Today's Daily Schadenfreude: Sam Fox

What goes around comes around. That's the real beauty of karma, and it lends itself well to schadenfreude.

Sam Fox, of Clayton, Mo. (where I once lived, during law school and while briefly in private practice), was the Bush administration's crime syndicate's nominee for ambassador to Belgium. However, the nomination was withdrawn today because of the furor over Fox's $50,000 contribution to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (now there's an oxymoron for ya) in 2004.

The White House issued its statement with no explanation a half-hour before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was scheduled to vote on Fox’s nomination.

Fox, a wealthy businessman and one of the national GOP’s most reliable political donors, contributed $50,000 in the last election to the group that vigorously attacked Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, alleging that Kerry did not deserve the medals he had won after his service in Vietnam.

Kerry allies branded the campaign a smear and some Democrats believe that it cost their party the election.

[...]

"The bottom line is that what was done to Kerry was unconscionable. I served with John Kerry; I know what he was made of," Wade Sanders, a former assistant secretary of the Navy, said in an interview with the Post-Dispatch this week.

[Sen. Claire] McCaskill [D-Mo.]* and Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., said they had not wavered in their backing of Fox.

Fox, 77, who is national chairman of the Jewish Republican Coalition, has contributed over $1 million to Republican campaigns since the 1990s.

When Kerry pressed him on the contributions to the Swift Boat group, Fox declined to apologize or to explain in a fashion that mollified Kerry and others on the committee.

"When I’m asked, I just generally give," Fox said at the time.

Well, good thing he's not going to Belgium, then, eh? Will you do anything you're asked, Sam? Even without checking the veracity of the cause for which you are being solicited? Man, you're an easy mark ...

Is the "Jewish Republican Coalition" the same as the group to which Dick "Dick" Cheney spoke last weekend? It seems likely ... so if I'd known that Sam was going to go down this hard this soon, why, I could have just gone to Manalapan myself and laughed at him directly.

Well, I guess this laughter from afar will have to do. Congratulations, would-be ambassador Sam Fox! Today's Blast Off! Daily Schadenfreude is for you!

* Too bad Sen. McCaskill supported such an obvious wanker for the ambassadorship ... but I guess she was just supporting a constituent.