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FAMILY BUSINESS How many bodies can fit in the trunk of the presidential limo?
CERTAINLY THE Bush White House can't match the glamour and great writing on The Sopranos. But as the HBO show ended another riveting season, it wasn't difficult to see the similarities between Tony's mob and W's—except that the organized crime orchestrated out of the White House isn't just a fictional tv drama. From Dick Cheney's Halliburton payoffs and bribes, to Capo Rumsfeld and his crew of torturers, to consigliere Karl Rove's plotting to pop anyone who challenges the boss, it's looking more and more like La Cosa Nostra, complete with the bloody turf battles. Two weeks ago John Ashcroft and his crew moved in on Tom Ridge's terror territory, surely precipitating a sitdown. Then George Tenet got iced.
We all know how the Bush mob deals with those who violate the family's own brand of omerta. Former Treasury Sec. Paul O'Neill, former terrorism czar Richard Clarke and former ambassador Joe Wilson are just a few who got whacked hard, smeared as fantasizers, liars and lunatics. And let's not forget the particular brand of retribution that Wilson received from this White House: having his wife's undercover status as a CIA operative exposed, possibly undermining U.S. security around the world. Even HBO couldn't have dreamed up that one.
It should come as no surprise that the Bush gang cavorted with a thug as sleazy and ruthless as Ahmed Chalabi, only to later whack him too. And these are only the high-profile hits. The Bushies exact revenge more frequently—and more inconspicuously—than Tony Soprano himself on any given day. Last week, Washington, DC, Republican city council member David Catania was banished from the Republican National Convention, told that he could not be a delegate and work on the platform committee—because he'd crossed the president. Never mind that he had campaigned for Bush in 2000 after meeting with him and had raised more than $80,000 for Bush's re election campaign. The Bush mob put a contract out on Catania, an openly gay Republican, because he'd said that Bush's backing of a federal marriage amendment caused him to decide he couldn't support the president. The DC Republican Party chair Betsy Werronen was the designated hit woman, refusing to certify Catania's election as a delegate.
"At the end of the day, for us to certify a delegate for the convention, you have to support the re-election of the president," Werronen told reporter Lou Chibbaro Jr. at the Washington Blade, DC's gay weekly, though the party rules do not state that. (The rules only state that elected delegates must support the nominee for the Republican Party at the convention, something Cantania said he would do—he just wouldn't support Bush in the general election.)
Cantania doesn't know for sure that the orders came from on high, but he speculated to me that the national Republican Party and the Bush campaign had every reason to whack him as well as to keep him away from the cameras at the Republican Convention in New York. Cantania is a prominent gay Republican spokesperson, one of the so-called Austin 12 who met with Bush in 2000 and a man many consider a rising star in the party. He's one of the Republican Party's "mavericks," the label given to those younger than 40 who raise at least $50,000 for the Bush campaign. But Catania has been outspoken in recent months, strongly expressing his criticism of Bush.
"I am denouncing him," he'd said of Bush in March after the president came out for the FMA, determined to work against Bush's election.
The Bush mob doesn't tolerate that kind of talk, and Cantania had gone much further than the Log Cabin Republicans, who still will not say whether they will endorse Bush, but did run some television ads attacking Bush on his support of the FMA. When LCR criticized Bush in 2000—by going public about his refusal to meet with the group during a time when he was courting the religious right—Bush rubbed out LCR's leaders, sidelining them and later handpicking the group of gays (the Austin 12) with whom he would meet in an effort to show he was a "compassionate conservative." LCR spent the next four years sucking up and trying to regain some semblance of access. But then Bush went and supported the FMA and, darn, they were forced to take a stand again.
Now, for once again having an opinion and airing those anti-Bush television commercials, it looks like the Log Cabinites are getting whacked once more. Last week, James Driscoll, a Log Cabin member who sat on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) was told by HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson that he won't be reappointed to the council. (In a further example of how the AIDS council has been handed over to the fundies, Thompson has brought in a lawyer who ran one of Bush's faith-based initiative programs, Joseph Grogan, to head the AIDS council.)
According to the Washington Blade, "One PACHA source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Thompson, acting at the behest of the White House, was seeking to remove Driscoll and other gay Republicans from PACHA because of their ties to the national gay group Log Cabin Republicans."
Perhaps fearing retribution, Log Cabin head Patrick Guerriero denied there was a purge of gay Republicans and defended the Bush mob's honor.
"I don't think there's an ounce of evidence that this is happening," Guerriero told the Blade. "If I saw any evidence of this, I would be the first to speak out. I don't think it's happening."
What we do know is that those gays who remain closeted and work diligently within the Bush administration are allowed to stay and work their way up. The Blade also reported on "high ranking" gays within the campaign, and asked campaign manager Ken Mehlman—who has defended Bush's push for a federal marriage amendment—if he or anyone else in the campaign or the White House was gay. Mehlman, an unmarried 37-year-old, refused to answer questions about his own or anyone else's sexual orientation.
"[M]any gay Republicans, including some at Log Cabin, insist that there is in fact gay representation at the top level of the operation," the Blade reported. "But in an attempt to avoid an '80s-style outing campaign against prominent members of the party, members of Log Cabin and the Austin 12 have refused to divulge any information about the lives of Bush's closeted staffers." In other words, they'll honor omerta and protect the capos in the Bush mob at all costs. o
Volume 17, Issue 23
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