What's in a name? In Air America's case, about $800,000

Someone once said that a war isn't a good war unless it has good songs to go with it.

I suppose that scandals are the same way; they need a chic, catchy name before they really have a lot of gravitas.  Look at the recent Valerie Plame/Karl Rove nonsense.  Nobody on the Left came up with a good name for it, and now all of the words written about it have been relegated to bird cage lining.

The $800,000 scandal involving Air America seems to be gaining momentum by the day, and I agree with the WizBangers that it certainly seems like a good time to come up with a catchy name.

So far, "Air Deadbeat," "Air Enron," "Air Scamerica," and "Con Air America" have come up.  If you think of a better one, leave a comment.  My vote goes for "Frankengate," inspired by the Left's continual scandal-mongering and their clumsy attempts at making individual conservatives into scapegoats even if those individuals were never involved in any wrong-doing.  Besides, I think Al Franken deserves it, since he has been slinging rhetorical mud at his ideological opponents for a long time now.  David Lombino of the New York Sun reported today that Al Franken (who, if you didn't know, is Air America's masthead personality) didn't learn about the financial hanky-panky until last week.  But come on - what self-respecting conspiracy hound believes such an excuse?

This story has gotten a lot of blog bandwith so far, but none of the blogger's opinions have been as damning as yesterday's unbelievable story from the New York Sun: Funds of a Youth Bronx Group Allegedly Lent to Air America.

You've got to read it all in order to understand just how rotten this whole thing smells.  But here are a few highlights:

- In addition to masterminding the swindle of the Gloria Wise Club by Air America, Evan Cohen also borrowed money from Gloria Wise in order to pay personal debts and family medical expenses.

- Cohen "paid back" the Gloria Wise loans with hot checks.

- There is still a great deal of uncertainty over exactly how much money was involved, though the total amount is rapidly approaching $1 million.

- At least $400,000 of the money was wired to Air America without the approval of Gloria Wise's president, Jeannette Graves; at least one check for $213,000 was drafted based on documents that were endorsed with a rubber stamp of  Graves' signature.

- It is unclear how much of the money actually went into Air America's coffers, although they are apparently willing to pay $800,000 in order to make the story go away.  And how lame is this:

Members of the Gloria Wise executive committee described to the Sun transfers from the club to Mr. Cohen and to Air America that totaled $875,000. They said Sunday that one reason Mr. Cohen cited when asking for personal loans was that he needed money for chemotherapy because he suffered from brain cancer.

Mr. Franken said he did not know whether his former colleague had the disease, but he recalled that Mr. Cohen, a native of Guam who is 39, referred repeatedly to it. For example, Mr. Franken said, he'd complain to Mr. Cohen that studio equipment wasn't working, "and he'd say, 'You know, I have brain cancer.'"

"Brain cancer," Mr. Franken said, "seemed to be his answer to everything." Mr. Franken said he didn't know Mr. Cohen's current whereabouts.

But the folks at Second Breakfast seem to have located Mr. Cohen - in Nigeria.  (Thanks to WizBang for the link.)  It's possible that Cohen scammed both Gloria Wise and Air America and pocketed the money himself.  If that's true, we can only hope that some federal penitentiary is saving a seat for him right next to Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay.

Left-wing bloggers have either been ignoring this story or playing it down as a non-scandal.  They are wrong, because Air America was created as a voice of the liberal progressive political Left in America.  You know, the "good guys."  The guys who are motivated by justice and equality, not money and profits.  The guys whose radio network exists solely to perpetuate the stereotype of conservatives as greedy, evil, warmongering, scheming tyrants who feed dog food to their grandmothers.  The guys who have railed against capitalism, big business, the stock market, Bush's tax breaks, and any other manifestation of "greed" that they find.

That is, unless the greed is within their own ranks.  When that happens, we get Dead Air America.

Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and the Enron gang played high-stakes bait-and-switch with their company's finances and ruined a lot of people's retirement savings accounts.  But Evan Cohen swindled a truckload of cash from a charity that helps poor inner-city kids.  In my book, that places him at least a few degrees higher on the Loathe-o-Meter.  And I hope he pays for it dearly.

BoreAmerica, which has been logging the tribulations of Air America for some time, is a great source of info on this story.  They also have an Air America Scandal Counter and an Air America Scandal News Ticker script that you can add to your own website, if you so desire.

Comments

[Ken Summers]

Thanks very much for the link!