Lamborn among the Lilliputians

Congressman Doug Lamborn (R-CO5) couldn’t have known when he first waded into Colorado politics over a decade ago that he would wash ashore on Lilliput. Such seems to be the case, however. As you remember, Jonathan Swift created two fictional islands in his 1726 classic, Gulliver’s Travels, Lilliput and Blefuscu. No disproof having been established, one assumes that both islands are, still today, located in the South Indian Ocean, separated by a channel 800 yards in width, and inhabited by people “not six inches high.” More to the point for the purpose of current politics: When a shipwrecked and still asleep Lemuel Gulliver washed up on the shores of Lilliput and was captured by little people who tied him down before he awoke, he discovered that the two islands were permanently at war over the correct way to eat a boiled egg. Still today, the inhabitants of Blefuscu are firmly convinced the correct way to eat a boiled egg is to start at the rounded end. The Lilliputians are equally convicted that, still today, no civilized person eats a boiled egg any way except sharp end first.

Though Gulliver is a giant compared to the Lilliputians, he does not return their hostility in kind, but rather helps to aid them in various ways before, for no other reason than his refusal to take part in their selfish perfidies, he again earns their fickle and shallow scorn.

Naïve people here in Colorado sometimes refer to Lilliput as the El Paso County Republican Party, but we really should get into the habit of calling places and people by their proper names. The little people in Lilliput are particularly active these days, doing their best to tie up Congressman Gulliver -- er, Lamborn -- before he permanently awakes and takes to himself for many years to come the title of Congressman, a title which the Lilliputians believe rightfully belongs only to a Lilliputian.

The chief Lilliputians in Lilliput these days are one Mr. Jeff Crank and one retired General Bentley Rayburn. To be sure, both are accomplished men by Lilliputian standards; indeed, they appear to know it. Gulliver is equally accomplished and, refreshingly, doesn’t appear to know it. More to the point, by the standards that Gulliver considers genuinely meaningful and which are in truth the only things that can turn a Lilliputian into a Giant -- old-fashioned notions that include courageous loyalty to true principles and good men above one’s personal ambitions, and doing the right thing and telling the truth even when it’s not popular, and doing it for a long time -- it appears Gulliver is, still today, as lonely as he was in 1726.

The Leading Lilliputians are currently squabbling over who is justified in taking on Gulliver in a primary next year. One says it is properly he because -- well, that’s never been entirely clear. Part of it must be a result of his having come so close to beating Gulliver two years ago. As for the rest of it -- well, perhaps he eats the round end of the egg first.

The other Leading Lilliputian and his Supporting Lilliputians say he’s a general, and thus a true leader. The question as to why a true leader would challenge an incumbent Giant like Gulliver -- remember, a Giant is not necessarily someone who is popular, but someone who does what is right and tells the truth, and has for a long time -- does not appear to have yet been posed in Lilliput.

To cap things off, if a newspaper article on Sept 19 was any indication, it appears the Leading Lilliputians are so hostile to Gulliver that they may have overcome their own mutual antipathies long enough to make something of a Gentle-Lilliputian’s agreement: if either is behind in the polls close to election day, that one will drop out of the race. “There is no formal agreement,” mind you – personal interests are not to be sacrificed until it’s clear there is really nothing to be sacrificed and fulfillment of spite toward Gulliver becomes the only remaining objective. “It’s not going to be my ego that causes [Gulliver] to get re-elected,” one Lilliputian said.

The next day, the other Lilliputian’s supporters were again assaulting both his rival and Gulliver for only the vaguest of reasons: “[Gulliver] was not a leader in the (state) legislature, and he won’t be in Washington,” one said. “And [the opposing Lilliputian] has nothing to set him aside, nothing of stature.” Translation: we don’t like Gulliver and the other Lilliputian eats his boiled eggs pointed end first.

So what does our modern-day congressional Gulliver do amidst these Lilliputians? What Gulliver has always done. “[Gulliver’s] campaign said they had no comment,” the latter story reports. He faithfully continues his accustomed course in the world and in the halls of national government, praying for the welfare of the Lilliputians even in their spite toward him. It’s safe to assume Gulliver realizes life and politics in Lilliput are, still today, fickle, and not likely to change any time soon.

Pinon Canon moving Lamborn's way?

Wednesday’s striking article in the Pueblo Chieftain reporting that Sen. Ken Salazar (D-CO) is less than entirely firm in his opposition to the Army’s expansion of Fort Carson on the south side of Colorado Springs not only tends to vindicate the good judgment of Congressman Doug Lamborn (R-CO5). It also illustrates an enduring principle of virtuous politics: do what is wise in the short term, even when it’s not popular, and time will vindicate your position and reputation. Wisdom, to put it proverbially, is justified by her children. Sometimes it takes a long time: years and decades, as with President Reagan’s call in the 1960s, to heaps of ridicule in the popular press, academia, and in the Republican Party, for the Berlin Wall to come down. It took approximately 35 years for Mr. Reagan’s courage and wisdom to shine forth so clearly that even the moral and intellectual mediocrities in the media and academia, and political mediocrities at the top of the Republican Party, could not deny it.

Sometimes it happens more quickly, as may very well happen in this case. Mr. Lamborn earlier this year was lampooned up and down both by Democrats and Republicans for supporting the U.S. Army’s plan to expand Fort Carson in the Pinon Canon region. Even Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO4) came out in opposition to this military expansion on the grounds that it would hurt ranchers in the Pinon Canon area.

A vote taken in the U.S. House on an amendment, co-sponsored by Musgrave, prohibiting the Army from even studying the Pinon Canon expansion went against Lamborn overwhelmingly -- and that vote has been used ever since by his Republican detractors to show how “ineffective” he is.

When Sen. Salazar, by contrast, despite his comments earlier in the week, proposed in the Senate a one-year ban on Army progress on Pinon Canon to serve as a (**politico-spin psycho-babble alert**) “cooling-off period,” the measure passed by a much more narrow 47-45 vote. Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO) opposed the measure and predicted he and Salazar will soon (**politico-spin contradict-what-you-just-did-and-reveal-it-to-have-been-shallow-cosmetic-politics alert**) offer a requirement that the Army study Pinon Canon .

Allard’s prediction and Wednesday’s report on Salazar’s hesitations are further evidence of just how far-sighted and apolitical Mr. Lamborn is. Musgrave opposes the expansion on short-term political grounds: there are many ranchers in her rural 4th district, and ranchers don’t like the Army talking about taking their land. It’s a short-term political play, plain and simple, with an eye toward the next election cycle that will be held in the shadow of an unpopular military effort in Iraq.

In another short-term play to environmental concerns that undermines her ostensible concern for the private property of ranchers, Musgrave has joined Democrats in imploring the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency to prevent private mining companies from digging for uranium on their own land in Weld County.

Lamborn, on the other hand, has taken the unpopular position of supporting the Pinon Canon expansion for a very simple reason. It is right and good and necessary for national security.

As of 2005, the U.S. military had closed 350 military installations since 1989. The military has been constantly shrinking since Reagan’s Berlin Wall prophecy came true. It requires no lofty genius to discern that, when the military is shrinking base-wise, remaining bases may have to expand to support current and future defense needs. This is especially so when a worldwide (legitimate and important) war against terror continues and 10,000 new troops are on their way to Fort Carson.

Moreover, it’s not exactly like the U.S. Army has a record of abusing private property rights. Neither has the Army chosen Pinon Canon arbitrarily. Neither is the Army talking about wielding the eminent domain power without proper discretion. Many landowners would sell willingly to the Army and have said so. It may even be possible for the Army to acquire all the property it needs without using eminent domain, but there is no way to know this if the Army is not allowed to study the question.

In the worst-case scenario where eminent domain must be used, this case is precisely the sort for which the eminent domain power exists: for the state to acquire the property it needs to support legitimate government operations. Sen. Allard and, apparently, Sen. Salazar are feeling the increasing weight of these unavoidable propositions.

What is not a legitimate use of eminent domain is the constant manner in which the power has been abused over the last 30 years, and is today being abused, by state and local governments for entirely decorative things like parks or, in the recent infamous U.S. Supreme Court case Kelo v. New London, for taking one party’s property and giving it to real estate developers who can provide more tax revenue than can the rightful owner.

Almost all of the current parties opposing the Pinon Canon expansion (Musgrave certainly excepted) either support these routine abuses of eminent domain and private property or have been silent in the face of them. But when the Army wants to use the eminent domain power for the purpose for which it was intended, these parties indignantly join misguided Republicans to complain that the private property of ranchers everywhere is in danger and in need of their heroic rescue.

Certainly the Pinon Canon expansion still faces an uphill battle. Left-wingers everywhere who love to oppose any U.S. military moves are up in arms about Salazar’s public hesitations, and local ranching groups will remain fearful. The question will turn on whether pro-defense senators and congressmen can find some other way the Army, which obviously is only looking to do its job, can accomplish its short- and long-term goals, or whether these legitimate national security needs will continue to be pathetically sacrificed on the altar of the 2008 election.

Either way, to the degree he cares about such silly things, there is little further short-term political downside on this issue for Congressman Lamborn, who has already been punished mercilessly by both foe and ostensible friend for his good deeds. There is, however, enormous upside for him should Pinon Canon ultimately move ahead and wisdom once again be justified by her children.

Barthas intimidated? Nonsense

Supporters of Jeff Crank's congressional primary run in Colorado Springs dealt another blow in the past week to the very honesty in campaigning they have been so vocal in calling for from Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO5). Jonathan and Anna Bartha, long-time Republican activists who were publicly supported by Congressman Lamborn during Anna’s recent victorious run for the Falcon District School Board, join the lengthy list of public officials and Republican activists who have returned Mr. Lamborn’s friendship, support, and courageous defense of the principles they claim to hold dear with public slander and political betrayal.

The Barthas worked for Mr. Crank in the 2006 primary against Mr. Lamborn, appearing at local Republican meetings to announce themselves as committed social conservatives (which they are), and then without a word about Mr. Lamborn’s record on social issues that is unsurpassed by any conservative in Colorado over the last half-century, generically explained that they were supporting Mr. Crank.

The Barthas were not the first to do this to Mr. Lamborn, and whenever someone has explained their reasons for doing it, it is in the same fashion as is always used when a Republican insider decides to oppose the kind of principled Republican that comes along only a few times in a generation. Republicans across the state did this to Bob Schaffer in his 2004 U.S. Senate primary against Pete Coors.

To wit: Mr. Schaffer’s conservative record may be impeccable, but, um, er, uh, we’re supporting Mr. Coors because we think he will “be wonderfully effective, reach across the aisle to get things done, and work hard on behalf of Colorado values in the Senate.” There is never any substantial or specific reason for this kind of squeemishness, poor judgment, and just plain bad faith by self-proclaimed conservatives against a Republican hero.

This is a formula followed ad nauseam in Colorado Springs over the last two years by people who at one time had been personal friends, colleagues in the state legislature, and fellow evangelical Christians with Mr. Lamborn. Evangelicalism places a heavy emphasis on brotherhood and sisterhood with others in the faith. This charity between spiritual siblings was something commanded by Christ and is more than just good feelings. It is something that requires Christians to tell the truth about each other, to defend the good name of those who have been falsely impugned, and to make a private attempt at reconciliation before taking the matter public when a disagreement occurs.

(For the record, Christian charity does not require Christians who run for office to abstain from telling the truth – even unpleasant and unflattering truth – about the political record of opponents. On the contrary, public records are public matters for everyone. It does require, however, that presentation of that record be accurate.)

When Mr. Lamborn announced he was running for Congress two years ago, for many of these people personal friendship dropped by the wayside, close to a decade of shoulder-to-shoulder work in the state legislature became a publicly-announced reason not to support Mr. Lamborn – because he is “ineffective” or other such ill-defined nonsense – and brotherhood and sisterhood in the Christian faith, something Mr. Lamborn does not take lightly, was abused as a cover for baseless public insults against him.

In the present case, the Barthas, after telling the editor they are committed family-values conservatives, complained in a letter to a local newspaper about two donations Mr. Lamborn received from gambling interests. Mr. Lamborn has said he returned both donations, and one of those returns has been publicly confirmed by a spokeswoman for the relevant organization. The Barthas also complained about a vote Mr. Lamborn made against stiffening penalties for dog-fighting.

Stiffening penalties for dog-fighting has become an issue of social conservatism? Many conservatives, likely including Mr. Lamborn, think perhaps all the recent public indignation over dog-fighting in the wake of the Michael Vick affair is just a bit over-blown, given that 1.5 million unborn (human) children are being executed every year in the U.S. without any penalties at all.

The Barthas did not check with Mr. Lamborn before publishing their letter, and thus did not know he had returned the gambling donations or why he voted against stiffening penalties for dog-fighting. They thus were not able to present Mr. Lamborn’s record accurately. As many of Mr. Crank’s supporters have done, they were looking for any reason to publicly criticize Mr. Lamborn. Mr. Lamborn’s response was perfectly legitimate. He is a congressman with plenty more important things to do than deal with locally critical letters, which he sees all the time. In this case, however, Mr. Lamborn called the Barthas personally in an attempt to reconcile privately and preserve a friendship – just as Christ would have us do.

Local media have made it seem as though Mr. Lamborn threatened “consequences” in his calls, but this is ridiculous. He noted a simple truth that everyone knows: telling lies about people who have done nothing wrong carries consequences, and a recent public letter from El Paso County GOP Chairman, Greg Garcia, had said as much. Instead of responding to Mr. Lamborn like responsible adults, the Barthas first did not respond and then, after Mr. Lamborn issued a public letter to Mr. Garcia asking that the matter be addressed, contacted the Denver Post to make public Mr. Lamborn’s private messages and claim Mr. Lamborn scared them. Mr. Lamborn then followed with a charitable note to the Barthas apologizing if anything in his messages had been misunderstood, but he need not have done this, as he was the one who had been misunderstood and misrepresented.

All this confusion shows the wisdom of Christ’s admonitions. Find out the truth about your brother before you publicly criticize him, and when he gets upset at your ill-founded words and attempts to reconcile privately with you, return his phone call, apologize for not coming to him first before making public claims about him, and take steps to make the offense right.

Since this sequence of events is not now likely to occur, the truth about the matter is likely to get buried as more time passes, and everyone will sigh and wonder why Republicans, especially ones claiming to be Christians, are always fighting. Many will use the episode as another reason to criticize Mr. Lamborn. What a wonderful political world this would be if, instead, we would decide to be people who love and support heroes like Doug Lamborn and pray for the day when both political parties, Congress, and the courts are again full of people who share his courage and wisdom.

And as for Worldcom

"Let justice run down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” [Dave Crater says he thought of those words from the Prophet Amos when a reader of this website wrote that while he may be right in asserting the innocence of Joe Nacchio, he went too far in making the same claim for Bernie Ebbers of Worldcom. Here is Crater's rebuttal. - Editor] The recent white-collar legal lynching that brought down innocent former Qwest Communications CEO Joe Nacchio is only the latest in a string of hostile anti-business rampages conducted by America’s attorneys, judges, and bureaucratic regulators in the wake of the 2001 stock market collapse.

That market collapse brought the Nasdaq composite from over 4500 in the spring of 2000 to under 1500 by the end of 2002 – a loss of over two-thirds of the market’s peak value. This market-wide collapse in the New Economy destroyed billions in stockholder wealth.

There was not a single CEO, accountant, or consultant in America responsible either for this collapse, or for its effects on his or her individual company.

Yet seeing the legal and political opportunity of a lifetime, attorneys, judges, and regulators have waged a full-scale legal assault on prominent members of the American business class over the last five years, positioning themselves in the process as saviors of the public trust and of the nation’s retirement savings against greedy corporate thugs.

The greedy thugs are not in the business community. The greedy thugs are in posh government and law firm offices across the nation.

Like recently and justly disgraced Durham County (NC) District Attorney, Mike Nifong, these greedy thugs have abused their legal and moral authority in order to build ambitious careers for themselves in law, media, and government and to re-distribute the wealth of their victims to people who have no moral right to it. Among the chief offenders is now-governor of the state of New York, Democrat Eliot Spitzer, who between his election as state Attorney General in 1998 and his 2006 election as governor, conducted an arbitrary reign of leftist terror on Wall Street unlike any the nation has ever seen.

The description by the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, of Spitzer’s brazen power-abuse aptly describes the attitude of ambitious prosecuting attorneys everywhere (http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/05/business/spitzer.php): "Spitzer's approach is to walk in and say, 'we're going to make a deal, and you're going to pay $600 million to the state, and you're going to get rid of this person and that person, and if you don't do it by tonight, we're going to indict the company,"' Donohue said. "It is the most egregious and unacceptable form of intimidation we've seen in this country in modern times."

Colorado U.S. Attorney Troy Eid – a Republican, showing the intimidation and leftist propaganda justifying the intimidation are a bi-partisan affair – proudly pronounced a few weeks ago that the conviction of Joe Nacchio was the largest for insider trading in the nation’s history. (Mr. Eid was clearly abreast of the current state of the fierce competition transpiring among the nation’s prosecuting attorneys to bring in the largest conviction.) The prosecution and conviction of Bernard J. Ebbers, founder and former CEO of MCI-Worldcom, was the largest fraud and conspiracy conviction in history in terms of the prison sentence it secured. Mr. Ebbers is now serving 25 years in the Oakdale Federal Prison in Oakdale, Louisiana.

Like Mr. Nacchio, Mr. Ebbers was a business phenomenon. And like Mr. Nacchio, Mr. Ebbers is an innocent man.

The son of a traveling Canadian salesman, Ebbers worked as a milkman while bouncing between the University of Alberta, Calvin College, and finally Mississippi College. Ebbers joined a few others to, in the best tradition of American risk-taking entrepreneurship, found Long Distance Discount Services, Inc. in 1983. By 1995, the company had acquired 60 other companies and had changed its name to Worldcom. At his peak in 1999, Ebbers had gone from being the son of a traveling salesman and running college milk routes to being worth $1.4 billion and being listed at number 174 on the Forbes 400.

To many of the nation’s attorneys and judges, and to many in the public, such unbelievable evidence of America’s promise is no longer something to be celebrated. It is something to be abhorred, and its chief incarnations villains to be prosecuted and legally pillaged whenever the political opportunity arises.

Not helping, of course, is the slide, rapid throughout the 20th century, toward a welfare state that arbitrarily, inconsistently, and ever-increasingly regulates every aspect of American business and glorifies the government bureaucrat who produces nothing. Accounting regulations are a constantly-changing circus that increasingly diverges from financial reality and that, when violated in either substantive or cosmetic fashion, calls down in the name of “Accounting irregularities! Control the businessman!”, even more oppressive, arbitrary and wealth-destroying folly such as the Sarbanes-Oxley act of 2002.

And as this folly progresses to greater and greater heights, the integrity and virtue of a government bureaucrat or attorney is only questioned if he files the most absurd rape charges against innocent college lacrosse players who weren’t even at the scene of the crime, or if he carries on a pugnacious rampage on Wall Street against anything with a white collar. And even in the latter case, he still can become governor.

Also not helping things is the long antipathy of America’s legal system toward the historic Christian religion. Attorneys and judges are, by and large, secularists, and many of them aggressively so. Businessmen, on the other hand, earning their wealth by actually producing things and wealth for other people – as opposed to sopping and legally plundering their millions from productive people – tend to believe in God and show it with their lives.

These are both generalizations, of course, carrying obvious exceptions. But this is one of those obvious things that is true but not really worth saying. The generalizations are accurate, and Ebbers at the time of his prosecution was a member of Easthaven Baptist Church in Brookhaven, Mississippi, regularly teaching Sunday school and attending Sunday morning worship. When the allegations against him were first brought to light, Ebbers addressed the congregation and, like Joe Nacchio, Charles Keating, Martha Stewart, and a host of other business victims of recent legal outrages, insisted on his innocence. “I just want you to know you aren’t going to church with a crook,” he said. “No one will find me to have knowingly committed fraud."

Well-said. Ebbers said “knowingly” because he knows how this game is played. Keating, who also demonstrated classic religious sensibility in using his wealth to donate millions to Mother Theresa, was convicted in 1992 of committing fraud unknowingly – an impossible crime. The conviction was overturned by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which informed the lower judge, none other than Lance Ito of O.J. Simpson fame, that fraud requires intent. But only after Keating had done four and a half years of hard time.

Another important strategy of the game is to threaten and intimidate with potential charges in an attempt to get the victim to admit guilt. If the victim does “confess,” send him/her to prison, levy heavy fines, and hold a press conference pronouncing to the world that justice has been done. If the victim does not admit guilt, try to get the victim to make some statement that can be turned into a charge of lying to regulators. Then drop the original charges (Martha Stewart) or greatly reduce them (Ebbers), and make the main force of your prosecution that they – horror of horrors – lied to you in an effort to avoid your witch hunt. And bump up the sentence to show them the mistake they made in not admitting their guilt in the first place.

Stewart was originally hit with charges of insider trading in ImClone stock. She was convicted on zero counts of insider trading, but on four counts of lying to investigators and obstructing “justice.” Ebbers was originally hit with a 15-count indictment. Those charges were then dropped and replaced with one count each of fraud and conspiracy and seven counts of making false statements about the original counts.

Keating’s conviction was overturned and Stewart, not seeing the point in fighting with legal agents who don’t care about justice, did 6 months voluntarily, paid fines, and acquiesced to regulation of her business involvement so she could be done with it. Ebbers was not so fortunate. He received a sentence, affirmed by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, that, in the words of the judge who wrote for the court, was “longer than the sentences routinely imposed by many states for violent crimes, including murder." A law-abiding Southern Baptist, Ebbers drove himself to prison.

There is no other name for this but moral and legal corruption. The people who have perpetrated it are themselves criminals. In addition to destroying the lives of innocent people whose only crime was being a wealthy executive at the time of a stock market collapse, it is transforming America from a nation of wealthy entrepreneurs in big skyscrapers and country clubs into a nation of wealthy attorneys and bureaucrats in big skyscrapers and country clubs. We are a wealthy nation, and unless we want to be a poor nation, that wealth must be possessed by wealthy people.

The only question is whether we will be a nation that resents having that wealth in the hands of people who have made many others wealthy by creating jobs and producing things large numbers of people want and need – and who cannot control when the entire economy tanks – or whether we will be a nation of institutionalized envy that presumes the wealthy businessman guilty until proven innocent and uses the power of its legal system to plunder the most productive and re-distribute their wealth to everyone else every time the market crashes.

The verse from the Old Testament prophet at the top is no mere rhetorical device. It is a reminder that a God exists who cares about justice, knowledge of Whom prevents the poles of our minds from becoming reversed and the resulting moral current that powers our lives from running backward. When the current runs backward, we call the guilty innocent and the innocent guilty. But there is a Day coming soon when the poles will be restored, and justice will flow down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. In that hour, if not before, naked legal ambition and self-serving public prosecutions that use the power of the state to condemn the innocent will no longer play in the court of public opinion. For the court of public opinion will no longer be one governed by stock market losses, the vagaries of economic fortune, and widespread cultural envy. It will be governed by justice, and by the people in this life who stood for it and who contended for the innocent – even the rich innocent – in their hour of trouble.

Which side will you be on?

The innocence of Joe Nacchio

“Also I will make justice the measuring line," we read in Isaiah after sadly reading the headlines, "and [I will make] righteousness the plummet; the hail will sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters will overflow the hiding place" (Isa. 28:17). The rise of Joseph P. Nacchio is one of the great American success stories of the 20th century. And the demise of Joseph P. Nacchio is a turn-of-the-century nightmare for a nation and a legal system that have lost their way.

The involvement of Republican officials, moreover, in the white-collar lynching of an innocent man, not unlike the Republican lynch mob currently screaming for Congressman Doug Lamborn’s blood in El Paso County, testifies to the simultaneous manner in which the modern conservative party has lost its intellectual and moral roots and diminished its influence as a conserving political force. If America is, as French filmmaker and terrorism opponent Pierre Rehov claimed last week at a Denver event organized and promoted by our own distinguished blogmaster, “the last fortress,” it will not remain a fortress for long without a renaissance of real character and conviction within its conservative party.

The son of an Italian immigrant who worked as a Brooklyn longshoreman and bartender, Nacchio earned a B.S. in electrical engineering and an MBA from NYU, and an M.S. in Management from MIT.

Few sons of bartenders do this. Even fewer do what Nacchio went on to do both in a quarter- century at AT&T and in five years at the helm of Qwest Communications. In the wake of telecommunications deregulation in 1996, Nacchio was recruited by Phil Anschutz, the Denver business magnate, founder of Qwest, and hugely (if quietly) influential conservative, to take the telecom public and turn it from a regional Bell company into a national communications and Internet powerhouse.

Nacchio delivered in spades. Between Qwest’s 1997 IPO and 2001, the stock rose 600%.

During this period, Nacchio was made chairman of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee and was granted a Top Secret security clearance. One can still find on the Internet glowing articles from the period about Nacchio, whose net worth had reached $170 million before he was 50.

Then the so-called “bubble” burst of 2001 occurred. The plunge affected the entire New Economy. Qwest stock plummeted, along with that of all its competitors. Historical stock prices for Qwest, British Telecom, Sprint, and Deutsche Telecom cement the point. Here are links for the relevant graphs:

(Qwest) http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=Q&t=my&l=off&z=m&q=l&c= (Sprint) http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&l=off&z=m&q=l&p=&a=&c=&s=s (British Telecom) http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&l=off&z=m&q=l&p=&a=&c=&s=bt (Deutsche Telecom) http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&l=off&z=m&q=l&p=&a=&c=&s=dt

Nacchio was no more responsible for Qwest’s plunge than his fellow telecom CEO’s were responsible for their stock plunges. Enron and Worldcom stock tanked during this same market plunge, and their management was just as blameless for it.

If there had been accounting irregularities at Qwest – there was no evidence of this, despite frenetic accusations that an incredulous Nacchio refuted – those irregularities would not have caused the stock to plunge. Accounting irregularities do not cause stock plunges. This was a market- and economy-wide degradation in future earning potential.

Nonetheless, self-serving and public-pandering SEC regulators and attorneys swept into Wall Street like a horde, assuming their easy prey guilty until proven innocent. “Insider trading” and “cooking the books” and “defrauding little old ladies of their life savings” were the self-righteous rallying cry. Insider trading was the hook and the book with which they got Nacchio.

The idea of insider trading is, of course, nonsense. Economists who still maintain an understanding of the moral principles underlying the classical free market – a dying breed indeed, such as the late Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell -- have explained that, to the degree the nebulous idea of insider trading has any discernible meaning, it is a virtue rather than a vice. Management ownership of company stock is one of the greatest incentives to good company performance that exists, sales of stock by those insiders are a matter of public record, and such sales quicken the speed at which company information is communicated in that company’s stock price. It is restriction of insider sales which introduces inefficiency, and thus volatility, into the market and increases risk to the Little Guy.

Since insider sales can never be large enough to move stock prices by themselves and do not deceive anyone in any way, including those who buy the shares sold by the insider, the modern “insider trading” mentality amounts to an expectation that company executives must share in any stock losses of the companies they manage. Otherwise we will suspect him, or in the abominable case of Martha Stewart, her, of “insider trading” and proclaim to the world that she is a villain worthy of doing hard time.

Selling stock in a company you help manage is no different from selling a car that you, as an insider with respect to that car, believe has reached the point of being defect-prone. As long as you commit no dishonesty with respect to the person buying your car, you are engaging in a perfectly legitimate market transaction, even if you do not disclose to the buyer every opinion you have developed about the car from long use of it. Information is always asymmetric in any market. Penalizing those with the best information in the name of protecting the Little Guy is an ideal way to destroy the efficiency of a market and, by extension, the future earning power of the Little Guy.

Martha Stewart and Joe Nacchio both committed identical crimes: being successful in business and making stock sales at the right time. Their being successful in business destroyed the public sympathy to which they were rightfully entitled as they were subjected to such legal outrages. The list of other innocent victims in American business in the last 50 years who have had their lives ruined by the all-purpose “insider trading” tag is long and distinguished. And it shows no signs of abating. It is another of the many symptoms of the widespread antipathy toward business and wealth creation that accompanied the rise of the welfare state, and the concomitant loss of belief in moral capitalism, or anything moral at all, in the 20th century.

In Nacchio’s case, the judge who presided, the federal District of Colorado’s Edward Nottingham, was a Bush 41 appointee. Nottingham, telling Nacchio his crimes represented ones of “overarching greed,” sentenced him to 6 years in prison and fines amounting to over $100 million. Nacchio had already spent $40 million on a tepid legal defense that, as any defense is tempted to do when faced with an irrational witch hunt based on arbitrary, baseless charges, amounted to little more than a play for sympathy and a beg for mercy.

Some of Judge Nottingham’s statements at Nacchio’s sentencing are unbelievable: Nacchio had family and a good job in New Jersey, said Nottingham, but he came to Qwest “because he couldn’t turn it down.” Apparently, any virtuous man would have turned down an offer to be CEO of a major American firm, and Nacchio’s failure to do so just shows what a greedy creep he is. Judge Nottingham could have remained a lowly state judge, but he accepted appointment to the federal bench “because he couldn’t turn it down.”

Nottingham then taunted Nacchio, “I would bet anything Mr. Nacchio…wishes he would have walked away from Qwest in January 2001when he had a chance to do so.” Yes, Your Honor, there is little doubt he does, just as you would wish the same had you known your success would lead to such a preposterous injustice.

After the hearing, U. S. Attorney Troy Eid, a Republican appointed by a Republican, said the Nacchio case was the largest insider trading suit ever filed in the nation based on the number of counts (19), the amount of money involved, and the length of prison term. “Justice worked here,” he proudly told a crowd of news reporters and onlookers.

Thankfully, justice did eventually work in the famous case of Charles Keating, convicted in 1992 on vague charges related to the savings and loan collapses of the 1980’s – collapses driven by arbitrary and constantly changing government regulation of the banking industry, not by anything Keating did wrong. Keating was a boy scout who campaigned against pornography and donated millions to Mother Theresa, but he was steamrolled just as Nacchio was. He spent four and a half years in prison after a kangaroo trial presided over by O.J. Simpson judge Lance Ito. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s most liberal appeals circuit and no friend to business, later overturned his conviction. Judge Ito, they said, had failed to instruct the jury that Keating must have criminal intent to be convicted of fraud. Ito allowed Keating to be convicted of accidentally committing fraud.

It is possible the inane conviction of Nacchio, who has a wife and handicapped son, may also be overturned on appeal. But Nottingham denied Nacchio’s request to be free on bail pending appeal, meaning Nacchio would have done time for crimes he did not commit had not the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals on Aug 22 overturned this ruling by Nottingham. Two weeks after he self-righteously taunted Nacchio, it came out that a drunken Judge Nottingham had spent $3,000 at a downtown strip club and $150 on an internet dating service. (Irrelevant to the merits of this prosecution, but so much for judgmentalism about things someone can't turn down and wishes later he had.)

This is the kind of circus the American justice system has become under the onslaught of modern amoral liberalism. Rather than the executor of justice, the system is becoming a monument to injustice, and Republicans are among its chief offenders. U.S. Attorney Eid publicly lamented the 10th Circuit ruling, saying, “We hope the defendant will begin serving his sentence as soon as possible."

Pierre Rehov called America “the last fortress” because there is a legacy of moral justice here that exists nowhere else in the world. That legacy still preserves hope, but that hope will continue to fade rapidly unless somewhere, somehow basic moral sanity can be restored to a legal system that has become in many places little more than a towering refuge of lies.

Mr. Nacchio, I have no reason to think you will ever read this, but if you do, I want you to know I join the honorable Mr. Anschutz (who took the stand at trial despite his famed passion of privacy) as a character witness on your behalf. You are a decent man, and I hope you and your family know and believe and can find some comfort in that future day when "hail," in Isaiah's metaphor, will sweep away the refuge of lies, and water will overflow the hiding place of those who aggrandize themselves by calling the innocent guilty. I hope you can hold on. I hope you can believe. And I hope in that final day you will be found faithful in a Christ who atones for sinners -- for all of us -- and who ultimately bids you pass from this unjust life into the awesome presence of eternal justice.