Heath, Ohio's Favorite Son

My former congressman, Bob Ney, is out of prison and accusing the Bush Administration of taking “bloodsport to a new level.” Ney, of course, was sent to prison for 30 months for accepting bribes while a congressman. Makes you feel good to be an Ohioan. Some things that I didn’t know about Bob: he speaks Farsi (that was a pretty big shock) and, while he was in congress, would start drinking at 7:30 in the morning (this was less of a surprise).

But why, you ask, does Bob Ney think that the Bush Administration had it out for him?

[Ney]: But at the end of the day, you know, I brought a lot of things on myself. . . And I did some things that were wrong. But I also believe that part of this was fueled in the sense of the Iran issue. It's been no secret that when I went to prison I gave permission for a secret meeting I'd had with Mr. Guldimann [Tim Guldimann, then Swiss Ambassador in Tehran] who came from Switzerland. He presented a document that was absolutely incredible, where Iran would have recognized Israel and a whole host of other things, would have let our inspectors on their ground; and I sent that to the White House.

I'll stand by that today; the White House denies it, but Colin Powell's former assistant admits that that came over to the State Department and the White House wanted no part of it. And I believe that every step of the way, and I think it came more from Cheney's people, but every step of the way that I attempted to deal with Iran, it got pretty harsh back. And so I think part of this, I made the bullets, I gave them the bullets, but I think some of the force was also involved with, you know, Iran and people that would rather see those countries not communicate, no matter who is head of Iran.

Ney, by his own admission, is a drunk and a felon. He just got out of seventeen months in prison. It certainly isn’t hard to believe that Cheney didn’t want to see a normalization of relations with Iran. It definitely isn’t hard to imagine the Bush Administration mismanaging our foreign policy because it didn’t fit in with their preconceived notions of how the world works. That being said, Bob Ney was a drunken congressman taking bribes – we don’t really need any outside excuses to explain why he was taken down.

Still, it’s always nice to see what people from your hometown are up to.