Pirate Politician ~ Torturing tropical kittens to stop Rep. Jerry Weller (R-Ill.)
After learning from Professor Leeson how much law and order went into piratical governance, I couldn’t help but think that Rapidsea should host an occasional section called "Pirate Politician." I have just the candidate for September.
The political sphere is buzzing about Representative Jerry Weller (R-Illinois) who had made some misjudgments in revealing some paradisiacal land developments in Nicaragua. Then, this week, one of Weller’s aides, John Dusik, pushed Mike Flannery, a reporter from CBS2 in Chicago, down some stairs following Weller’s announcement that he will not seek reelection. You can read the CBS2 article here.
Politics can get really nasty during ethics investigations into corrupt practices, and there is often a tropical land deal mixed up in the mess of it all.
The Chicago Tribune had an article on September 7, 2007, called "Inside Rep. Weller’s Nicaragua land deal." Here’s a short excerpt:
Weller, a southwest suburban congressman with a fondness for Latin America, has sunk a large share of his investment capital into a land development in Nicaragua. But he didn’t declare the extent of his holdings on his required congressional disclosures, and he indicated dramatically different purchase prices for the land in American and Nicaraguan records.
They talk, too, about facilitating his investment through his support of the Central America Free Trade Agreement. This pact was supposed to be, in part, for the farmers and tractor makers in his district.
Whether you think that he is guilty or not, you have to wonder which side, if not both, is more obsessed about the tropical property. Was Weller obsessed with finding paradise or with the prospect of selling it off to people? Or did his critics pick out these deals because paradise looms in our hearts as an important, and fairly elusive, place that they could easily attack him for?
I believe it was Steven Spielberg who said that you can elicit a sympathetic response from an audience in a number of ways, but to take the route of, for example, torturing kittens is irresponsible of a film maker. Conjuring up evil images of bastardized tropical land deals is akin, for a place, to torturing kittens just for effect.
Then again, it looks like both sides know what was up. Weller is seeming more and more crooked to me with his goon pushing people down some stairs.
This story follows up on some presidential campaign fund-raising scandals. We heard a lot of attacks flying at Hillary Clinton with Hsu’s indictment, but Mitt Romney went by relatively unscathed with several scandals including one important one involving a fundraiser named Alan B. Fabian.
Fabian was Mitt Romney’s national finance committee co-chair at the start of this year and had personally contributed the maximum to his campaign. The scandal came in that he ran a computer-leasing scheme that allegedly defrauded major companies, including GE, of $32 million dollars, which he used to buy beachfront property and private jet time.
Isn’t it amazing how perception (in these two cases of tropical wrongdoing) is often more important and real than reality? This fact, along with hefty air conditioning and substantial irrigation, makes Arizona feel a lot more like a paradise than it should, just as Los Angeles did during the early days of the 20th century.
If only these pirate politicians would come here to Rapidsea and realize that they have just been pre-programmed to believe that they need these escapist, expensive things. They want them so much that they are willing to steal and lie to have them in their lives instead of turning to their own homes and finding real value there — along with a desire to make them better for those stray kitties.
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Posted on September 22, 2007
Filed Under Government, Pirate Politicians, Pirates, Politics | 3 Comments
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