1115.org

“Mega-GOP-donor Sam Fox”, Bush’s nominee for ambassador to Belgium, was up before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday.

An interesting event, due to the fact that “Fox contributed $50,000 to fund the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads that sought to smear Kerry’s Vietnam War record in the 2004 presidential campaign.” And the additional fact that one of the members of the committee is John Kerry.

Here’s how it went down:

Kerry grilled Fox about his Swift Boat contribution during his confirmation hearing Tuesday. In response, Fox told Kerry that he considers him “a hero” and that no 527 group could ever “take that away from him.”

OK, then, Kerry asked, so why did you give money to a group that tried to do just that? “When we’re asked, we give,” Fox replied. He said later that he couldn’t remember who had asked him for the contribution. And while he said that he thinks 527s should be outlawed and that he’d never give money to any group “if I thought what they were printing was not true,” he also said that he “personally” would have “no way of knowing” whether a group’s representations will turn out to be true at the time he’s giving it cash.

When we’re asked, we give. And, of course, we really have no way of knowing who we’re giving to, or for what. Maybe that was also the Bush regime’s rationale for giving to Sunni extremists allied with al Qaeda?

Somebody should really ask Sam Fox to check and let us all know whether he may have, equally inadvertently, given money to terrorists, or the friends and supporters of terrorists. Because he may well have been asked. By people he knew and trusted.

After all, if the National Republican Congressional Committee happily takes the money of people accused of financing terrorism, and the President’s people stuff money under the burnooses of al Qaeda’s friends and family, how surprising would it be if a mega-GOP-donor was stuffing money under the same burnooses?

Also, I, for one, am going to test the truth of Fox’s “When we’re asked, we give”.