The Tom Cruise Nexus of Washington Corruption

[PhilipShore]

Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-blumenthal/the-tom-cruise-nexus-of-w_b_42894.html">Link

What ties the current scandals in Washington together? Tom Cruise. Cruise's name has popped up in the Duke Cunningham corruption case, the U.S. Attorney purge hearings, and the Lewis Libby trial. Cruise, the couch-jumping face of Scientology, is like a "body thetan" to Republicans who come in contact with him.

ake David Iglesias, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico. Iglesias, appointed by President Bush, was a well-liked and highly approved of Attorney in the Justice Department who wound up facing alleged pressure from Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) to bring down indictments on prominent New Mexico Democrats prior to the November elections. Iglesias was fired in what appears to be a great Attorney purge by the Justice Department. Before Iglesias' work as a U.S. Attorney and his role in yesterday's riveting Capitol Hill hearings he was a Navy JAG officer who just so happens to have been the basis for Tom Cruise's character in the film A Few Good Men.

Lewis "Scooter" Libby, as I'm sure you know, was convicted yesterday on four counts of perjury, making false statements, and obstruction of justice. Libby had been covering up for his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, as prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald sought to find the original source of a leak that ended the career of an undercover CIA agent and endangered the lives of those she had come in contact with all in the name of a political vendetta. Now Tom Cruise has never played a short neoconservative Cheney acolyte, but he nevertheless comes into play in this tale of scandal. In the spring of 2003, as Libby and the Administration were worried about possible blowback over their insertion of the infamous "sixteen words" in the President's State of the Union, Libby met with Cruise and Cruise's then-girlfriend Penelope Cruz to discuss the treatment of Scientologists in Germany.

If I'm a Republican in Washington I would stay away from Tom Cruise -- and I would never let him play me in a movie, ever. He invades their lives and causes bad things to happen to them. Hey, maybe Scientology is real after all.