Cruella'a Last Dance

Remember Katherine Harris? Jeb Bush's psycho, heiress ex-girlfriend who helped W rig the 2000 recount and then won a seat in Congress from a very right-wing district in the Florida panhandle? One of my college buddies used to be one of her top staffers, and we had some entertaining debates about whether she was an enlightened public servant or, well, an election-stealin' ho and complete frickin' loon. I took the latter position. Well, her run for the U.S. Senate against Bill Nelson (D-FL) keeps getting better and better.

Her campaign staff has quit several times over, citing her micromanagement and "tantrums," and she's been tagged for accepting thousands in bribes from Mitchell Wade at MZM, one of the defense contractors that greased Duke Cunnigham's palms. Unlike Duke, Kat was a cheap date, but she also couldn't put out like the Dukestir, so maybe you get what you pay for. On one occasion, she accepted a $2800 dinner. When called on it by the press, she claimed that she had reimbursed the restaurant, despite the facts that she hadn't (or maybe she just lost the receipt), and that it was the contractor who had already paid (and not the restaurant who got stiffed on the check). Caught in the fib, she then gave a small $100 check to a creepy evangelical church in Jacksonville called Global Dominion Impact Ministries as some kind of bizarre attempt at charity penance. The Feds are finally investigating. No big surprise.

But the best part of the story so far is a recent revelation about how she kept MSNBC host (and former congressman) Joe Scarborough out of the primary race: she called up all of Florida's big GOP donors and told them that Joe was involved in the mysterious death of one of his staffers. Hmmm. . . . Missing white woman. Mysterious death. Powerful TV personalities covering things up. This sounds like the kind of story they should be investigating. . . on MSNBC. And maybe Dan Burton can get the House Oversight Committee involved in a reenactment. I'm sure they've got some leftover pumpkins from the Vince Foster investigation.