King Ralph... or not

Yesterday Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition, failed in his bid to become the Lieutenant Governor of Georgia. He lost the primary to a State Senator named Casey Cagle.

Reed is a political operative who has wrapped himself in a metaphorical Shroud of Turin, using the Bible as a cover for some of the most sickening misdeeds ever to come on the political scene. This is a guy who promoted an attempt to keep an Indian tribe in Louisiana from opening a casino on their reservation, presumably out of "respect for morality", when in fact he was BEING PAID by a RIVAL Indian tribe to keep the competition at bay.

This is a guy, in the tradition of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, who actually talked about cashing in on elederly black churchgoers:

In advance of its August publication date, GQ has released a big piece on Ralph Reed today, with one gem in particular: a plan hatched by Reed and Jack Abramoff which sounds suspiciously like "mortgaging old black people," as a former Reed associate told the magazine.

In July of 2003, Abramoff and Reed considered launching something called the Black Churches Insurance Program.

We know how this scheme would have gone, because Abramoff pitched something similar to a cash-strapped Texas tribe, the Tigua. Basically, since the tribe couldn't pay Abramoff, he offered to arrange "a life-insurance policy for every Tigua 75 or older." When those elders died, the death benefits would have gone to Abramoff through one of his non-profits. The Tigua didn't take Abramoff up on the offer, but it was too good of an idea to let go.

So Abramoff apparently thought black churches were a good target. This would have been the same thing, according to GQ's Sean Flynn, except that it was African-Americans. Or as "a former associate of Reed's" told GQ, "Yeah... it sounds like Jack approached Reed about mortgaging old black people.”

And Reed was into it. After all, he and Abramoff have been friends since their days at the College Republicans in the 80s.

It's extremely hard to shock me at this point. But taking people's life insurance policies from them as payment? Profiting from their deaths? Even I'm bowled over by the evil of that scheme.

I suppose it's cheering that Reed couldn't get elected by his own party in Georgia. He's a flim-flam artist who deserves the jail term that it increasingly looks like he may get, given his ties to Abramoff and the violations of the law which that entailed.