The folks behind the blog Cool Patience have done their homework on the Virgil Goode/MZM connection, which explains quite a bit.
Virgil, as he likes his constituents to call him, has just one bill of note to his name: 2003’s HR 277. That was his bill that would permit troops to be stationed domestically, something that we Americans tend to be a little skittish about, what with, y’know, the Revolutionary War and all. As Cool Patience points out, this bill required that a new training program be established to retrain soldiers for their new duty. The essence of the bill, Goode Amendment intact, went on to be tacked onto the Defense Authorization Act of 2005. This despite that the Department of Defense was opposed to the Goode Amendment. So why did he include it?
MZM is the business of, among other things, security personnel training for Homeland Security. Coincidence? If so, there seem to be a lot of those going on between Rep. Goode and the emerging MZM scandal.
Again, Cool Patience has the story.
The interesting thing about virgil is that he was opposed to the war in Iraq.
He was? In the 2004 campaign, he was all about it.
Is there more to this than Goode exerting his usual activity to bring a company into his district, as with MZM’s presence in Martinsville and Greene County?
The Wade/Cunningham affair looks like pure personal sleaze. Of course, even if Virgil is getting nothing personally out of the relationship, not every quid-pro-quo arrangement that benefits inhabitants of one’s district is appropriate. Though we’d be awfully naive if we thought that every time a congressman induces a company to locate a branch in his or her district, there wasn’t an implicit understanding that the company would appreciate it if their life were made easier by legislation that the congressman can influence.
I should maybe clarify: when I say “exerting his usual activity to bring a company into his district” I don’t mean to imply that’s bad. Quite the opposite: that’s one thing a congressperson is elected to do. The only question is whether it’s done properly, ethically, and without undue influence on either side.
You’re absolutely right, David — at this point, there’s nothing more than a Congressman receiving an unusually large amount of money from employees of a business with offices in his district. And I’ve known about that every since MZM made their first contribution to Goode, and never saw fit to mention it before. It’s only because of the Cunningham situation that I speculate that there may be more to this than meets the eye, and that’s why I hope that the big boys (read as: journalists) will look into this.
Yeah…I saw him speak and he was basically ranting about the brown people and how they don’t deserve our money. He’s an ignorant old coot, in my opinion.