Golflogic.ca

Good news for Canadians: better tee times this summer.
 
Lots of Republican golfers won’t be coming up this way any time soon.  You see, this past January the Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives vigorously launched into ethics legislation, which banned golf junkets on corporate jets used for government business. These new laws were part of an effort by legislators to clean up Washington’s culture of corruption, brought to an unprecedented level by Jack Abramoff, the top Republican lobbyist.
Abramoff, now serving an 11-year sentence in a Maryland minimum facility, is ratting out his colleagues in a plea bargain and is helping prosecutors win guilty pleas or convictions from a long list of his friends who were once among the rich and powerful.
 
What triggered the scandal were the costs of a “recreational” golf trip to St. Andrews, Scotland in 2003, led by the now-disgraced Abramoff.
 
These days, Abramoff might be in a work party wearing a safety orange jumpsuit along the highway. If he were allowed to talk to the public he could tell you about the time he and Tom Delay, majority whip of the House, flew across the Pacific in a charted plane to play golf at a luxury resort in the northern Marianas Islands in the South Pacific, paid for by special interest groups who wanted permission to keep Asian sweat shops in US territory. Abramoff could also tell you stories about the time he and his friends played the old course at St. Andrews and spent $156,000 for a few days of green fees and other legitimate political expenses. They flew there and back in a corporate jet. Abramoff now spends his time along the highway looking out at the tall fence surrounding his new home. He will seldom have enough space to swing a club. The only bag they will be carrying around is one that holds garbage or his laundry.
 
He is far from his country club set where he and his cohorts extorted, bribed and conned people into giving them tens of millions of dollars to leverage political clout in Washington. These include lobbyists, senior government officials, governors, Congressmen and appointed Bush cabinet members, who circumvented national security laws and the loathsome Patriot Act they helped legislate into existence.  Some twenty of them are under indictment, another twenty are already serving their sentence, while a dozen or more have been targeted for further indictments. 
The most chilling part is that Abramoff conducted his lobbying in such an arrogant manner that it makes federal investigators wonder whether he ever worried about getting caught.  
 
As for those who are now awaiting sentencing, their best days on the links are behind them. Their weekends will be spent preparing their testimony rather than teeing off. They will soon face the House Ethics and Rules Committee members.
 
“Sir, did you play golf in Scotland with Jack Abramoff?”