Faith and Freedom Hitmen

The latest bizzaro hidden camera stunt orchestrated by conservative filmmakers James O'Keefe and Ben Wetmore has, by all accounts, epically failed.
According to CNN, O'Keefe planned to lure correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat riddled with all sorts of romantic props -- dildos, condoms, handcuffs -- and make sexual passes in an attempt to embarrass her. If gone as planned, the whole incident would have been secretly video-taped.

For a high-profile religious conservative like Reed, the stories of being paid millions by one Indian tribe to run a religious-based antigambling campaign to prevent another tribe from opening a rival casino made him look like something worse than a criminal--a hypocrite. He had once called gambling a "cancer" on the body politic. And the e-mails to Abramoff didn't help, especially those that seemed to suggest that the man who had deplored in print Washington's system of "honest graft" was eager to be part of it. "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!" he wrote Abramoff a few days after the 1998 election.

To Reed, it sometimes appeared, Christian voters were pawns in a game of power swapping. The Journal-Constitution reported that the man who had once condemned China for its one-child policy and its persecution of Christians had created a "grass-roots" Christian group to lobby for freer trade with the superpower--an effort quietly financed by major U.S. corporations like Boeing that were the Georgian's true clients. The profits Reed collected from such dealings were not, by any indication, the wages of illegal behavior. But to some they were the wages of sin. "He got nailed for being a phony," says a fellow G.O.P. operative in Washington, with more than a little schadenfreude.