Swing State Project

Fortunately, just above Burns’ guest opinion, we have the Gazette’s editorial on the same subject. It fills in the many holes deliberately left in Burns’ piece. The editorial points out that the Washington Post reported that Burns “pressured the Interior Department to put the Saginaw Chippewa project in the school program, even though it didn’t meet requirements.” It didn’t meet the requirements because the tribe is filthy rich, thanks to its casino operations. Ream, and others, see some connection between the fact that Abramoff was a lobbyist for the tribe and also donated $130,000 to a political action committee formed by Burns. Nor did it seem a coincidence to some that Abramoff, or some of his clients, paid for things like trips to the Super Bowl for aides to powerful lawmakers. Anyway, the Post reported that when Burns’ efforts on behalf of the Michigan tribe were unsuccessful, “Burns earmarked $3 million for the Saginaw Chippewa school anyway.”

You’d never know any of this from reading Burns’ piece. He makes it sound as though he was simply doing a favor, for reasons of his own, for the Democratic senators from Michigan.

He plays the same selective game with the subject of the Super Bowl junket. He says the trip was perfectly allowable because it was thought at the time that it was paid for by a tribal government, and Senate Ethics Committee rules allow the acceptance of gifts from sovereign nations. He acknowledges, however, that given Abramoff’s misleading statements, “the staff have subsequently been unable to determine who actually paid for the trip.”

In other words, they found a loophole, so what’s the problem? The problem is that “the good people of Montana” don’t think a senator’s staffers should be accepting expensive junkets from anybody — not from lobbyists, not from sovereign nations, not from connected fat cats. Burns’ willful blindness on this is the result of living in D.C. for too long.

Way too long.

Via Left in the West.