Lobbyists give money to politicians and the politicians do favors in return. Because except for the murder I couldn't identify a single illegal act in the entire movie. It's the kind of movie that someone as stupid as I am needs a little preparation for - a few hours of studying with a book called 'Lobbying for Dummies' or something. And I can hardly credit the notion that Mike Scanlon's (Barry Pepper, with a great twisted face) girl friend dropped the dime on all these enterprises because she found a pair of red alien panties in her boy friend's laundry. Abramoff makes some venomous remark about George W. Tom DeLay has a prominent role and I don't know what he did that was supposed to be bad. I don't know why Jon Lovitz got stabbed with a ball point pen. I don't know what an expression like 'he wants ten percent under the table' means. In one of his minor deals, towards the beginning, the Chippewa tribe, among whom I once lived as a cultural anthropologist, gave him millions of dollars and the money apparently disappeared. A second reason I found it hard to assess the movie is that I didn't understand it because I'm too dumb. He opens a kosher restaurant on K Street and plans to open a Hebrew school.

Abramoff is a colorful, funny, very active guy. No explanation is offered for why spending on lobbyists more than doubled between 20. Nobody argues that perhaps congressional aides or interns ought to be doing the research instead of paid lobbyists. He only had the misfortune of being caught. According to the film, Abramoff just did was everyone else was doing. Mass murderers and psychopaths provide us with bad examples that we can point out to our kids so they'll know what not to become. The Mafia fills in the gaps that the police force can't, and it meets a market demand among consumers of illegal goods. Otherwise it wouldn't be there, right? Whores make the streets safe for our wives and children. If something exists in a society, it's there for a good reason.

That explanation comes straight out of a now unfashionable school of sociological thought called functionalism.

They give legislators information about subjects the legislators need to know something about in order to do their jobs. I mean, right at the beginning, after we see Kevin Spacey (superb) talking to himself in a mirror, we hear his explanation of why lobbyists exist. I had a difficult time dealing with this movie, partly because the entire system of lobbying is so despicable in itself, and partly because the writer has done his best to show Jack Abramoff as a fundamentally nice guy who just overreached a little and got caught.

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