Schaffer and the Marianas scandal: Denver Post headline says it all

The Denver Post pushes the Bob Schaffer/Marianas Islands/Jack Abramoff story further today, Bobby adds some context, while the Post headline says it all:

Schaffer/lobbyist strategies meshed

Bob Schaffer and his campaign continue to try and spin the Abramoff/Marianas story and claim that he has never known Jack Abramoff. But the Denver Post's latest installment in the breaking Schaffer/Abramoff/Marianas story today adds more details that connect the dots and show that Bob Schaffer worked in lock-step with Abramoff and the convicted lobbyist's Marianas clients to whitewash human rights abuses in the islands and kill any attepts at reform in Congress:

In early 1998, now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff sent a secret memo to a textile tycoon on the Northern Mariana Islands, an American protectorate whose garment factories had been heavily criticized for squalid working conditions and abusive labor practices.

The lobbying plan focused on using congressional oversight hearings to change the subject from factory conditions to political shenanigans by the Clinton administration. Abramoff's lobbying team would prepare questions and "factual backup" for friendly lawmakers. Trips to the island for congressmen and staff would be a key tool to "build permanent friends," the memo said.

The linchpin would be an attack on the Interior Department's Office of Insular Affairs (OIA), which was the lead agency pushing for reform.

Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff were two peas in a pod on this disgusting project. But DeLay couldn't do stuff like this alone, he had to get many House members on board to create legislative legitmacy.

Bob Schaffer fit that bill.

Schaffer's friend DeLay is now under indictment - not for this yet; his not yet confirmed friend Jack Abramoff is in jail - cluing in the FBI, one would think, so he gets out of jail sometime this century. Jack has small children just like Bob. (And now we can see another reason to game US Attorneys at the Justice Department.)

And Bob Schaffer cluelessly runs for Senate against the eminently upstanding Mark Udall. Bob Schaffer will be lucky now to escape indictment this year, let alone win a Senate seat in Colorado.