Getting Rid of Murtha

[Tiger in Spain 0]

I think there are valid arguments for staying, and I see valid arguments for phasing a withdrawal. It is very unfortunate that whatever merits those two positions may have cannot simply be discussed rationally without having one's patriotism or support for the troops questioned.

If the libs would voice their concerns in a manner other than what they are doing now, they would stand a better chance of actually being heard. But to have these people, the same people over and over, find the nearest microphone and yap on and on that "we can not win this war", "our soldiers are murdering people in cold blood", "we need to withdraw immediately before it gets worse", ""If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings.", etc (the list goes on and on)

If this is what libs consider "supporting the troops", keep your damn "support." I for one do not want it. I think they are confused as to which troops they are supposed to be supporting.

[AURaptor 1,126]

There you go again. Misunderstanding everything. There was never much here about Cunningham.

Jefferson was removed by the democrats prior to an indictment even being issued. It is unprecedented. Some of the CBC protested, key players, like Rangel and Lewis, did not. He hasn't been charged with anything. Cunningham stayed until he copped a plea. Nothing was ever done to him by the Repugs.

I'm not misundestanding anything. I've already stated why there wasn't much of anything here about Cunningham. Jefferson was removed after he had $ 90 k in marked bills found in his FREEZER. And he was caught on tape accepting those very same bills. I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation, of course....... :huh:

[Jenny AU-92 0]

The Duke not only stole, he sold his vote and influence directly for excessive and totally unneeded luxuries.  He stole tax dollars from the hardworking men and women who pay taxes and handed it over to the corrupt military-industrial complex that Republican and General Eisenhower warned us about 45 years ago.

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Did my Abscam post above get overlooked? I guess Murtha was just gonna donate the bribes he was negotiating with the "Arabs" to charity?

By 1980, Murtha was a lieutenant of Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill and was moving to the top in the House when the FBI named him as one of eight members of Congress videotaped being offered bribes by a phony Arab sheik.

The other seven congressional targets took cash and were convicted in federal court. The videotape showed Murtha declining to take cash but expressing interest in further negotiations, while bragging about his political influence. Murtha testified against the popular Rep. Frank Thompson in the Abscam case, which created lifelong enemies in the Democratic cloakroom.The House Ethics Committee exonerated Murtha of misconduct charges by a largely party-line vote, after which the committee's special counsel resigned in protest.

[Tigermike 3,046]

The Duke not only stole, he sold his vote and influence directly for excessive and totally unneeded luxuries.  He stole tax dollars from the hardworking men and women who pay taxes and handed it over to the corrupt military-industrial complex that Republican and General Eisenhower warned us about 45 years ago.

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Did my Abscam post above get overlooked? I guess Murtha was just gonna donate the bribes he was negotiating with the "Arabs" to charity?

By 1980, Murtha was a lieutenant of Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill and was moving to the top in the House when the FBI named him as one of eight members of Congress videotaped being offered bribes by a phony Arab sheik.

The other seven congressional targets took cash and were convicted in federal court. The videotape showed Murtha declining to take cash but expressing interest in further negotiations, while bragging about his political influence. Murtha testified against the popular Rep. Frank Thompson in the Abscam case, which created lifelong enemies in the Democratic cloakroom.The House Ethics Committee exonerated Murtha of misconduct charges by a largely party-line vote, after which the committee's special counsel resigned in protest.

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Jenny, there is much more dirt under the Murtha carpet, but in their world only Republicans should be exposed.

Rep. Jack Murtha, Democrat, Pennsylvania, has made quite a name for himself by rabidly attacking our military involvement in Iraq. It seems disingenuous that someone who for years has opportunistically touted his own service during wartime, Murtha has not shown an ounce of respect for the men and women under fire in Jihadistan. He has accused soldiers of committing atrocities and the military brass of covering it up, and he has labeled the war strategy as incompetent and is looking for an immediate pullout of all our forces from the region. Well, the anti-war Left that made Murtha their poster child might be interested in knowing that Happy Jack was the largest recipient of defense-industry dollars in the 2006 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Did you know that Jack Murtha was the largest recipient of defense-industry dollars in the 2006 election cycle?

Murtha used his political clout to get the U.S. Navy to move the Hunters Point Shipyard to San Francisco in 2004, while Nancy Pelosi's nephew was an executive of the company that owned rights to the land. In addition, Murtha's brother runs a lobbying firm that received more than $20 million from last year's defense-spending bill. Murtha also supported earmarks in defense-spending legislation that translated into millions of dollars worth of business for companies owned by the children of fellow Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski. If all this still isn't enough to make you wonder about Jack Murtha's ethics, then think back to 1980's Abscam debacle, in which the FBI named Murtha as an unindicted co-conspirator.

But as Tex says of Murtha, "a politician taking a position that I think they sincerely believe." I believe you Tex when you say Murtha is beyond reproach.

If anyone is a poster boy, Fat Jack Murtha fits the bill.

[TexasTiger 12,992]

The Duke not only stole, he sold his vote and influence directly for excessive and totally unneeded luxuries.  He stole tax dollars from the hardworking men and women who pay taxes and handed it over to the corrupt military-industrial complex that Republican and General Eisenhower warned us about 45 years ago.

242821[/snapback]

Did my Abscam post above get overlooked? I guess Murtha was just gonna donate the bribes he was negotiating with the "Arabs" to charity?

By 1980, Murtha was a lieutenant of Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill and was moving to the top in the House when the FBI named him as one of eight members of Congress videotaped being offered bribes by a phony Arab sheik.

The other seven congressional targets took cash and were convicted in federal court. The videotape showed Murtha declining to take cash but expressing interest in further negotiations, while bragging about his political influence. Murtha testified against the popular Rep. Frank Thompson in the Abscam case, which created lifelong enemies in the Democratic cloakroom.The House Ethics Committee exonerated Murtha of misconduct charges by a largely party-line vote, after which the committee's special counsel resigned in protest.

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Yeah, I read your Robert Novak attack piece. I looked around the internet and found the same innuendo and characterization in a number of conservative sites, all stemming from the same right wing source. The only hard facts are that the FBI offered 8 congressman $50,000 and 7 of them took it. One clearly said, "Not interested." And one congressman testified against a member of his own party who was crooked. Best I've been able to tell, saying he was "interested in further negotiations" is a characterization that I may or may not agree with if I carefully reviewed all the evidence myself, which I haven't had the opportunity to do. I know he was cleared, which when that happens to a Republican seems to end the story with most folks on this board.

Murtha is hardly my hero or spokesman, but as is often the case on this board, I find myself pointing out attacks that I don't believe are fair or substantiated. No one on the Right hated Murtha when he was a strong backer of this war, or the last one, or the one before that. Right after he changes his position on the war, now we are dragging up a sting operation from 27 years ago in which he was the ONLY congressman not to take the money and saying, "Ah hah! Scumbag!" Same old song and dance, Republican character assasination. If his position is so obviously wrong, point that out. If it is so obviously wrong, why is he such a threat? If he is so misguided, make that case. Instead, every opponent is made out to be a scumbag.

Here's another point of view from someone who has watched Murtha represent his district for years. Is it unbiased? Don't know. Maybe not. But he certainly predicted the Right Wing's next move with stunning accuracy. Is Novak's article unbiased? Please.

They don't know Jack

Sunday, November 20, 2005

By Dennis Roddy

Moments after Walter Cronkite, fresh home from Saigon, declared that the war in Vietnam could not be won and the troops should come home, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a political giant unaccustomed to retreat, knew he was finished.

"If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America," Johnson said.

From that moment in 1968, the Vietnam War consisted of a long, fatal denouement, every death a profound indictment not of a bad decision in 1964, but corrupt indecision between Tet 1968 and the day Richard Nixon welcomed home the POWs.

The loss of Vietnam rankled John Murtha deeply. I know this because I knew him 30 years ago, when I was a college sophomore and worked in the 1974 campaign that sent him to Congress. In a wretched little cubbyhole office on lower Bedford Street in Johnstown, I went through the Murtha family photo album looking for things to use in a brochure. One thing that stood out was a photograph of a photograph next to a framed document. It was Marine Reserve Maj. John Murtha's orders to Vietnam, next to his service photo.

He argued his way into Vietnam -- wanted to go, and once wrote an article for a service magazine about how the war could be won through motivation and leadership. The photo was fuzzy, faded and graphically useless even as it spoke with clarity about the man the Conemaugh Valley was about to send to Washington.

In Congress, Rep. Murtha has been a hawk among doves, a man filled with political acumen and suspicious of anything smelling of the post-Watergate reforms others in his congressional class embraced. When U.S. troops went to Lebanon, Mr. Murtha went to see them. When we invaded Grenada, he cheered them on. When America dabbled in El Salvador, he supported aid to defeat a communist insurgency.

Mr. Murtha was, in short, Johnstown: a place where working people expect others to work, are slow to embrace the new, and will happily join up for a war so long as the cause is good and they are sent there to win. Cambria County, in which Johnstown is the lone city, cast aside the leftover traditions of the New Deal last year and voted for George W. Bush. They voted for Mr. Bush because they believed him when he said the Iraq war was necessary, and because they accepted his sincerity about banning abortion, saving their guns and restoring old values that fit them like their fathers' steel-toed work boots. In short, they voted for George W. Bush because they believed he was like John P. Murtha.

Last week, with Walter Cronkite off the airwaves, and a once-aggressive press more than two decades at bay, George W. Bush lost Jack Murtha.

He lost Middle America.

Every death in Iraq from this moment on will be a mark of shame, first upon the president who took us there under an erroneous pretense, then upon a Congress that allows any more men and women to die while they cast about for a new pretense for staying.

But where Lyndon Johnson was a political giant, unwilling to lash out in revenge, President Bush is not. What remains ahead for Mr. Murtha is so obvious as to be harmless to him even as it is toxic to governance. Vice President Dick Cheney fired one of the first shots, questioning the congressman's judgment and, by implication, his honor.

"I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done," Mr. Murtha responded.

Expect Mr. Murtha's patriotism to fall into question. His morality in office will be questioned. Possibly his enemies will assign him Tom DeLay's finances and Bill Clinton's libido.

Soon the Swift Boaters will be afloat, suggesting that Mr. Murtha's Vietnam service was a charade (he won a Bronze Star), and that his Purple Hearts were undeserved. The Purple Heart gambit has been played before, first in 1982, then just last year. The answer to this nonsense will be the one that gave Mr. Murtha such cache as both a candidate and a member of Congress: big wound or small, he got it in Vietnam. He was there. They were not.

The second brick destined to crash through the Murtha family parlor window is Abscam. Mr. Murtha was one of eight members of Congress lured to a Washington townhouse by a team of FBI agents posing as representatives of a fictitious Arab sheik. They handed out briefcases filled with $50,000 in return for helping the sheik gain residency in the United States.

Mr. Murtha is on videotape telling the agents, "Not interested," but inviting the sheik to invest a few million in his struggling hometown, where unemployment reached 25 percent.

Mr. Murtha's probity might have been in doubt at that moment. Certainly he played the political coquette, suggesting they might do business later.

But where his companions were stuffing their pockets, he was trying to figure out how to get a fake prince to open a factory in Johnstown. Among agents of the government operating a fantasy, Mr. Murtha was attempting to get something real accomplished. That is what he is like.

Now, having learned through Abscam that good intentions cannot be achieved by appealing to false premises, Mr. Murtha is applying the same fresh truth to the Iraq war.

No man has more credibility on issues military and certainly none represents a district more attuned to the values Mr. Bush professes to love.

If Jack Murtha's district stands behind him on this, the Bush administration has lost that part of the body politic wherein the heart is kept.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05324/609044.stm