Abby Zimet

RINF Alternative News

This weekend’s most skeevy spectacle featured an unseemly parade of GOP presidential hopefuls trooping out to Las Vegas to scrape, bow and pander before 80-year-old Israel lover, crackpot kingmaker and casino gazillionnaire Sheldon Adelson – $40 billion and counting – at a Republican Jewish conference just cringingly crass enough for a Robert Altman movie.

Amidst much Vegas glitz, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Scott Walker and others came to genuflect before Adelson, who in the last election dumped over $20 million into a super PAC for Newt Gingrich, reportedly spent even more on Romney and praised Mike Huckabee as “a great person, a great American and a great Zionist.”

More recently, in Israel, he bought a right-wing website and paper deemed “the mouthpiece of one man – the prime minister,” and started a school for entrepreneurship. How low did the lowly supplicants have to go?

This low: Chris Christie had to do humble penance for telling a story in which he inadvertently referred to the Occupied Territories as “the Occupied Territories” – as dubbed by one observer, “Baby did a bad bad thing” – for which crime he spent much of the weekend furiously backpedalling and clarifying he was “an unwavering friend and committed supporter of Israel, and was sorry for any confusion that came across as a result of the misstatement,” an act of obeisance that put to shame Scott Walker’s modest move of telling Adelson how he puts up a menorah every holiday season. Alas, maintaining his reputation as “a true wild card,” Adelson failed to endorse any of them, or as Andy Borowtiz puts it, he declined to buy any of the “third-rate grab bag of has-beens and dimwits.”

For this indignity and so much more, we thank you, Citizens United.

Common Dreams.