The Taming of the C.R.E.W.
By Miguel Guanipa (10/13/06)
Melanie Sloan, who heads CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington), apparently does not own a TV set, or she would have noticed the three major news networks that are at the forefront of the left leaning advocacy coalition that virtually dominates the medium, making her "non-partisan" group's existence somewhat redundant.
According to its background statement, the reason why CREW was ever launched is to provide a counterpart to the many “avowedly conservative” advocacy groups and address the need to bring “the message of injustice” to the people (meaning liberals).
The argument could be made that CREW’s only purpose for existence is to ‘out’ Republican homosexuals like former congressman Mark Foley and strategically peddle their politically damaging indiscretions, but that is a whole other story.
Evidently CREW believes there are only two kinds of citizen watchdog groups; Conservative and Non-partisan. The latter term is donned by progressives who are too apprehensive to describe themselves as liberals. Thus they can cast their mission as one unencumbered by partisan loyalties; the perennial blind spot of the liberal..er..progressive mind.
The story of CREW is the classic “girl meets millionaire ideologue- girl runs website as citizen advocacy group and becomes ideologue herself and lives happily ever after under the funding of aforementioned millionaire ideologue”. Predictably, CREW has ended up suffering from the same malady which affects all watchdog groups unaware of their own prejudice: the “Nobody Watches the Watchdog” syndrome. Accordingly they have sidestepped any kind of self-scrutiny by cloaking their righteous crusades under the guise of blind justice.
CREW bills itself as a group dedicated to “empowering citizens to have an influential voice in government decisions and in the governmental decision making process”. To achieve this goal, they claim to use a “combination of research, litigation, and advocacy”, which upon closer analysis look more like intimidation tactics.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)requests seem to be a heavily used template in CREW’s word processors and range from requests for information on all of the evangelical leaders who have visited the White House to minutes of meetings between the President and Abstinence Based Programs, or just requests to determine the Bush administration’s funding policy for Pregnancy Resource Centers; the usual suspects from the vast right wing conspiracy that the left preoccupies itself with on a regular basis.
Their requests are rather expansive, demanding that their targets of inquiry provide any responsive records regardless of “format, medium, or physical characteristics”, which may include any kind of electronic records, audio or video tapes, e-mails, voice mails, photographs, telephone messages, calendars, scheduled meetings information, discussions minutes, etc The only thing that seems to be missing from CREW’s relentless inquests is the proverbial kitchen sink.
A fee waver rider on all FOIA’s is also duly submitted; which means that the taxpayer is the one that will be footing the bill for what is arguably a series of well timed, politically driven, frivolous witch hunts, regardless of the financial cost incurred by the organizations or individuals responding. The only consolation CREW offers is the assurance that the disclosure of the information will “likely contribute to a better understanding of relevant governmental procedure by the general public in a significant way” - Sure.
The staff listed in the CREW website include Kimberly Perkins who once served as Assistant General counsel for the NAACP, Dan Roth who during his tenure at the Alliance for Justice drafted reports on the John Roberts and Samuel Alito nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court, Naomi Seligman Steiner who worked previously as communications director for a gun control organization called Violence Policy Center, Lida Masoudpour who served as an intern for Senator Hillary Clinton, and others including Executive Director Melanie Sloan, who worked for Representative Charles Schumer and Senator Joe Biden in different capacities and also signs most of the group’s wide-ranging inquiries. It is almost as if someone sat down with the most ardent fringe left ideologues to form a group with the singular task of attacking, harassing and intimidation conservatives of all stripes.
Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are among those unfortunate enough to have found themselves in CREW’s line of fire, along with almost any conservative organization or political action committee suspected of violating the law; apparently regardless of how the suspicion arises.
Their most recent official complaint entailed the suspension of Karl Rove's security clearance pending the outcome of the ill-fated Valerie Plame investigation; as every one is now aware, no evidence of wrong doing ever materialized against Mr. Rove and the source of the leak turned out to be someone I wonder if CREW members had already suspected. This is but one example of the kind of wild goose chases CREW seems to habitually engage in that reflect a clear partisan animus towards those who do not belong to the progressive camp.
As it is to be expected, a search in CREW’s website will not yield any investigation initiatives against possible violations like Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid’s recent collection a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale, or the ACLU’s ( a non-profit organization) recent political advertisement against Senator Joe Lieberman; which could lead one to infer a glaring bias on the part of CREW’s operatives.
Their annual report listing those they consider being the “Most corrupt members of Congress” also seems to confirm a bias of sorts. The second and most recent report contained 21 republicans and 4 democrats.
At first I marveled at the tremendous good fortune that has befallen Democrats to have so few representatives in the House and Senate acting unethically (or at least not getting caught). But unless there are no progressively minded politicians or non-profit organizations engaging in any kind of unethical behavior - which, if you think about it, is the kind of dream world liberals wish they’d lived in – CREW’s ceaseless filing of complaints and FOIAs against Republican congressional leaders and conservative based non-profit organizations would lead one to surmise that they have renounced their professed commitment to disallow their objectivity from becoming tainted by any one particular ideology.
Not surprisingly, a pattern seems to emerge which exhibits an apparent coordination between the causes that CREW adopts and the liberal media’s aggressive pursuit of such causes on a parallel shift; almost as if there was an uninterrupted pipeline between the two of news that could potentially have a detrimental effect on conservatives. This can be observed in the short lapse of time it takes for publications like the New York Times or the Washington Post to do a press release soon after CREW has dispatched its latest official complaint or FOIA request aimed at dissecting the most innocuous activities of conservative political or religious groups.
In short the bulk of causes that CREW chooses to stand behind provide a clear demarcation of where the lines are drawn for those who suggest -at the risk of being soundly ridiculed by the mainstream media - that there may be after all a culture war at hand.
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