Visclosky Scandal Finally Getting Legs?

Visclosky in Serious Trouble

Looks Like Peter Visclosky’s life could start to get a little less comfortable from here on in. Talking Points Memo are highlighting a story linking him to a corruption story involving probably the most tainted house Democrat, Jack Murtha.

The nuts and bolts of the story are here.

and here:

It is a tale of standard Washington corruption involving Congress critters, lobbyists and defense contractors

Murtha is basically an old school pay to play politician to put it politely. He became the darling of that that portion of the left that seems to believe that the enemy of your enemy is your friend when he became a very vocal critic of the Bush Iraq war policy. It wasn’t difficult to see that Murtha’s own ethical shortcomings were about to make big news and that his loud anti war stance was little more than an attempt to divert attention.

Anyway, back to Peter Visclosky. I used to live in Lake County so I had at least heard his name but that was about all. Talking to others who had met him and lived in his district for much longer than me the impression was of a very bland politician. That was why this line from the TPM article made me smile:

Besides Murtha, the other lawmaker who appears most entangled with PMA is a little-known Democrat from Indiana named Peter Visclosky. A friend of Murtha who is also a member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, he has been subpoenaed for documents in the probe, and his legal bills are soaring.

Whereas a lot of politicians would take the phrase “little-known” as a massive insult, I always got the impression that this was exactly what Visclosky wanted. It says something that he could remain so anonymous even while being named as the 15th most corrupt politician in Washington:

In 2009, Visclosky was named one of the 15 most corrupt members of Congress by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The important thing here is that Talking Points Memo has decided to pick this story up again. MSNBC and CNN to a slightly lesser extent often use TPM as a source for stories. Once the cables pick something up it then gets amplified back around the so called blogosphere and then there is a good chance that the networks and the print media will wake up for long enough to bump the story back up.