Progress Now Action

It's barely been a week since the scandal surrounding Colorado Senate candidate Bob Schaffer's relationship to disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff exploded into the headlines, and in that time the sheer volume of damaging information uncovered by media and bloggers has been staggering.

Staggering enough that it's hard to keep track of the many facets to this developing story, and it's important to keep all the facts in view as the righties slowly gather their (tellingly) weak counterspin. Here's a few simple points to keep the conversation on focus:

1. The Schaffer/Abramoff scandal began with Schaffer's own words. It's possible that scrutiny of Schaffer's congressional record would have led to an examination of his relationship to Abramoff and labor policy in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), but it was Schaffer's explicit praise for practices there and recommendation of the situation as a "model" for the rest of the nation that led to deeper and immediate questions. Horrific labor abuses like 90-hour mandatory weeks and coerced abortions have been widely documented in the CNMI, leading to the passage this year (after repeated failures in previous Republican Congresses) of major reforms.

2. Schaffer's connections to Abramoff and unconscionable labor practices in the Northern Marianas are easy to find. Schaffer's own congressional papers show that his 1999 trip to Saipan was arranged by Abramoff's lobbying firm. Schaffer's staff knew that he would be meeting industry officials represented by Abramoff. A month after Schaffer returned from Saipan, he fulfilled the precise aims of an Abramoff secret policy memo to Saipan clients by attacking federal officials investigating labor rights abuses in the CNMI. Schaffer has received a disproportionate amount of campaign money from Saipan residents, including $2,000 from Governor Benigno Fitial, a key Abramoff ally.

New information uncovered by bloggers at Squarestate.net shows that Schaffer's staffers met directly with Abramoff staffers around this time, compromising Schaffer's semantics denial game of claiming he "never met him."

3. The Denver Post is far from a "liberal spin rag." The Post has taken surprisingly un-progressive positions in its editorial pages and elsewhere, notably its front-page editorial comparing Governor Bill Ritter of Colorado to "Jimmy Hoffa," not to mention Post publisher Dean Singleton's recent reference to somebody named "Obama bin Laden." The Post's reporting on local issues has often favored Republicans, but in this case a reasonable examination of the facts makes a multi-day scandal-ridden expository impossible not to write.

4. The right's counterattack against this story has not been based on factual information. In fact, the response from most right-wing echo chambers has been mostly notable in that it is absent, expect for a few dogmatically committed shills who have barely managed half-hearted "how many times can we say liberal propaganda" non-responses. Schaffer campaign manager Dick Wadhams hit a new apex of slobbering reality denial when he managed to respond to questions about the scandal by repeating the phrase "Boulder liberal Udall" three times in a laughably ungrammatical quote.

As you can see, this story is not as "complicated" as righties and overly jaded political sophisticates would have you believe. It's really simple: Bob Schaffer was at least negligent and at worst knowingly complicit in the cover-up of one of the worst human rights/corruption scandals on United States soil in recent times, and either conclusion is profoundly troubling.