Bob McCarty Writes

The scandal that led to the withdrawal of Commerce Secretary-designate Bill Richardson may be “just the beginning of a string of scandals unlike anything we’ve seen in American history,” Richard A. Viguerie said today.

Viguerie used a late-afternoon news release to share his thoughts about Richardson, the current New Mexico governor and former Clinton cabinet member who faces a grand jury investigation into whether he exchanged infrastructure-related state contracts for political contributions.

“The federal government is on the verge of handing out hundreds of billions of dollars of so-called ‘economic stimulus,’” said Viguerie, chairman of ConservativeHQ.com. “You can rest assured that big contributors and others with the right political connections will get big chunks of that money, and that a lot of it will never be accounted for. Much of it will go for ‘green’ energy projects that will turn out to be scams, and for public works projects that make the Capitol Visitor Center and ‘The Big Dig’ look like money well spent.”

The Capitol Visitor Center was originally planned to cost $71 million, its “final” budget was $265 million, and it eventually cost $621 million. The Big Dig was a Boston highway project that, by the time all political interests had been satisfied, cost four times the original estimates even with inflation taken into account.

“Cost overruns, the use of substandard materials with resulting injuries and deaths, payoffs to political interests such as environmentalists and neighborhood groups, and out-and-out bribery on government contracts — that’s what the American people better prepare themselves for, if the politicians have their way on this ‘stimulus,’” Viguerie said.

“Blagojevich? Richardson? You ain’t seen nothing yet!

“Already, it is hard to read or watch the news without being bombarded with stories of politicians being credibly accused of wrongdoing, being indicted, being sentenced. Throwing a trillion taxpayers’ dollars into a corrupt system will only make the system more corrupt.”

This explosion of corruption “is a serious threat to our democracy,” Viguerie said. “It is the Chicago-ization of American politics.”