Al Sharpton: Republican Front

A bit penne ante given the present catastrophe, but the fact that Pierre Salinger died about the time I read his memoirs a couple of months ago evoked the "Angel of Death" meme of recent blogging involving the concentration of celebrity deaths during the vacations of Keith Olbermann's producer when I found out Tuesday that Jack Newfield, whose Only In America:The Life and Crimes of Don King I'm currently reading, died on December 21.

Newfield's career included an expose of health problems caused by lead paint in New York buildings and a classic memoir of Bobby Kennedy.

Newfield's website has some of his articles from earlier this year including this February profile of Al Sharpton:

The Reverend Al Sharpton has become a radioactive Trojan Horse. It turns out the left-wing preacher is being subsidized by the sleaziest rightwing consultant, Roger Stone. It's a Marx Brothers parody of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

Mr. Stone is the guy who led the mob to invade the counting room in Miami in 2000 and stop the Florida recount. He is also the guy who had to quit Bob Dole's "family values" campaign when semi-nude photos of him and his wife ran in a swinger's magazine promoting promiscuous sexual encounters.

Rev. Sharpton is a smart survivor who has become a force in local politics, even after being exposed as an FBI informer, a rape hoaxer, and the demagogue who called a Jewish merchant in Harlem "a white interloper" just before his shop was torched.

But now, there just might be a critical mass of sleaze that finally punctures the man who has squandered so much talent on scams of vanity. He returns for the New York primary diminished and redemonized.

In last week's Village Voice, Wayne Barrett exposed Rev. Sharpton's presidential campaign as a Republican holding company, with the freaky dirty tricks expert Roger Stone as the cash conduit.

Mr. Stone has loaned more than $200,000 to Rev. Sharpton's shell organization, the National Action Network. NAN has also run up $18,000 on Mr. Stone's credit card. Mr. Sharpton's campaign also owes Mr. Stone $50,000. And his campaign manager is a Stone operative, who stays in Mr. Stone's apartment and is not getting paid, according to Mr. Sharpton's filings.

All this should disqualify Rev. Sharpton from getting the federal matching funds he covets. And it should limit his capacity to make mischief in future elections. Mr. Stone says he wants Rev. Sharpton to run as an "independent" in 2008 to beat Hillary Clinton.

There is a long pattern of Rev. Sharpton helping Republicans on Election Day. In 1986, he endorsed Alfonse D'Amato over Mark Green, in return for a HUD grant. In 1992, he relentlessly bashed Mr. D'Amato's challenger, Robert Abrams. In 1994, he appeared in public with George Pataki two days before he beat Mario Cuomo. In 2000, Rev. Sharpton invited spoiler Ralph Nader to join him on election eve. Rev. Sharpton has always loved the conspiratorial game of playing both ends against the middle, just like Mr. Stone's mentor, the odious Roy Cohn.

There is also a long pattern of Rev. Sharpton's financial chicanery of unpaid debts, lawsuits, borrowing, and credit card scams. His campaign is reportedly $500,000 in debt.

His former South Carolina campaign manager says he quit when Rev. Sharpton asked him to rent - and pay for - a storefront headquarters. The campaign man-ager was already owed many weeks' salary.

Rev. Sharpton has not disputed any of Mr. Barrett's facts; he's only attacked Mr. Barrett on a personal level - just as he has been lashing out at fellow blacks lately, including Rep. Charles Rangel, Virginia Fields, Ron Daniels, and Bill Lynch. He is blaming everyone but himself for his bad showing in South Carolina. Rev. Sharpton has always been brazenly unflappable in embarrassment, but now he seems to be falling apart.

This Sharpton-GOP alliance has been rumored for years. In my 1995 biography of Don King, I described how Rev. Sharpton had a desk in the office of racist Republican Senator Strom Thurmond and arranged for James Brown to make a commercial supporting Thurmond for re-election. I also reported that Rev. Sharpton had asked Thurmond to use his influence to block a Justice Department investigation into King.

Rev. Sharpton never runs for an office he might actually win, like the City Council. The real purpose of his presidential campaign is to get his hands on federal matching funds and to push aside his mentor, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, as the lead-ing national spokesman for black America. When he started running, he told me he would win South Carolina's primary the way Rev. Jackson did in 1984. He promised he would win New York City the way Rev. Jackson did in 1988.

In his mind, Rev. Sharpton is running against Rev. Jackson, not President Bush. He owes Rev. Jackson a concession speech.

It seems unlikely he will come close to Rev. Jackson's 1988 accomplishment, which electrified the black community and set in motion the events of David Dinkins's election in 1989.

Rev. Sharpton campaigns here after getting less than 20% of the black vote in South Carolina and with most black leaders here supporting other candidates, including Mr. Rangel, Mr. Dinkins, Ms. Fields, Bill Perkins, and Greg Meeks.

Rev. Sharpton often says he comes out of "The House of King," in an effort to identify himself with Martin Luther King and the glory of the civil rights movement. But, more accurately, Rev. Sharpton comes out of the house of Don King, his mentor in hustling grandiosity.

Continued...

The Bad Faith Reality

Ron Suskind, 10-17-04:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Ancient and Hermetic Order Of The Shrill FAQ, 9-16-04:

We are those who were once sane, fair, and balanced, and who have been driven into shrill unholy madness by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration.

You can't hide your liaison eyes.

Against the will of Sistani, guess who may be back on the ballot, waiting in the wings...

From The New Republic's Spencer Ackerman's IRAQ'd blog:

To use the shorthand "six major parties" is deeply misleading. There are four political parties included here that can fairly be called "major": The Kurdistan Democratic Party; the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan; the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI); and the Da'wa Party. The final two parties would be considered marginal were it not for the longtime patronage of the United States: Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National Accord and Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. (Yes, them again--apparently you can mislead the U.S. on intelligence about Iraq and then pass sensitive U.S. information to your longtime Iranian "liaison" and still not lose the support of the Pentagon and Vice President.)

As the Times notes, this is essentially calling the old Governing Council out of retirement to reprise their greatest hits--like "Hey! (Why Don't You Trust Me)" and the follow-up single, "Exiled (From Your Heart)." It's a curious arrangement. If the stated purpose is to curb Iranian influence, bringing Chalabi back into the mix is counterproductive.

The Sign of the Seal.

While Josh says Game. Set. Match., Laura Rozen, who has pictures, says The Sign of The Seal is flashing Game Over:

Game over.

"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al Qaqaa," said David A. Kay, a former American official who led the recent hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the vast site. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an I.A.E.A. seal."

One weapons expert said the videotape and some of the agency's photographs of the HMX stockpiles "were such good matches it looked like they were taken by the same camera on the same day."

Independent experts said several other factors - the geography; the number of bunkers; the seals on some of the bunker doors; the boxes, crates and barrels similar to those seen by weapon inspectors - confirm that the videotape was taken at Al Qaqaa.

"There's not another place that you would mistake it for," said Dean Staley, the KSTP reporter, who now works in Seattle.

The accidental news encounter began last year after the invasion, Mr. Staley recalled in an interview. Their Army unit arrived in the region on Friday, April 11, and made camp. The Fifth Battalion of the 101st Airborne's 159th Aviation Brigade flew helicopter missions from the camp in the Iraqi desert, moving troops and supplies to the front.

A week later, on Friday, April 18, two journalists recalled, they joined two soldiers who were driving in a Humvee to investigate the nearby bunkers. Among other things, wandering inside the cavernous buildings offered the prospect of relief from the desert sun.

"It was just by chance that we were able to go," said Joe Caffrey, the team's photographer. "They wanted to go out and we asked to tag along."

Mr. Caffrey provided The New York Times with the latitude and longitude of the camp, which places it between 1.5 and 3 miles southeast of Al Qaqaa bunkers. A commercial satellite photograph of the region shows that the camp was close to the storage site. Mr. Caffrey said the soldiers used bolt cutters to cut through chains with locks on them, as well as seals. He said the seals appeared to be lead disks attached to very thin wires that were wrapped around the doors of the bunker entrances, forming a barrier easily cut in two.

They visited a half dozen bunkers, he said. The gloomy interiors revealed long rows of boxes, crates and barrels, what independent experts said were three kinds of HMX containers shipped to Iraq from France, China and Yugoslavia.

The team opened storage containers, some of which contained white powder that independent experts said was consistent with HMX.

"The soldiers were pretty much in awe of what they were seeing," Mr. Caffrey recalled. "They were saying their E.O.D. - Explosive Ordinance Division, people who blow this kind of stuff up - would have a field day."

Here's more from KSTP showing the IAEA seals.

Those in denial need to find a new preoccupation. It was HMX and it went missing after the US should have been securing such sites.





Posted by Laura at October 28, 2004 11:41 PM

Tons more evidence of the mishandled occupation.

From Joshua Micah Marshall's excellent coverage of the al Qa Qaa Affair...

[ Where is Thomas Warrick these days, anyway? ]

Difficulties keeping the story straight.

In this article filed today by the AFP, Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita suggests that the explosives at al Qa Qaa may have disappeared even before American troops arrived on the scene.

"We do not know when -- if those weapons did exist at that facility -- they were last seen, and under whose control they were last in ... It's very possible -- certainly it's plausible -- that it was the Saddam Hussein regime that last had control of these things."

Di Rita went on to say that it is not clear whether the explosives were at the facility when US troops did their initial searches of the place for weapons of mass destruction and related materials.

But another Pentagon official who spoke to the Associated Press seems to disagree ...

At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said US-led coalition troops had searched Al-Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact. Thereafter the site was not secured by U.S. forces, the official said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.

Sad.

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