "left" was ever in power that would have been

very nice to me...but in my lifetime there has never been a leftwing government in power in the US. Carter and Clinton can hardly be called leftwing; center and center right perhaps but not leftwing. What left was Mr Abramoff discussing?

[dusmcj]

5. I remember those retards, vintage 1983

topsiders, ill-fitting sports jackets, bad haircuts and too many poli sci classes. And a reputation for leaving ummm, messy socks under beds and having long-suffering girlfriends - guess they were practicing for when they would have their own interns.

A tattier bunch of conformist morons, in the 1980s of all times, with inadequacy and defensiveness complexes, I cannot recall. While the rest of us were dancing to Boy George, shopping at Sal's Boutique and dyeing our hair in primary colors, these folks were getting wood for the Gipper.