2007-02-14t13_43_31-08_00.jpgLanny Davis was on the Situation Room this morning lobbying for Ted Olson as a good AG candidate. He’s been doing this for a while. In an article endorsing Olsen in The Hill, Lanny speaks to his “fellow liberal Democrats” and therein lies the problem — Lanny is called upon to go and speak on behalf of liberals in these charades. Lanny isn’t a liberal, Lanny is a member of the Old Boy’s Club who nurses this bizarre commitment to “civility” even as he’s being clubbed about the head by his opponents:

[I]n Ted Olson, in my judgment, we will get a principled and independent thinker who will focus on the word “Justice” in the department’s name, even when some in the White House, or members of Congress from both parties, try to pressure him into partisan choices and decisions.

Right. Because Ted Olson, he’s no partisan. Lanny gives a rundown of Olson’s career which curiously leaves out his history with the Arkansas Project. Digby doesn’t. When Olson’s name first started to be bandied about in the spring, she wrote:

What an excellent idea. De-politicize the Justice Department with one of the guys who ran the Clinton witch hunt. I guess the Republicans think it’s still 2001 and Orrin Hatch is still Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. They can’t seem to grasp their changed circumstances.

Here’s an article from the NY Times from when they rammed Olsen through as solicitor general:

Underlying the dispute is the role Mr. Olson played, along with his wife, Barbara, during the Clinton presidency, when both engaged in harsh, even vituperative criticism of both President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Olson has never denied being a leading figure in anti-Clinton circles, but the dispute has involved his connection to a specific venture at The American Spectator known as the Arkansas Project.

The Arkansas Project was a venture at the magazine for which Richard Mellon Scaife donated $2.4 million to pay for negative research about the Clintons’ behavior in Arkansas. In sworn testimony before the committee, Mr. Olson has unequivocally denied knowledge of the project from 1994 into 1997.

”I was not involved in the origin, management or supervision of the Arkansas Project,” Mr. Olson testified under oath and repeated in written answers to the Judiciary Committee. Although he was involved in some of the negative Clinton articles at the magazine and even wrote some himself, he sought to make a distinction between those activities and those directly related to the Scaife-financed Arkansas Project.

Right:

The first meeting of the Arkansas Project took place in 1994 at Olson’s Washington law office and was attended by Olson, Stephen Boynton, Dave Henderson and others from the American Spectator and other Scaife-funded organizations, according to reporting by Jonathan Broder and Joe Conason. In a subsequent article about the extravagant, “tax-exempt” lifestyle of American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell, a third of whose $598,000 McLean, Va., home was owned by the nonprofit foundation that publishes the magazine, Salon obtained documents outlining “frequent visitors to Bob’s home/office for business purposes” and “dinners and meetings at RET’s home” in 1996 and 1997. Theodore Olson was among those “frequent visitors” — a list of whom reads like a who’s who of anti-Clinton journalists.

As reported by Salon’s Jake Tapper, Olson amended his response in a letter he sent to Leahy last week: “I do recall meetings, which I now realize must have been in the summer of 1997 in my office regarding allegations regarding what became known as the ‘Arkansas Project.’” Olson elaborates in the letter that he was the American Spectator’s attorney during the same period of time that the Arkansas Project took place. Olson also confirms that he did, in fact, convene a meeting about the Arkansas Project in his office prior to 1998. Of the 1994 meeting, he writes, “I do not recall the meeting described.” Olson adds, “I certainly was not involved in any such meeting at which a topic was using Scaife funds and the American Spectator to ‘mount a series of probes into the Clintons and their alleged crimes in Arkansas.’”

I think it’s time for Republicans to realize that their political hitmen are going to have to take a rest and go out into the private sector and make some millions for a while. I’m sure they’ll be back. They always come back. But right now, the VRWC needs to take a break. They aren’t installing any more dirty trickster, character assassins for the next two years. Nah guh happ’n.

Except it isn’t the Republicans, it’s Lanny Fucking Davis, who — as White House Counsel during the Clinton witch hunt — said that Scaife was “using it [his money] to destroy a president of the United States.” It’s not like he didn’t know what was happening, fer the love of gawd, he was there. And now he crawls on TV, like some battered housewife supreme, and recommends Olson for the AG spot? Well if even “liberal” Lanny Davis says he’s not a veteran hack but a fair and honest broker then he must be, right? And suddenly Olson is someone who has “bipartisan” support.  Cue the Washington Post.

I realize this is getting long but it’s worth recalling a Wolcott post that pretty much sums up Lanny Davis and the DC cultural sickness he represents:

I was traveling the cable dial this afternoon where I came upon a panel on CNBC’s Kudlow & Company just as Lanny Davis, his insipid, ingratiating grin firmly in place, was saying that he hoped Democrats wouldn’t “politicize” the Jack Abramoff situation but simply let the facts of the case emerge.

This is the sort of idiot we’re inflicted with, the perfect representative of the Beltway Democrat who cautions against politicizing anything remotely political for fear it might give David Broder a spot of indigestion. Imagine what the Newt Gingrich of the early nineties would have done if he had had something like this handed to him on a platter–he wouldn’t have sent it back to the kitchen. He would have worked it for everything it was worth, and more. But Beltway weenies are too timid and prissy to exploit a golden opportunity. Everyone knows the Abramoff scandal has “Republican” stencilled on every side of it and if you won’t/can’t use it to jump all over the Republican Party and the DeLay machine, what the hell are you even doing in the Democratic Party? As more details surface, the Abramoff cesspool is going to make the K-Street crowd and their Republicans on retainer look even worse than they do now, and here’s Davis waving the white cocktail napkin of surrender and urging preemptive pullback. Beltway Dems like Davis and the DLC crowd don’t want to politicize the Iraq war, or the Alito hearings, or the Katrina clusterfuck, or the NSA spying scandal; they shy away from every prospective fight and prevent any ongoing debate or controversy from gaining traction. Just as Jack Murtha’s bombshell was gaining momentum, in droops Joe Lieberman to back up the president with a gift-wrapped testimonial. Yes, I know Lanny Davis is not an elected official but he was representing the Democratic side along with Harold Ford against John Fund of WSJ and Arizona congressman Jeff Flake (R). Given how Davis was fawning over Flake (who was making mild reformist noises about the need to clean house)–saying that he wished he could vote for someone so bright and sensible–and how Ford was prudently urging us to stay the course in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was more of a barbershop quartet than a doubles match. Kudlow, of course, couldn’t have been more pleased by the civility and consensus shown by the fab four. Lanny Davis and Harold Ford were his kind of Democrats–reasonable, moderate, mainstream, and completely housebroken. They were good little guests.

Democrats are perceived as weak, ineffectual and useless because Lanny Davis keeps getting the chance to speak for them. Then they get boxed in and bludgeoned by the Republicans because they listen to him.

Ted Olson does not get a pass, and Lanny Davis needs to acknowledge who he is truly speaking for — the Ivy League entitlement set who talk about outrageous things in moderate tones and who obviously can never, ever do anything to disqualify themselves from public office.

Lanny needs to put a sock in it.

Related posts:

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  3. Lobbyist Lanny Davis: Liberals Should Give Up on Public Option
  4. DOJ Still Feels Ripples of CIA Leak; Lanny Breuer Still Has Conflicts
  5. Does Lanny Breuer Have a Conflict in the Cheney Interview FOIA Case?