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The Great Deceiver
Landrieu stole '96 election and she'll say anything to get
're-elected'
By Jeff Brewer
[email protected]
Louisiana voters are probably unaware that Senator Mary
Landrieu is one of the most liberal legislators in Washington, D.C.
The woman who won her initial senate race by fewer than 5,800 votes is a
longtime advocate of higher taxes, a pusher of federally funded abortions, an
enemy of the Boy Scouts, and a mouthpiece for several of the most vocal
gun-control outfits in the country. Landrieu even spearheaded efforts to
use taxpayer dollars to provide healthcare benefits for the partners of
homosexual city employees and ‘morning after’ abortion pills for teenage
girls.
Not surprisingly, such left-wing activism won Landrieu glowing approval from
something called Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a radical organization
that bills itself as the “arbiter of liberalism.” Landrieu has a
lifetime 84 percent rating from ADA, just a few points shy of Massachusetts
Senator-for-life, Ted Kennedy, who checked in at just under 90 percent.
Contrast these numbers with John Breaux’s ADA relatively moderate score of 55
percent and it’s obvious how out of step Landrieu is with the rest of
Louisiana.
But if you’re still not convinced Landrieu represents the antithesis of
Louisiana values, consider that the National Rifle Association gave the Senator
a “C-“ grade while anti-Second Amendment Handgun Control, Inc. handed
Landrieu a favorable 92 percent rating. As if it couldn’t get any worse,
the Senator sponsored and twice voted to provide funds for needle-exchange
programs, and even championed legislation that would have continued funding
public schools that ban the Boy Scouts from utilizing school facilities.
Moreover, when Bill Clinton carried Louisiana with 52% of the vote in 1996,
Landrieu received 75,000 fewer votes than the president, suggesting she was to
the left of that liberal goon squad, Clinton-Gore. In 2000, George W. Bush
won Louisiana with 53 percent of the electorate, running on a conservative
platform of lower taxes. The Senator, however, voted to gut President
Bush’s 2001 tax cut by over $800 billion! The vote was just one of 125
she’s cast as a public servant to raise the taxes of hardworking Americans.
Landrieu’s position on social security is also at odds with her more
conservative constituents. According to The Nation magazine, candidate
Landrieu supported a 1996 Democratic Leadership Council plan to “gradually
convert Social security from a transfer program to a new system of individual
private savings supplemented by modest public pensions for the needy.”
In 1999, The New Orleans' Times-Picayune newspaper reported that Senator
Landrieu enthusiastically endorsed the notion of investing “a portion of
Social Security in the stock market,” telling reporters “That’s a risk
I’m willing to take.” Yet, her latest campaign ad quotes Landrieu as
saying “And I won’t support any plan that puts Social Security at risk.”
This sort of ambiguous fence-straddling makes Windsock Willie look downright
principled.
The Senator has other problems to worry about, though, besides backlash from
obstructing President Bush’s legislative agenda. The December 9th
edition of Forbes Magazine details the Senator’s connection to another case of
fraud and abuse at the Small Business Administration (SBA). In November
last year, the SBA granted a 10-year, $698-billion dollar contract to
TeamQualtec, a ‘small’ firm headed by Jewell Maria Whitmore, to develop a
massive electronic catalogue of fighter jet parts and blueprints for the Naval
Air Systems Command (Navair). Whitmore’s company, which received the
grant based on Whitmore’s being a member of an ‘historically
disadvantaged’ group (black females), included several well heeled partners
like Lockheed Martin, software giant Intergraph and a consulting firm known as
CCI.
To make a long story short, TeamQualtec and its partners didn’t fulfill their
contractual obligations, prompting Navair to suspend one of these firms—Urban
Planning and Innovations (UPI) of Kenner, Louisiana—for “unsatisfactory”
performance; it was so bad that UPI couldn't keep a handle on its own accounting
ledgers. However, last June, three months after Navair supposedly
cancelled UPI’s eligibility for subcontracting, Senator Landrieu issued a
press release trumpeting her work in getting UPI an additional $13.3 million
from Navair’s catalogue project. Completing the quid pro quo, UPI owners
Nicholas and Keith Baroni, Jewell Whitmore (who turned out to be a beauty
'engineer' with Mary Kay cosmetics), and TeamQualtec consultant John Sylvester
contributed at least $11,000 to Landrieu’s re-election campaign.
With December 7th right around the corner, it behooves Louisiana voters to ask
themselves if they wouldn’t want someone else serving as their
senator...someone of integrity and someone who holds to traditional Louisiana
values. Mary Landrieu, who wants to raise taxes, fund abortions and
increased drug use, and spend the federal government into multi-billion dollar
deficits, is just another left-winger. The state’s most liberal senator
ever needs to find other work.
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