Okay just to be

Okay, just to be clear, the following quotes are such obvious malarkey that I don’t think they have any direct application or relevance to today’s unfolding scandal. But for sheer humor and bizarreness value, I think they’re worth passing along.

This passage is from a March 2003 article in The Hill in which Jack Abramoff describes how the Bush administration is so relentlessly clean that it’s made the lobbyist’s job far harder than it was under Clinton …

“I’m the only lobbyist who took a 90 percent pay cut to join the lobbying field,” a smiling Abramoff said in his downtown office this month. But he doesn’t expect sympathy — with the Republicans now in control of the White House, House and Senate, and his friend Tom DeLay (R-Texas) controlling the House agenda, Abramoff does not have to look far to find clients interested in his services.

But, he stresses, being a leader in Republican fundraising and strategy doesn’t guarantee success for his clients.

“I think it’s a very different administration … compared to the Clinton days,” Abramoff said of George W. Bush’s White House. “They’re going to go out of the way to make sure that they are not courting special favors to lobbyists and to special interests. They’ll only agree to things on strict merits.

“From a good government point of view, that’s very refreshing. From a lobbying point of view, it’s obviously more of a challenge.”

Because of that, he says, many lobbyists are turning more and more to members of Congress rather than executive agencies. “What people have done is probably tried to utilize the congressional legislative route on many more things than they would have otherwise done,” Abramoff added. “In the past, I think you could have gone to the Clinton administration and gotten an administrative or executive fix on something that now people have to go to [Capitol] Hill and try to seek redress there.”

But even in the Capitol, where Republicans have controlled the House for more than eight years, Abramoff has noticed changes in the style and operations of the GOP leaders.

“[Speaker Denny] Hastert [R-Ill.] is very confident, very organized and even-tempered. It’s a stable environment there,” he said. “I think it was a little less so with [former Speaker Newt] Gingrich [R-Ga.]. The DeLay operation also has ripened into a very mature ground operation.”

Gotta love ’em.