Return to Sender

Fatboy strikes wingnut gold:

Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh raised $2.1 million for children of fallen Marines and law enforcement officers on Friday by auctioning off a letter from Senate Democrats denouncing him for a remark about "phony soldiers."

Philanthropist Betty Casey purchased the letter on eBay, which said it was the most expensive item ever sold for charity on the online marketplace.

The letter, signed by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and 40 fellow Senate Democrats, expressed outrage over what they described as Limbaugh's "characterization of troops who oppose the (Iraq) war as 'phony soldiers'."

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Casey is with the Eugene B. Casey Foundation, which said in a statement it bought the "smear letter" to demonstrate its belief in free speech and support of Limbaugh.

Alrighty then. And who might this Eugene B. Casey be?

President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Casey as director of the Farm Credit Administration when he was 36 years old and he served there from 1940 to 1941. His annual salary was $6,500. At the same time he was also an agricultural adviser to the White House.

Casey ran into some problems with the IRS during that time frame. According to newspaper articles, the government claimed he didn’t report his total income between 1941 and 1943. Casey reported that his income for the three years was $81,210, but the government said his income was more than twice that amount, $171,780.

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A federal judge in Baltimore slapped him with a $30,000 fine, and Casey went to prison in 1946. He served five months of a six-month sentence for evading $70,384 in income taxes between 1941 and 1943. President Harry S. Truman pardoned him of the tax evasion in 1951.

Some would have Casey seen as a respected individual who worked for two presidents, but the transcript from a 1963 interview with Jonathan Daniels, who worked as press secretary to both Roosevelt and Truman, revealed that Casey was a sort of special assistant to the president with no real job.

Roosevelt hired him because Casey did fund raising for one of his presidential campaigns, Daniels asserted in a wide-ranging oral history interview for the Truman Library. Daniels described Casey as "a little wacky" and said some of the White House staff "referred to Casey as the ‘washroom rodent.’"

Daniels recalled during the interview that Casey had been fired from the Roosevelt administration. He cited a 1943 memo from President Roosevelt that referred to the "General Casey impasse." Daniels said that the impasse meant "how the hell are we going to get rid of the son-of-a-b----."

Well, at least he wasn't a drug-addicted sex tourist, or one of the innumerable closet cases prowling the halls of gubmint by day, and your local park bathroom by night. Unless that "washroom rodent" crack means something....