There is an Invisible Cord that connects the Gingrich coup that seized Congress for the GOP in 1994 to the cash flow in the election of 2012, most specifically Karl Rove’s Incredible Bulk: the quarter billion for American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS. The Invisible Cord winds from Virginia Beach to the Congo, Washington, DC, and Liberia, a warlord madman with a child army, a supermodel dumber than a sack of rocks (diamond rocks), and the Reverend Marion “Pat” Robertson.
This election year began with a YouTube video, Kony 2012, that went crazy viral. It was about Joseph Kony, the monstrous African warlord with an army of captive children. But Kony is a mere copycat killer, a bloody second-tier maniac compared to the inventor of the child army, Charles Taylor, sentenced in the Special Court of Sierra Leone in 2012 for multiple counts of murder, rape, and the use of child soldiers.
In Liberia, in 2010, I met one of these “soldiers”: Peter Tah, a one-armed kid (there were many) selling chewing gum on the streets of the capital. Peter was nine years old when the warlord invaded his village, hacked his father to death with a machete in the family doorway, then told Peter they’d kill him if he didn’t join their army. In three days, he was on the front line with an AK-47 bigger than he and was quickly shot in the arm. There was virtually no medicine in Liberia for saving his arm, so doctors had to amputate.
Charles Taylor, the Liberian warlord who holds the patent for inventing the first child army, is a cannibal, a mass murderer, and a credentialed economist—a much-too-frequent combination. He earned his degree in Massachusetts where he was later imprisoned for embezzlement, then escaped to Liberia and formed his kiddie army.
Taylor slaughtered his way into the presidency of Liberia where, in short order, he was facing arrest for crimes against humanity, including fomenting civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone so he could control the traffic in illegal “blood” diamonds. The evidence against him included his sending supermodel Naomi Campbell a little bag of diamonds-in-the-rough as an inducement to affection.
It didn’t work: since they looked to Ms. Campbell like just a bunch of dirty pebbles, she gave them away.
But Taylor had a friend in God, or at least the Lord’s sales rep on Earth, Dr. Pat Robertson. At Taylor’s request, the Reverend Robertson spoke to President George W. Bush about backing off Taylor. Robertson said he spoke on the maniac’s behalf as a matter of heavenly mercy, and it had nothing to do with Taylor’s giving Robertson a gold mining concession.
(Note: While Robertson is called “Reverend” in the press, he, in fact, defrocked himself, leaving the Baptist Church. He told me he is not a televangelist, but a “businessman.” Amen to that.)
Why would Bush listen to Robertson? What did Bush (and the Bush family) owe the Reverend Pat?
It goes back to that 1994 election and earlier.
In the Year of Our Lord 1994, as Newt was preparing his Contract with America, the Reverend Robertson raised millions to buy airplanes to feed the desperate survivors of the recent massacre in Rwanda. The reverend was filmed handing out food in the African refugee camps, then, when the cameras were turned off, he loaded the planes with equipment to take to the diamond mines he owned in the Congo.
The IRS, under a Democratic administration, was having trouble avoiding the smell of sulfur from Robertson’s “not-for-profit religious” organizations which were making him a billionaire.
Either the law would end Robertson or Robertson would end the law.
The Lord heard Robertson’s prayers and whispered, “Use the Lists.”
The Lists: Three million names of the faithful donors to the not-for-profit religious educational group Christian Coalition. Political use of the lists was a crime. But there is a Higher Law—Reverend Pat’s. So the Lists were given, in secret, to a convicted con man and traitor, Colonel Oliver North, the Republican candidate for Senator for Virginia. Members of the Christian Coalition received a message from the Lord: campaign literature announcing His endorsement for the crazed colonel for Senate.
While the Lists, not only from the Christian Coalition but from Pat Robertson’s cable television “church,” were put in the service of politicians, they also did service for mammon. Two insiders told me Robertson used his ministry to obtain millions in investments in the Kalo-Vita vitamin Ponzi scheme. Then he allegedly used the business lists as “an organizational structure to back his political agenda,” that is, church assets were allegedly used in political campaigns—which was unquestionably illegal. Then.
In 1999, I was granted a rare audience with Dr. Robertson (that’s another story) and the business director at his TV-studio-cum-church in Virginia Beach. I was nervous, constantly fondling my cigarette lighter. (I don’t smoke—mild asthma—so I didn’t bother putting fuel in the lighter: it enclosed a tiny tape recorder which the Rev. Pat’s security crew allowed me to take through the metal detector.)
“The Doctor,” as he prefers to be called, spoke to me at length in his television studio dressing room, slowly removing his makeup mask. What was underneath was most interesting.
In 1988, the Lord told Robertson to run for president. I asked how Robertson could have lost the presidential race with the Almighty as his campaign manager.
The answer was that the Lord wanted him to run, not win, and—pay attention to this—to create that three-million-name mailing list and political fist known as the Christian Coalition, which would forever give the Christian Right (i.e., Robertson) veto power over GOP candidacies. Of course, that wasn’t legal. Not yet.
I learned more from my sources. On September 15, 1992, the Christian Coalition’s President Ralph Reed told George Bush’s campaign he was prepared to provide 40 million so-called “voter guides” that would in fact help Bush, “a virtually unprecedented level of cooperation and assistance . . . from Christian leaders.” Unprecedented and illegal.
And strange in another way: Robertson had just a couple months earlier said that Bush was “unwittingly carrying out the mission of Lucifer.” But if Satan could get reelected, it was unlikely He’d investigate the source of his reelection.
Judy Liebert, former chief financial officer of Robertson’s godly empire, has allowed me to reveal her name. She told me she complained to Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition president (and today a big-shot Republican consultant), when he began destroying documents subpoenaed by the FBI. She said Reed told her, “Why don’t you just take a gun and blow my brains out?”
Amen to that.
But Rev. Robertson had the last laugh: On March 26, 2010, the US Circuit Court of Appeals unlocked the monster in the box. In SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission and Republican National Committee v. FEC, the court took the Citizens United case to its mad conclusion: not just corporations but not-for-profit groups could spend without limit on political campaigns. The Christian Coalition’s tricks were now treats, and the abuses of Robertson’s businesses for political purposes now became court-blessed uses.
While much attention has focused on Citizens United and allowing corporations to fund political campaigns, the SpeechNow ruling that followed blessed the greater danger: not-for-profit “social welfare” organizations, including Rove’s Crossroads, their agendas obscured and their funding sources hidden.
But in 1999, the hour for these rough beasts was yet to come. Someone, someone who couldn’t care less about no stinkin’ lawmen’s badges, had to lay the beastly seed for Citizens United and corporatocracy. That someone, or something, was named “Triad.”