It happens when the German commander orders Claude Rains’ Vichy French police captain to close the nightclub run by Humphrey Bogart’s character.
When Rains is challenged on the pretext for shutting the place down, he proclaims loudly and emphatically that he is shocked, shocked, SHOCKED to discover that there’s been gambling going on at the club—right before he pockets his winnings from previous nights at the roulette table.
What makes the scene so delectable is the way it perfectly encapsulates all the wink-wink-nudge-nudge corruption and moral rot that come with collaborating with authoritarians, even wannabe ones.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita and U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, R-Indiana, just offered their homage to Rains’ performance.
After years of backing him, endorsing him and using him for whatever bit of filthy partisan dirty work they could conjure up, Rokita and Banks announced that they were stunned, stunned, STUNNED to learn that Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales was not a paragon of virtue.
Banks and Rokita rescinded their endorsement of Morales and instead have chosen to back a Banks staffer whose primary qualification for elected office seems to be that he apparently once worked as a male model.
The attorney general and the U.S. senator aren’t the skilled comic performers that Rains was, but—in a perverse sort of way—their pretend epiphany about Morales is just as deliciously absurd as the late movie star’s was.
Like Rains’ straight-faced hypocrisy, Rokita and Banks are opening the curtain on a wing of the Indiana Republican Party that has made one deal with the devil after another after another and another.
Morales never has hidden who or what he is. He’s an unapologetic hustler always on the make for the next grift.
Fired twice as a staffer from the office he now holds by themselves ethically bankrupt secretaries of state—yes, Rokita himself was one of them—Morales has made it clear that he sees rules and laws as things to be ignored, circumvented or just plain broken. He has the same regard for public service that a dog does for a tree.
Before he was elected secretary of state, Morales faced credible accusations that he had, at best, sexually harassed two young women, both of them Republicans, and ducked out on his military service commitment.
That’s in addition to being fired twice for incompetence by two previous secretaries of state whose highest aspirations were to be partisan hacks.
Once in office, Morales focused on sticking the taxpayers with the bill for buying him expensive new rides, putting family members on the public payroll, taking all-expense-paid trips to foreign lands funded by dubious sources for undefined purposes, stretching the limits of his office’s authority to wage voter suppression campaigns and, finally, hiring an extremely well-compensated female staffer to perform unspecified services even though her immigration status is up in the air.
If Rokita and Banks were unaware of all this, then they must be blinder than Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder combined.
No, the attorney general and the senator did what Rains did in “Casablanca.”
They pretended not to notice that Morales was selling off his office piece by piece while he still was in a position to do political dirty work for them. As long as he launched expensive and legally questionable campaigns to purge Democrats from voter rolls and performed other bits of partisan skullduggery, Banks and Rokita opted to see nothing, hear nothing and say nothing.
Once, though, it became clear that their obliviousness might cost them—Hoosier Republicans were growing restive that Morales might further drag down a GOP ticket already burdened by President Donald Trump’s intraparty feuds—their sight suddenly, miraculously, restored itself.
All at once, they could see Diego Morales for who he is and what he’s done.
Then, Todd Rokita and Jim Banks found themselves shocked, shocked, SHOCKED to learn that gambling was happening in the back room—right before they pocketed their winnings.
The problem here is not Morales.
At least he had the dignity never to pretend to be something other than what he is, a low-level scammer constantly on the make.
Banks and Rokita, though?
The contempt for the voters they’re showing with their little charade is shocking.
And not in a comic way.
