As Tom Delay’s chairmanship is chipped away by critics and prosecutors, we’re reminded how much water one of our local talk hosts, Rabbi Daniel Lapin (KTTH Sun. 7-10p) displaces in some of the shadier national Republican hog-wallows.
Two recent national press pieces underscored Lapin’s role in the breaking story that finds more Republicans each day peeling away from the mean, self-righteous, born-again loser. Some say only the power of prayer, or a deaf, dumb, blind (or well-paid) grand jury can save Delay.
You hear a lot of GOP meta-rada on the talking head shows about the innocence and ubiquity in Congress of Delay’s putting his family on his payroll. But what they’re not talking about is Delay’s mutually masturbatory relationship with sullied lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
He’s the gigantic tub of scum accused of--among many other things--bilking Indian tribes out of casino millions by promising to peddle his Congressional influence with the mighty Delay.
Who introduced Abramoff to Delay? Why, it was the jolly Mercer Island rabbi, Daniel Lapin. Abramoff is (or was) a boardmember of Lapin’s non-profit organization, Toward Traditon, as is, (or was) Michael Medved (KTTH, m-f, 12-3p). Another local connection: before his troubles, Abramoff worked as Seattle’s venerable law/lobbying firm, Preston Gates.
Frank Rich in Sunday’s (4-17) NY Times says he met the South African-born rabbi at a Christian Coalition convention in 1994.
He was regaling the crowd with scriptural passages proving that high taxes are "immoral." Now the show rabbi of the Christian right, Rabbi Lapin has moved on to bigger broadcast pulpits. When he's not preaching the virtues of "The Passion of the Christ," he is chastising "Meet the Fockers" for promoting "vile notions of Jews" that "are not too different from those used by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels." He apparently didn't like the idea that Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman played characters who enjoy sex.
Rabbi Lapin, according to Slate, is the networker who jump-started the mutually beneficial business relationship of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay by introducing them in the early 90's. That was some mitzvah. As Marshall Wittmann, a former Christian Coalition lobbyist who later jumped to the Democratic Leadership Council, told me recently, "We now see the meaning of Judeo-Christian values."
The Slate piece by James Harding, Washington bureau chief of the Financial Times, enumerates some of the lower points in Abramoff’s career; from millionaire right-wing operative, to movie maker to high-rolling Washington lobbyist. Harding writes:
Abramoff's defining innovation on K Street—the Avenue of the Lobbyists—hasbeen to wear his political and business hats at the same time. He is an operator and also an ideologue.
F’rinstance: although the legalistic Orthodox Jewish values he allegedly espouses disapprove of gambling, Abramoff flacked tribal casino gambling concerns--even getting Indians an audience with President Bush. He charged outrageously inflated fees, even pressuring the tribes to donate to a right-wing think tank run by Grover Norquist, who’s apparently ethically impaired as well.
In the 1980's, he made the anti-Communist, potboiling action dud, "Red Scorpion" with Dolph Lundgren. There were protests when it was uncovered that Abramoff used extras and military equipment supplied by South Africa's racist right-wing government, then an outlaw state shunned by civilized nations.
Because Seattle is a small town, we’re usually proud when one of our own gets the national limelight. Frankly, the idea that the hyper-orthodox Lapin could ascend anywhere--except, perhaps, in the Hall of Fame of right-wing cartoons--seemed laughable.
We’d naively thought he was just a quaintly opinionated blowhard with the haughty accent of an Afrikaaner who’d done fill-in on KVI and KTTH and bought himself onto the radio in the weird off-hours usually reserved for secular infomercials for male performance supplements.
On-air he’s a folksy clergyman “(Everybody needs a rabbi,” he always says) who’s a bit of a yenta, a match-maker, and champion of marriage between people of the same faith, same species, but different genders; he’s didactic and condescending--and speaks in paragraphs--long paragraphs. Northwest goyim in general have little contact with Jews, especially religious ones, so listeners gush and treat him like an exotic animal--sort of their pet Jew.
Quaint opinions? we might mention his firm stance against recycling. Or his denial that any poverty in the U.S. exists. Or that Living Wills are suicide notes. Or that to love your pets is unBiblical. Or that tattoos, birth control, piercing, abortions and assisted suicide have immoral equivalency.
(I have to get off this my chest--it’s less conpiracy theory than conspiracy indulgence. But this is my blog, damn it, so here it is: Lapin doesn’t believe in birth control, and has 7 children (6 girls, 1 boy). Lapin is French for ‘rabbit’-- an animal who also doesn’t believe in birth control (nor restraint, I’m told). Is this a coincidence...or something more sinister? While we're entertaining unanswered questions: is it true that Lapin’s South African high school buddies called him “Danny Rabbit” for his rapid successes with the opposite sex? What do rabbis wear under their dark suits? What do rabbits wear under their dark suits? We’ll probably never know...)
During the Schiavo kerfuffle, when it seemed Delay was prevailing in his shocking Federal buttinskyism with his ham-handed tactics, Lapin crowed on-air warning liberals that their day in America was done.
Daniel Lapin is political activist as extreme as James Dobson. Rev. Ken Hutcherson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Except for that Lord Jesus part, he’s in lock step with them. He’s their show rabbi, no more a benign sectarian clergyman than Jesse Jackson.
For years, he’s been kickin’ it with some of the most powerful and extreme conservatives in the country, some of whom are in power. For all the poo-pooing conservatives do about Hillary’s “vast rightwing conspiracy,” they do all seem to know each other. And if you think Lapin’s faith-based goofiness isn’t getting into policy makers ears these days, I’ve got a kibbutz on Mercer Island I wanna sell you.
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