Bribe, thy name be “research paper”

Here in Colorado we are having quite a kerfuffle over “plagiarism” involving Scott McInnis, Republican candidate for governor. It seems that a while back a private foundation run by the Hasan family paid him $300,000 to write a policy paper on water issues. He gave back “Musings on Water.” It turns out that his musings were actually the musings of other people, notably a sitting judge. He lifted not a passage or two, but whole pages of material.

When exposed, McInnis said that he had depended on a paid researcher, and that this researcher was the real plagiarizer, and not him. Today the assistant said (Denver Post) that the McInnis people had crafted a letter having him take responsibility for the whole mess, but that he had refused to sign it. So now we have McInnis not only plagiarizing, but also pissing downhill. What a guy!

McInnis is toast. His likely opponent in November, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, is no prize himself. It’s not like we are faced with momentous choices. As so often happens in this country, our choice is one of method of screwing: Do we prefer Phillips, or standard screws?

Something far more interesting and revealing happened here. McInnis’s “Musings on Water” is not an important document, and was read only by a few people and then filed away. Because we live in the Google age, someone was able to nail him for the passage lifts. Stuff like that goes on everywhere. Scott’s lesson to the rest of the political class is they need to be more careful in the art of disguised bribery.

Far more important is this: McInnis was a fair-haired boy, no towering intellect, but a man seen with statewide potential for higher office. The Hasan Family Foundation was not buying “research” from him. They didn’t care about his ideas on water policy. Surely they were smart enough to see that he was no policy wonk. They were buying him. They were buying influence, maybe even lodging themselves as his own personal closet skeleton.

Three hundred thousand dollars! It is not peanuts, and it was not for research. It was a disguised bribe.

Scott McInnis is nothing, was nothing, and will be a well-paid something in the future, just not holding public office. In the meantime, there are quite a few Colorado politicians of “both” parties hitting the Ambien at night as they try to keep their minds off the payments they received for fake work done for people who have an unseen interests in public policy.

This whole affair reminds me that while we need campaign finance reform, corruption will not ever be easily undone.
______________________________

By the way, this train of thought was triggered by a few words from a much smarter guy than me, David Sirota, who wondered about the bribery aspect this on AM760 this morning. It is a very confusing set of circumstances until put in that framework. Did not mean to pull a McInnis on Sirota.