Murtha’s Ethical Past and Present
The Bear on Jun 16 2006 at 7:25 am | Filed under: Politics
Much is made by the media and the Democrats about Jack Murtha‘s heroic service in Vietnam, and his newfound and allegedly principled anti-war stance. Yesterday, I dealt with some of the likely motivations behind Murtha’s recent fiery denunciations of the Iraq War, our soldier’s morale and then his knee jerk accusations that our soldiers had murdered civilians in Haditha. Today, an astute reader, Lauren, provides a link whose sourcing from whom I liberally borrow, which may shed further light into the Congressman’s motives for his posturing–as it appears that ethical problems may have caused him to generate a smokescreen.
Murtha’s family ties to lobbying interests are now under investigation in the House after the 2005 appropriations bill, partially authored by Murtha, granted at least $9.5 million to at least four clients of a lobbying firm, KSA Consulting, where a former Murtha staffer and Murtha’s own brother, Robert “Kit” Murtha are principals. And it matters because Murtha is the ranking member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, in prime position to dole out pork to individuals in the defense industry who have the right connections.
The first signs of trouble for Murtha came this time last year with this L.A. Times article copiously detailing KSA clients, their contacts with Murtha, and awards to them with Murtha’s prints on them. And given that he believed that he was looking at the convening of an ethics probe per this article (which goes into further detail about Rep. Murtha’s colorful ethical past), Murtha apparently decided to avoid an embarrassment, and work a very effective PR end-run in November by adopting a bombastic leftist stance on the Iraq war that made him wildly popular with the media. Politically clever and morally reprehensible, and were that the sum of Murtha’s problems, it would be enough to disqualify him from opining as to the morality of the Iraq War. But we’re not even close to being done, as Murtha’s hands are unclean at least as far back as 1980.
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The Swiftboat-Rathergate patrol…
Right wing bloggers are licking their chops at the prospect of Dan Rathering TIME Magazine over the Haditha story. As a back-up, some of the chickenhawk defense patrol are preparing to Swiftboat John Murtha, just in case….