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Five (or six) weddings and a fundraiser

By ROBERT FRIEDMAN
Published May 15, 2005

U.S. Rep. Mike Bilirakis says he'll "let (the public) judge" whether he did anything wrong in taking eight all-expense-paid trips to Las Vegas over the past eight years from special-interest groups trying to influence his congressional votes.

Okay, let's judge:

Morally obtuse? Check. Hypocritical? Check.

"There's no magic to it," Bilirakis, a Tarpon Springs Republican, told the Times' Anita Kumar. "I enjoy being at a particular location. I like organized casino gambling. I like going through the looking glass into fantasy world."

Well, all of us enjoy being at a particular location, although many of Bilirakis' constituents may be surprised to learn that the particular location Bilirakis enjoys, over and over, is one of the most decadent ones on the planet. But unlike Bilirakis, most of us pay our own way to the locations we enjoy.

Bilirakis' blackjack and craps holidays at the Bellagio and Paris Las Vegas were paid for by groups such as the Consumer Electronics Association and National Association of Broadcasters. And anyone who has ever spent two minutes around Bilirakis knows those groups weren't paying the congressman for the chance to share his clever repartee.

Give Bilirakis credit for this much: He's under no illusion that the people subsidizing his junkets are his best buddies. That puts him ahead of state Rep. Trey Traviesa, R-Tampa, who earlier this year gave the Times' Steve Bousquet this excuse for taking wads of money from Tallahassee lobbyists just before a legislative-session moratorium took effect. "I have relationships with these people already," Traviesa said. "They're friends."

That makes Traviesa as delusional as the gentleman's club patron who convinces himself that Cinnamon really does have a thing for him. Except Traviesa is the one with twenties stuffed in his thong.

The Legislature finished its session earlier this month without getting around to approving Senate President Tom Lee's plans for cleaning up the kind of lobbying that is so mutually beneficial for people like Traviesa and his "friends." I'm sure our lawmakers will get around to it next year.

Another mitigating factor for Bilirakis: His subsidized travels aren't unusual for Congress. In fact, House Republican Leader Tom DeLay's junkets to Saipan, Scotland and points in between make Bilirakis look like the "homebody" he claims to be.

Nor are Bilirakis' ties to gambling all that unusual among conservative Republicans. For example, the extremely moral Ralph Reed has profited from casino interests in ways that dwarf Bilirakis' gambling junkets. Back when Reed was director of the Christian Coalition, he called gambling "a cancer on the American body politic" that is "stealing food from the mouths of children." But that was before Reed's consulting firm quietly took $4-million from a group of casino owners trying to keep rival casinos out of their territory.

Reed now claims he was duped by lobbyist Jack Abramoff - the same slippery fixer at the heart of DeLay's most serious problems - and didn't realize his $4-million came from those people who steal food from the mouths of children. But Reed, who is running for lieutenant governor of Georgia, is about as gullible as Dick Cheney, and his alibi isn't playing well even among his usual political allies.

There's something especially galling about the lawmakers who lecture the rest of us on morality when their mouths are empty and then turn around and stuff their faces at the lobbyists' trough once the cameras are turned off.

Democrats controlled Congress for decades until voters finally noticed their leaders had become caricatures of corruption and corpulence. But at least characters such as Tip O'Neill and Dan Rostenkowski seemed happy for everybody else to have almost as much fun as they did. Today's most prominent moralizers - many of whom look as though they are about to burst from suet and self-regard - have zero tolerance for everyone else's sins and unlimited tolerance for their own.

Bilirakis apparently decided to take full advantage of the Bill Bennett Exception, named for the self-appointed national scold who was notably lenient on himself after his own out-of-control gambling was exposed. It turns out that the rest of us were supposed to have understood that when Bennett railed on and on about decadence, he wasn't talking about that kind of decadence.

Fortunately, at least some of our leaders still practice the traditional values they preach and are willing to stand up to anyone who claims otherwise.

For example, Seminole County Republican Party chairman Jim Stelling sued Nancy Goettman, a fellow Republican official who wrote a letter to state party leaders that claimed Stelling had been married six times. The letter, which Stelling called "unconscionable," may have prevented Stelling from becoming state Republican chairman. He lost a runoff for the position days after the letter was disseminated.

"I believe in family values," Stelling said during last week's trial, explaining why he felt the need to file suit to clear his name.

Stelling told the court the letter defamed him, because he has, in fact, been married only five times.

The judge prevented Goettman, who served as her own lawyer, from pursuing several lines of questioning, including her attempts to force Stelling to tell the court how many times he has patronized Rachel's, a local strip club.

In the end, Stelling won his suit, but the judge ruled he had suffered no financial damage and awarded him no money. Nevertheless, Stelling said the verdict succeeded in "restoring my good name."

We'll let the public judge that.

Robert Friedman is editor of Perspective. He can be reached at friedman@sptimes

[Last modified May 15, 2005, 01:21:24]