Songbird

This is rich. Jack Abramoff's talking to Vanity Fair, and he doesn't like being dissed. The whole long article is in .pdf format, and therefore hard to excerpt without transcribing in full, but suffice to say that Abramoff openly laughs at this notion that all these Washington insiders didn't know him. "For a guy who did all these evil things that have been so widely reported, it's pretty amazing, considering I didn't know anyone," says Abramoff, and then he (along with the authors and investigators) detail connections to Rove, Mehlman, Gingrich, Norquist, Bush, Boehner, DeLay, the whole lot of them.

I'm a bit surprised that Abramoff is acting the martyr here. Surely he knows that Republicans cut their felons loose the moment they give them any trouble. It's practically a sport in DC. Any time anyone criticizes the Party, the line is "well, he's not a real conservative" or "he wasn't a major player." The list of luminaries for whom the President has selective amnesia is long and illustrious (Lay, Chalabi, I could go on and on and on). Surely Jack knew that this would happen. It's like Henry Hill in GoodFellas, when he goes to jail and his wife wonders if she could ask mob boss Paulie for some money. "Karen, no! We're on our own now. Nobody's going to help us while I'm in here."

The article is certainly a fun and juicy read, and it portends the real scandal to come, as an angry Abramoff is an Abramoff who will name names.