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MORE TROUBLE FOR SHAYS. Yesterday I doubted whether Rep. Chris Shays' challenger Diane Farrell had the deadlocked race sewn up now by her endorsement in The New York Times. Well, now Garance has a piece in The New Republic that should deliver a death blow to Shays. Apparently Shays has taken to bragging about his first venture into Iraq, leaving out the part about how, stopping en route in Qatar, a small middle-Eastern monarchy, he told an audience: "This nation, like my small state, has always played a large role in advancing participatory democracy, civil discourse, and stable commerce." But the scandal wasn't his royal ass-kissing -- it was how Shays, with his famously holier-than-thou stance on ethics, got there in the first place. According to Garance:
... despite his record of pushing for meticulous record-keeping, Shays's privately sponsored trip to Qatar was notably absent from his own annual federal financial disclosure form, filed in May 2004, in violation of House rules. Nor did he submit an amendment disclosing the sponsor of his Qatar trip until confronted in mid-October 2006 by The New Republic with internal Islamic Institute receipts for his plane tickets, which were provided by an Arab American source upset with Shays's foreign policy positions.It has seemed in the last couple years that his reputation for championing ethics rules reforms, campaign finance reforms and other good government measures was the only thing Shays had going for him in his liberal district. If this story gets the play it deserves, he won't have that either.
--Ben Adler
