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.
We Washingtonians are always proud of those of our own who gain national note, or, notoriety--no matter. We're as proud of the Green River Killer as we are of August Wilson; we always point up to our guys, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain; everyone we know is proud to have a friend who has a friend who knew Ted Bundy.
So with pride we report another homey making it big on the Right Coast. He's Rabbi Daniel "Danny Rabbit" Lapin, "show rabbi of the religious right,"(as Frank Rich has called him) Seattle vanity radio talk host (KTTH Sun. 7-9p) and the guy who owns the bragging rights to having introduced indicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff to indicted meanieocon Tom Delay, which is something akin to introducing Bonnie to Clyde.
(Abramoff was once board chair and longtime director (with syndicated talk host, and close Lapin friend Michael Medved) of Lapin's Mercer Island non-profit foundation, Toward Tradition. He was finally dumped from the board list on the TT website after his recent indictment) Lapin, until recently had dismissed the scandal as an accounting error.
In an investigative report in Sunday's Washington Post, How a Lobbyist Stacked the Deck Susan Schmidt and James V. Grimaldi tell how Abramoff derailed the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act which was backed by many Christian conservatives and anti-gambling groups, and who were astonished when it failed to pass the House.
Arrayed against eLottery were many leading groups on the religious right who were pushing to ban Internet gambling, including the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. James Dobson, influential leader of Focus on the Family, praised the bill in an opinion piece for the New York Times.
But they would have been even more surprised to find they'd been betrayed by their friend Abramoff, always known as a peddler of influence for the religious right's interests in Washington and the offices of Tom Delay who was, of course, staunchly anti-gambling.
eLottery Inc was Abramoff's client and would have gone out of business had the bill passed.
A senior aide to then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) helped scuttle the bill in the House. The aide, Tony C. Rudy, 39, e-mailed Abramoff internal congressional communications and advice, according to documents and the lobbyist's former associates.
Rudy received favors from Abramoff. He went on two luxury trips with the lobbyist that summer, including one partly paid for by Abramoff's client, eLottery Inc. Abramoff also arranged for eLottery to pay $25,000 to a Jewish foundation that hired Rudy's wife as a consultant, according to documents and interviews.
Here's where our homey comes in. Guess who's Jewish foundation got the money to pay off Delay's helpful aide. You guessed it--Toward Tradition.
It's fascinating reading (if you love that kind of thing, as you know we do) the details of how Abramoff and Orange County mega-evangelist Lou Sheldon convinced House conservatives that the legislation and its exemptions would actually expand legalized gambling, when exactly the opposite was true. Those House conservatives were elected for their haircuts, not their brilliance.
Abramoff quietly arranged for eLottery to pay conservative, anti-gambling activists to help in the firm's $2 million pro-gambling campaign, including Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, and the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition. Both kept in close contact with Abramoff about the arrangement, e-mails show. Abramoff also turned to prominent anti-tax conservative Grover Norquist, arranging to route some of eLottery's money for Reed through Norquist's group, Americans for Tax Reform.
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Rudy's wife, Lisa, was also drawn into Abramoff's orbit. She was paid fees by Toward Tradition, the Seattle-based Orthodox Jewish foundation that often allies with the Christian right on social issues. The foundation is headed by longtime Abramoff friend Rabbi Daniel Lapin and the lobbyist served as chairman of the board.
Toward Tradition was issued a $25,000 check dated Aug. 24, 2000, by eLottery. A copy of the check was obtained by The Post. Daum, the former eLottery official, said he could not remember the check but said all funds Abramoff directed him to spend were intended to defeat the Internet gambling bill.
Lapin said in an interview that he could not remember a check from eLottery but that the company could have made donations to his foundation. He said that any such donation would have been separate from his foundation's hiring of Liberty Consulting, a political firm founded and operated by Lisa Rudy.
"Lisa Rudy worked for us for six months - six to nine months - to organize groundwork for a conference," Lapin said. He said she was paid more than $25,000 but was unsure exactly how and when Lisa Rudy was hired. Lapin said her work could have been for an interfaith conference held in Washington in mid-September 2000. That conference, which opened a few weeks after the eLottery check was sent to Toward Tradition, featured such speakers as DeLay, Sheldon and Norquist.
Lapin's influential in the right-wing political religious circles, where so much power and influence has been garnered with the Bush administration. And though there haven't been any charges against Lapin, he's keeps getting exposed closer and closer to the principals in this metastasizing scandal.
He's our homey and we're proud of him, although we're kind of surprised his memory is so poor. We also wonder how much longer Entercom can continue to broadcast Lapin's self-subsidized Sunday night snore fest without starting to get some of this poo on themselves.
We've been reporting the Happy Rabbi's doings for some time. Click here for Rabbi Daniel Lapin, A Long Look Backward, about rebbi's controversial and eyebrow-raising years in Venus Beach. Or here for Rabbi Daniel Lapin: More National Embarrassment about the Congressional hearings that exposed him helping Abramoff cook up an impressive-sounding but totally ersatz "award" to help pad Abramoff's resume. The Rabbi With The Tinfoil Yarmulke (and we thought he was just boring...) enumerates some of rebbi's, shall we say, less than mainstream opinions.
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