I'll Bet You $50 You're An Anti-Gambling Wacko

Via Greg Saunders on This Modern World, a link to "Houses of cards," a story about how Republican Of The Year Jack Abramoff manipulated conservative "Christians" on behalf of his Indian casino clients. Nice.

Mr. Abramoff first hired Mr. Reed, a prominent evangelical who once called gambling "a cancer," to leverage his evangelical contacts to defeat pro-gambling legislation in Alabama in 1999. Mr. Abramoff hatched the campaign to protect the gaming interests of one of his clients, the Choctaw Tribe of Mississippi. While Mr. Reed worked to rally Christians for campaigns that benefited Mr. Abramoff's clients, Mr. Abramoff's partner, Michael Scanlon, wrote an e-mail to Kathryn Van Hoof, a former lawyer for the Coushatta Tribe, describing the plan to use Christians: "Simply put we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. The wackos get their information [from] the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet, and telephone."