abramoff, norquist, college repubicans, Moonies, GHW Bush

[cap]

The roots of these latest scandals reach back a quarter century to the early days of the Reagan Revolution. During that heady period for young conservatives, Abramoff and Norquist won control of the College Republicans organization in Washington, with Abramoff as chairman and Norquist as executive director.



In the book, Gang of Five, author Nina Easton wrote that the Abramoff-Norquist leadership transformed the College Republicans into a “right-wing version of a communist cell – complete with purges of in-house dissenters and covert missions to destroy the enemy left.”



Under Abramoff and Norquist, the College Republicans also allegedly began tapping into Rev. Moon’s mysterious well of nearly unlimited cash. In 1983, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, then chairman of the GOP’s moderate Ripon Society, released a study saying the College Republican National Committee “solicited and received” money from Moon’s Unification Church in 1981.


http://www.cjonline.org/parryBushCrimefamily.htm
Leach said the Korean-based Unification Church has “infiltrated the New Right and the party it wants to control, the Republican Party, and infiltrated the media as well.”



Before Leach could finish the press conference, Norquist disrupted the meeting with accusations that Leach was lying. For its part, Moon’s Washington Times dismissed Leach’s charges as “flummeries” and mocked the Ripon Society as a “discredited and insignificant left-wing offshoot of the Republican Party.”



To this day, largely through lavish spending on right-wing causes, Moon has made his cult-like movement a political powerhouse within conservative circles. However, evidence has continued to mount that Moon’s operation is a complex web of secretive businesses and groups that launder millions of dollars from suspicious sources in Asia and South America into the U.S. political system.



Moon has subsidized not only media outlets, such as the pro-Republican Washington Times, but conservative infrastructure, including direct-mail operations, think tanks and political conferences. Moon’s organization also has funneled money directly into the pockets of former President Bush and other leading politicians. Abramoff and Kidan, the co-defendants in the SunCruz fraud case, also became friends from their time with the College Republicans.

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. Connect the dots, la la, connect the dots

Moon and his connection to BushCo needs to be exposed. Seems they're all in bed together. How convenient.

[joemurphy]

2. After the Vice President shoots a guy in the face, we attack

Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction, GOP lobbyists bilk millions of dollars from Indian tribes, 80% of New Orleans' black population is dislocated, and we learn that the super-secret NSA is spying on US citizens without a warrant, why should I be surprised that the Republican party is being funded by a mysterious Korean cult-leader. Hey, it's all part of the same nightmare.

[cap]

3. with this administration

I feel like I'm locked in a house with 5 screaming kids, the kitchen pot boiling over, the phone ringing, someone's at the door, a flood in my basement, etc etc etc.

[barbaraann]

4. F. Clifton White was also very important in the rise of today's GOP

but he has been almost forgotten.

"THOUGH he spent his entire adult life deeply involved in politics, F. Clifton White ran for office only once: unsuccessfully, in a congressional primary at age 28. After that he turned to the nuts-and-bolts work of party organization, and before he died at 74 in 1993 he was recognized as one of its greatest practitioners. In a foreword to these memoirs (which White dictated in his final illness, and which have been expertly polished by Jerome Tuccille), the Washington correspondent David Broder writes that ``Clif White was different. He was always teaching -- and few people in postwar politics had more to teach than he did.'' White began by winning dominance of the national Young Republican organization in the 1950s, and turned the cadre of politicos that he formed there into the Draft Goldwater Committee, which captured the Republican Party in 1964 and changed American political history. In the next two decades he seemed to be almost everywhere: leading the unsuccessful drive for Reagan at the 1968 convention, managing the victorious campaign of James Buckley for a senatorship from New York in 1970, and serving as a senior advisor to manager Bill Casey in Reagan's triumphant 1980 campaign. White's memoirs are a relaxed and entertaining account of it all -- not neglecting such high points as his service as a World War II bomber navigator over Germany, but concentrating on politics. No serious student of American politics should miss this absorbing account of a career in its vortex." (book review)
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n8_v47/ai_16929602

"Before the Storm suggests that the formula for using a campaign to build a movement involves beginning long before the campaign kickoff, starting with small fights, and placing allies everywhere. A long-frustrated New York GOP operative named F. Clifton White convened a group that started thinking about a Goldwater candidacy years before Goldwater did, and created webs of supporters in key states that took the Republican establishment by surprise. In fact, it was a network that the candidate himself barely appreciated and was eager to replace with unsophisticated Arizona cronies--among them, a young lawyer named William H. Rehnquist, who helped craft Goldwater's tortured libertarian argument in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964."
http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/12/schmitt-m.html

F. Clifton White Applied Research Center for Democracy and Elections (ARC)
http://www.ifes.org/arc.html

http://www.ashbrook.org/articles/hartz-draftgoldwater.html

I could have sworn I saw an article on White on wikipedia but there isn't one there now, so perhaps my memory is incorrect.

[WinkyDink]

5. It isn't "cult-like"; it's a full-fledged CULT.

The Bushes ARE MOONIES, plain and simple. Look at who is travelling with "Rev." Moon these days.

[cap]

6. but why are the Moonies in on this?

eom