McCain's new fundraiser "counted Jews" and grilled a dog

April 5, 2007

By D. M. Silev
dmsilev@uchicago.edu


File this one under "You couldn't make this up if you tried".

Courtesy of Think Progress, we learn some details of just who Straight Talk has brought in to fix his anemic fundraising machine.

McCain recently brought in as a high-level fundraiser a guy named Fred Malek.

So, who is he? Well, like so many GOP types these days, he's a Nixon leftover. Specifically, he "counted Jews" for Nixon:

Nixon summoned the White House personnel chief, Fred Malek, to his office to discuss a “Jewish cabal” in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The “cabal,” Nixon said, was tilting economic figures to make his Administration look bad. How many Jews were there in the bureau? he wanted to know. Malek reported back on the number, and told the President that the bureau’s methods of weighing statistics were normal procedure that had been in use for years.

More disturbingly, he was arrested as a young man for

On a Friday in August 1959, five men in their twenties were arrested about 2 a.m...
After checking the blood-spattered pants of one of the men at the state crime laboratory in Springfield, it was determined that the stains were animal and not human blood. [Sherriff Harry] Backes said the men then changed their story and said they had "caught a dog and were barbecuing it."

Police then found the skinned animal on a spit in the park. The insides of the dog had been removed, and a bottle of liquor was found on a nearby park table. Backes said the men told him they had been drinking earlier in the evening at a West Bluff tavern.

One of the men arrested in the incident, in which a dog was killed, skinned, gutted and barbecued on a spit, was Frederick V. Malek, 22, of Berwyn, Ill.

What is it with GOP presidential candidates and cruelty to animals? Bill "cat killer" Frist, Rudy's wife apparently worked for a company that killed dogs as part of a sales pitch, and now McCain's big-time cash-raiser.

Oh, and as far as money is concerned, there's a minor matter of an SEC action (from the same WaPo article as above):

The SEC instituted administrative and cease-and-desist proceedings against Malek, his company, Thayer Capital Partners, and two Thayer affiliates, TS Equity Partners IV L.L.C, and TC Management Partners IV L.L.C. The SEC charged that in 1998 the Connecticut treasurer, Paul J. Silvester, used state pension investments in Malek's company to reward a friend and political supporter, William DiBella, former majority leader of the Connecticut Senate.