Politics: Another Friday Lesson

We'll start today's "the end is near" roundup with a trip down the front page of the Washington Post, the only major east coast newspaper not to lose two editors this month. The Post takes an uncharacteristically agressive stance in a Tom Edsall piece on a hideous but true fact about life in these United States: Votes get bought. World-reknowned scourge and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay along with Rep. Joe Barton (Tex.), Rep. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (La.) and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.) are written about in memos from an energy corporation like they are all lined up on an endcap at the Target: priced to sell. Read on:

Executives of a Kansas-based energy company believed that $56,500 in donations to political groups linked to four key Republican lawmakers last year would prompt Congress to exempt their firm from a problematic federal regulation, according to documents disclosed as part of a federal investigation of the company.

One executive of Westar Energy Inc. told colleagues in an e-mail that "we have a plan for participation to get a seat at the table" of a House-Senate conference committee on the Bush administration's energy plan. The cost, he wrote, would be $56,500 to campaign committees, including some associated with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.), Rep. Joe Barton (Tex.), Rep. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (La.) and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.).

The e-mail said Tauzin and Barton "made this request" for donations, and Shelby "made a substantial request" for another candidate. It not specify a direct request from DeLay.

Hint: Keep looking, and I'll bet they'll find some word from DeLay.

Pete Yost at the Associate Press also includes this little nugget which I will subtitle "Welcome to the world of buying and selling influence, you poor, stupid little man:"

In a May 20, 2002, e-mail, a Westar executive asked why he was writing checks to Republican congressional candidates whose names he didn't recognize in amounts far in excess of what he had earlier understood he would have to spend.

"Happy to give but earlier ... memo had me giving I think $300-400 per candidate. I am confused," the executive wrote.

A quick reply came back.

"You probably didn't get a copy of the memo sent internal mail on Friday about the current legislative issue in Washington," a Westar executive wrote. "Right now, we have $11,500 in immediate needs for a group of candidates associated with Tom DeLay, Billy Tauzin, Joe Barton and Senator Richard Shelby."

DeLay's fundraising committee drew what looks to be the largest single donation of about $25,000.

Next up on today's docket is the Post cover story no-one reads on lax enforcement of the Clean Water Act by the Environmental Protection Agency. In a past life a certain Liquid List editor whose name rhymes with Parek was intimately involved with the federal and local action plan for enforcing and informing the public about the quality of drinking water in America. The basic system for monitoring involves a lot of nosing around in water authorities checking for about three of the ninety things that can harm people. Then you tell them about it long after they have consumed those pathogens and there isn't anything they can do about it.

Imagine how hard it would be to screw up a system which basically doesn't do anything useful. Yet they have! A months-old EPA review shows that plenty of water authorities have exceeded the toxic substances limits, often by 100 percent or more. And the fines against these massive corporations and state utilities? If there are any fines at all, they average around $6,000.

But the fines aren't the problem, of course, it's the public health. 14 states have "significant noncompliance" and what's worse is, there is strong resistance to researching and understanding how this constant low-level exposure to toxins like mercury and vectors like fecal matter affects human health. Shouldn't the ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY want to understand how the ENVIRONMENT affects health?

Guess not.

Now let's take a quick leap over the red states and into the steamy confines of Los Angeles, where the L.A. Times gives us a jarringly realistic update from former U.K. Foreign Minister Robin Cook. Cook resigned over the Iraq war, which makes him about the most principled British politician who is undoubtedly running for office that I know of. Of course, I also know no other British politicians. But Cook's sounds are biting:

When the Cabinet of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government discussed the dossier on Hussein's WMD, I argued that I found the document curiously derivative. It set out what we knew about Hussein's chemical and biological arsenal at the time of the 1991 Gulf War. It then leaped to the conclusion that Hussein must still possess all those weapons.

There was no hard intelligence of a current weapons program that would represent a new and compelling threat to our interests. Nor did the dossier at any stage admit the basic scientific fact that biological and chemical agents have a finite shelf life — a principle understood by every pharmacist. Go to your medicine chest and check out the existence of an expiration date on nearly everything you possess. Nerve agents of good quality have a shelf life of about five years and anthrax in liquid solution of about three years. Hussein's stocks were not of good quality. The Pentagon itself concluded that Iraqi chemical munitions were of such poor standard that they were usable for only a few weeks.

Even if Hussein had destroyed none of his arsenal from 1991, it would long ago have become useless.

So why did Rumsfeld build a case for war on a false claim of Hussein's capability? Enter stage right (far right) his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, a man of such ferociously reactionary opinion that he has at least the advantage to his department of making Rumsfeld appear reasonable. Wolfowitz has now disclosed: "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on weapons of mass destruction because it was the one issue everyone could agree on.''

Decoded, what his remarks mean is that the Pentagon went along with allegations of weapons of mass destruction as the price of getting U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and the British government on board for war. But the Pentagon probably did not believe in the case then, and it certainly cannot prove it now.

Wait a second. We were lied to? I'm shocked!

Okay. Let's break for lunch.