Josh Marshall Gets It (mostly)

Talking Points Memo has a piece up about Dick Wadhams' bad string of luck lately. But Josh misses the mark here:

Our best guess is that Schaffer basically missed the Abramoff scandal, at least compared to how people experienced it in Washington. Schaffer was elected in 1996 and term-limited himself after the end of his third term, leaving DC in early 2003. He then tried and failed to get the Republican senate nomination in 2004. There is something called newspapers and the internet. But it just doesn't seem to have registered with him how radioactive Abramoff and his clients had become.

This is not about Abramoff, it's about Schaffer's moral failings. We imagine Schaffer would have blindly supported the sweatshop industry even if Abramoff weren't the intermediary.

Schaffer either genuinely thinks sweatshops are A-OK and he wasn't influenced by the thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from sweatshop moguls, or he doesn't think thay are A-OK but is willing to say so because he got thousands in campaign contributions from sweatshop moguls.

Who cares if Abramoff was the middleman (even though the evidence that he was is about as convincing as the evidence that water is wet). The fact that Schaffer is, as Rep. George Miller put it so eloquently yesterday, one of the few people who would defend the exploitative system in the CNMI is really telling.

Either Schaffer is a principled sweatshop proponent or an unprincipled sweatshop proponent. Is one better or worse than the other?

Abramoff is just the icing. Schaffer's extremism and corruption is the cake.