Ralph Reed Going Down?

    Here's hoping that this election season takes out a few of the worst Republican operatives and leaders. Rick Santorum is a possible loser in his Senate race in Pennsylvania. Today, The New York Times has a piece about the possible demise of Ralph Reed. I think it's particularly lovely to watch people like Reed, who spread so much rhetoric about Christian values, take into the chin for, guess what, the very un-Christian behavior of lobbying for casino interests and maybe even taking some Indian tribes for a ride:

The lobbying scandal is not an easy one to boil down to a 30-second spot. According to the charges against Mr. Abramoff, Indian tribes with casinos paid Mr. Reed to drum up religion-based anti-gambling sentiment against competing casinos, using Mr. Abramoff as a go-between. Mr. Reed now says he believed Mr. Abramoff’s assurances that he was not being paid with gambling money.

“Had I known then what I know now,” he has said repeatedly, “I would not have undertaken the work.”

Yet e-mail messages released by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee make it clear that Mr. Reed knew who was paying him and suggest that he helped funnel the money through other entities to disguise its source. On Wednesday, a Texas Indian tribe filed suit against the lobbyist and four associates, including Mr. Reed, accusing them of “greed, corruption and deceit.”

Mr. Reed’s critics seized on the scandal as proof that he had deployed his Christian supporters for profit. “Ralph Reed sold out our values,” Mr. Cagle’s advertisements say, calling him “hypocritical and immoral” and accusing him of “manipulating Christians for casinos.”

They also cite a little-noted aspect of the link between Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Reed, saying Mr. Reed helped defend an economic system in the Northern Mariana Islands, a United States commonwealth not subject to minimum wage laws, that fostered exploitation of immigrant workers, particularly women. In one commercial, the words “forced abortions” appear next to a grinning Mr. Reed. Mr. Reed’s campaign manager has called the link preposterous.

    Hypocrisy will come back to bite you, Ralph. Read the rest of the story here.