----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Perelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2006 6:27 AM Subject: [PEN-L] delay to resign
Now the Dems might have to run on issues rather than personalities. It is amazing how things work. Remember the great crime that got rid of Jim Wright?
There were two crimes; I was Pacifica's economics correspondent at the time (and also wrote about this for FAIR and the Guardian), before going into a kind of exile to escape US political stupidity. Wright made the fatal mistake of having an aide compile his speeches into a banal little low-circulation book he sold to campaign contributors. The proceeds were used for elections (which he regularly won by a landslide in any case); this was considered a grotesque subsidy from taxpayers to the Texan speaker of the house's political career. Of course, any journo covering the case - and most aspired to write their own book one day - could do the simple maths on the publishers' accounts. It became personal, a bizarre witch hunt. The *real* crime was Wright's involvement in Texas S&L cover-ups amounting to billions of dollars of damages to the public purse. The damn journalists couldn't get their head around structural corruption, so that issue was rarely if ever raised, and Wright was never called to account for it.
