An interesting find by the folks over at Tapped, the running weblog of The American Prospect. The ostensible purpose of posting an article from 1985 is to point out that Jack Abramoff was a crooked scumbag twenty years ago, just as he is a crooked scumbag today. Anyway, here's what Tapped reproduces. (Look it's Sidney B)
Staff Shakeup Hits Conservative Group; 7 Fired at Lehrman's Citizens for America
By Sidney Blumenthal, Washington Post Staff Writer
The national leadership staff of Citizens for America, a conservative group headed by drugstore magnate Lewis Lehrman, was fired or prompted to resign last week amid charges of mismanaged funds.
Lehrman sped from political obscurity to national prominence, particularly among conservatives, with his surprisingly effective 1982 gubernatorial campaign against Democrat Mario M. Cuomo in New York, which Lehrman lost by a margin of 2 percentage points. Since then Lehrman has used Citizens for America (CFA) largely as a personal vehicle to keep his name and trademark red suspenders in the political spotlight.
According to Lehrman's friends, he still has political ambitions and is considering challenging Cuomo next year if the governor seeks reelection and a national campaign in 1988. One of those fired last week from CFA said the organization was "gutted." But Lehrman said in a telephone interview that he remains "very optimistic" about the organization's future.
Last week seven members of the CFA national staff were fired or quit. Apparently, Lehrman concluded that the organization's $3 million budget was being mishandled, although he declined to comment on the reasons for the shakeup. (In the previous six months, more than half the staff of 40 had left the organization, CFA sources said.)
Lehrman has not been closely involved in the group's day-to-day activities. Instead, he has raised money and traveled.
In early June, Lehrman went to Angola, where CFA staged a conference featuring four anticommunist guerrilla movements. There he gave framed copies of the Declaration of Independence to Afghan, Laotian, Nicaraguan and Angolan rebels.
When he returned, he discovered that he was "boxed out of the bookkeeping" of CFA, according to one of his personal aides. He sent in his private lawyer. "It was one big party," Lehrman's aide said. Jack Abramoff, executive director of CFA, and other members of the staff Abramoff had hired "had gone hog wild," Lehrman's aide -- who declined to be identified -- said. The financial "mismanagement" and "lavish spending," the Lehrman aide said, is still being untangled.
On July 15, Abramoff resigned. All those staff members associated with him no longer are associated with CFA. Abramoff could not be reached for comment. Grover Norquist, the former CFA national field director, is in South Africa, according to a CFA spokesman. [Gary] Willett, the former CFA comptroller, said, "Everything from my end is off the record."
So Abramof is bad and blah blah blah...I know. It's important for Tapped to point out, but I know. What I'm really interested in is what the Republican candidate for governor of New York is doing in Angola, giving out awards to Jonas Savimbi and crew. Savimbi and UNITA are responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Angola's fifteen year civil war. Don't give me this freedom-fighter bullshit. These guys were fighting for power and money, mainly in the form of diamonds and oil. And here we have a major a Republican figure (by mid 1980s standards) handing these fucks awards.
Meanwhile, Grover Norquist, the guy who has had his hand in everything the GOP has done for the past decade, is in South Africa somewhere. What do you suppose he's doing there? Petitioning the apartheid government to release Nelson Mandela? Not bloody likely. While Dick Cheney was occupied voting against resolutions in the House of representatives calling for Mandela's release, guys like Norquist were busy denouncing Mandela as a terrorist and communist sympathizer.
These guys didn't care about democracy then, they don't care about democracy now. Period.