Some Sketchy Campaign Financiers Are More Equal Than Others

Last week, we mentioned the story of Norman Hsu, would-be Clinton campaign "Hillraiser" and fugitive from justice. The Los Angeles Times broke the story on Hsu's "wanted-man" status, and in so doing, touched off a flurry of returned or regifted campaign donations. At the time, we couldn't help but notice how easy the Times was on Hillary Clinton (easy enough that her campaign, while agreeing to donate the monies Hsu directly contributed to her campaign, will nevertheless keep the money generated by Hsu through third parties, even though it was the sketchy way Hsu seemed to wring ducats from the ducatless that engendered the initial report on his activities in the Wall Street Journal), but, as it turns out, the media may have been going even easier on another presidential contender.

In Tuesday's "Backtalk" with the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, a questioner from "Riverdale, NY" asks the question:

All those stories on NBC, CNN etc about one sleazy illegal contributor to Hillary's campaign, i.e. this Hsu fellow, but hardly a peep by your "fair and balanced" friends about the frickin' financial honcho for Romney, a Mr. [Alan B.] Fabian, being indicted for fraud! Which is the bigger story, or don't they teach proportionality in journalism school anymore?

Kurtz's initial response is to aver, "I don't know what Fabian's relationship with Romney was." Indeed, how could he? His own paper would have had to, say...reported on it! But, even in the article cited in "Backtalk" for reference (and, I suppose, to get the Post off the hook), Fabian is connected to Michael Steele and Robert Ehrlich, but no mention of Romney is made, other than to note "Fabian has also been a prolific donor to Republicans nationally."

In fact, the cited article comes from the Post's "Annapolis Notebook," which I imagine generates a ton of national attention. In a search of the Post's website, Fabian is mentioned in just two other places: a chat with the Post's John Solomon and a brief in the D section which reports on Fabian's fraud conviction with no mention of Romney at all.

Solomon's chat response, by the way, is stunningly brazen in the way it ignores the interlocutor's question entirely: Called on the carpet for not reporting on Fabian, Solomon posts a link to an article and responds by saying:

Actually, my colleague Matt Mosk and I reported on the Romney matter and included the following passage in our draft of the Monday story. "Likewise, Republican Mitt Romney faced questions about one of his Utah finance chairmen, Robert Lichfield, because of lawsuits he is facing alleging abusive treatment at boarding schools he founded to handle troubled youths." Unfortunately, it was edited out.

Wow. He's haughty. Then he offers a quote that mentions another person entirely. Then he passes on the blame to his editors! That's got to be the trifecta, right there! Count it! Swish!

By the way, if you are keeping score at home, a similar search of the Post for Norman Hsu yields 23 hits--and all but two of them connect Hsu to Clinton. So, "Riverdale, NY" is correct to note the lack of proportion the way these two fundraisers have been treated in the press, at least where the Post is concerned: the New York Times and the Boston Globe made the connection between Fabian and Romney, though neither have covered Fabian as much as Hsu, either.

Of course, the media's been notoriously light on Romney all year. In the wake of the Larry Craig fiasco, Romney was able to publicly act as if he'd never heard of the man, despite the fact that Craig was his campaign's "Senate liaison." Earlier this summer, Romney praised the health-care policies of Hezbollah, of all people, and suffered no lingering side-effects for his comments. It's hardly a stretch to imagine the apoplexy that, say, Barack Obama would have inspired, had he run to the left of Michael Moore in this fashion.

Of course, most notably, the press has lingered long over the meal served to them when Democratic candidate John Edwards got himself a pricey haircut, more or less ignoring the money Romney sets aside for his own cosmetological needs. We're not at all sure what the prevailing logic there is, but we gather that if Edwards were to have the decency to evince a studied disregard for the plight of the poor, the media would allow him to inject freshly harvested stem cells right into his crow's-feet.

Related:
Media Backtalk (9/4/2007) [Washington Post]

Previously, on Eat The Press
L.A. Times Breaks Story Without Breaking Clinton
To Say Nothing of John Edwards' More Humane Stance on Dog Transportation

Comments

[realitytrumpsbull]

No, no, public office isn't for sale to the highest bidder, no, no, say it isn't zzzzzzzzzzzzzz........

[Swift2]

Well, you're taking as gospel that the Paw family was a conduit for Hsu, and I don't think the WSJ story proved that. And, a lot more politicians than the Clintons were forced to return campaign money. Tell me, how would a politician know, say, that the Paw family's contributions were not kosher? They're running campaigns, not FEC investigations.

By the way, what really comes home from reading Bob Somerby's blog for all these years is that there were a lot of parties to the smearing of Gore. Now, you expect Fox and the Weekly Standard and other conservative sources to attempt to retail lies and propaganda about Democrats. What Somerby wants you to face is the fact that the big liberals have become lazy and passive. Somebody tells a lie about a Democrat in the pages of the Washington Post, and the big libs like E.J. Dionne just snooze. They didn't object, and in many cases, they collaborated in the Gore-bashing. A lot of libs got sucked in by the silly meme of "He's sighing, why is he so arrogantly sighing?" during one debate, without bringing up the fact that Bush was lying through his teeth, and that's why Gore sighed.

And HuffPost does the same. Any story with a possible anti-Hillary slant gets played up big, because I guess they think it will help Obama, or whoever Arianna is a fan of this week. It's time for liberals to stop the circular firing squad. Now's the time for people to dig at the records of the opposition -- remember them? And to deride the big libs who are right now proposing to roll over and kick their legs in the air for some tummy-rubbing by Senator Warner et. al. You know, act like a movement again.

[Antigen]

Oh, for goodness sake! Who cares about a little financial fraud among political money men. Once elected and appointed, it becomes their job to take our tax money by force and fraud and dole it out as most benefits their support base. You're splitting hairs here and ignoring a much more important story.

And I don't understand why...

ReasonOnline
http://www.reason.com/news/show/121088.html

Romney, Torture, and Teens
Maia Szalavitz | June 27, 2007

"When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said he’d support doubling the size of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, he was trying to show voters that he’d be tough on terror. Two of his top fundraisers, however, have long supported using tactics that have been likened to torture for troubled teenagers."

The article goes on to draw a rough sketch one of Romney's other big money men:

"Romney’s national finance co-chair is a man named Mel Sembler. A long time friend of the Bushes, Sembler was campaign finance chair for the Republican party during the first election of George W. Bush, and a major fundraiser for his father.

"Like Lichfield, Sembler also founded a nationwide network of treatment programs for troubled youth. Known as Straight Inc., from 1976 to 1993, it variously operated nine programs in seven states. At all of Straight’s facilities, state investigators and/or civil lawsuits documented scores of abuses including teens being beaten, deprived of food and sleep for days, restrained by fellow youth for hours, bound, sexually humiliated, abused and spat upon."

The public debate on the issue has focused on whether or not torture is justified in extracting military intelligence from enemy combatants. To those of us who underwent this form of 'treatment' as young people, the rest of the world seems to be missing the point entirely.

These methods are worthless for extracting valid, useful information from detainees. They're very good for scrambling the minds of the detainees and coercing false confessions out of them.

I would expect Sembler and Lichfield to support politicians who are fellow true believers. And that terrifies me!

[RJA]

That's interesting - is Sembler an associate of the notorious CIA psychologists, Mitchell and Jenssen? I wonder if an investigative journalist (if such a thing still exists) could peek into this uncanny similarity in coersive tactics.

[liz]

We should all read and re-read the new Vanity Fair article about the frighteningly mean and unbalanced 2000 press coverage of Al Gore versus the "good old boy, good old times" coverage of W. Same story as was written in Rolling Stone in 2001.
The "resignation" of Rove has not changed anything that much. We see history repeat itself every day of this campaign. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people not to call them on it every day. After brushing our teeth we need to e-mail a few MSM "journalists" about ethics and truth.