The Hartford Courant gets it wrong (as did Dick Ahles of the New London Day recently), giving Nancy “Donut-Hole” Johnson a pass on her connection with corrupt super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. (Why is she called Donut-Hole? Click here.)
Here's the Courant yesterday: “The latest ad ends in the same way as MoveOn's first commercial attacking Johnson - by trying to link the congresswoman to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, to whom she has no connection.”
The truth is that the political action committee of Jack Abramoff's firm, Greenberg Traurig, gave $1,500 to Donut-Hole in 2002. A more accurate Courant story would read: “The latest ad ends in the same way as MoveOn's first commercial attacking Johnson - by trying to link the congresswoman to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, to whom she has no connection, other than taking $1,500 from Abramoff's firm in 2002, which actually is not that much money considering the price of campaigns these days. Also, keep in mind that Nancy looks like a blonde-headed grandmother, so she was probably baking cookies the whole time that George Bush and Tom Delay was cutting taxes for the rich and trying to gut Social Security.”
Except that in real life, Donut-Hole Johnson is a straight-line Bush backer who has supported every element of the president's savage and wrongheaded economic plan. The subcommittee chairs on the House Ways and Means Committee chairs are called “the Cardinals of the House” because they are so powerful, and Donut-Hole was selected to be the chairwoman of the Health Subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee by Tom Delay. And it is well-known that in the Tom Delay era, no one became or remained a Cardinal unless they signed on fully to the entire economic agenda of the far right. That's why they called Delay “the Hammer.” And the Hammer didn't hand out $10,200 in campaign contributions unless he knew you were a woman he could count on.
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