Michael Goldfarb has been on the case of Chas Freeman since the beginning. Late yesterday, he posted another email from Freeman that he somehow recovered from the ether of the internet.

This letter defames Congress as an institution, depicting Congressmen as "Congresscritters" amenable to lobbyists and their goodies. To Freeman, politics is a game and the players with the biggest pockets win.

Freeman's view:

When you do the math, it looks like almost all of the $19 million figure for cumulative lobbying expenditure "on behalf of China" since 1997, is Hong Kong-generated or related. And to put the figure in perspective, over $3 billion is spent annually on lobbying activities in this town. (I don't know how much of that is foreign government-related.) This goes a long way toward explaining why our government decision-making processes are generally considered by international investors and businessfolk to be both venal and corrupt, producing the best government policy decisions money can buy.

Why shoud foreign government hire a lobbyist? To ally the foreign ambassador or appear to ally him to a US domestic interest with the ability to make campaign contributions or otherwise affect electoral realities. To advise the ambassador on the pet peeves and domestic political circumstances and agendas of the congresscritter in question so as to facilitate flattery, concrete gestures with possible impact on the electorate in question, or arrange a pseudo-event at which the congresscritter can claim credit for one his/her district's companies having made a sale to the country represented by the lobbyist. To do research on the congresscritter so as to expose duplicity, where and when it exists, as it almost always does.

the closest thing to a native American criminal class.