“If there’s a team, no one has asked me to join. As a conservative, I normally write more favorably about Republicans than Democrats and I routinely treat conservative ideas as superior to liberal ones. But I’ve never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team.”

This assertion of political purity struck me as false, coming from a journalist who has appeared repeatedly as a speaker at Republican Party events across the country — a breach of the political boundaries of “traditional journalism” that few, if any, of the writers on Journolist, for example, would ever contemplate.

Nevertheless, it is true that Barnes has enjoyed greater credibility than other journalists on the partisan right throughout his career. After all, he is a former reporter for such publications as the Washington Star, the Baltimore Sun and the New Republic. He was once a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and served as one of three panelists for the first nationally televised debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale in 1984.

Now, however, there is further evidence that Barnes not only routinely helped Republicans raise money as a banquet speaker, but accepted tens of thousands of dollars from party organizations as well:

• In February 2006, Barnes was paid $10,000 plus travel expenses by Oregon’s Lane County Republican Central Committee to deliver the keynote address at the annual Lincoln Day Dinner. (Thanks to Carla Axtman for research assistance.) These payments, recorded in filings with the Oregon secretary of state, were evidently made through the Premier Speakers Bureau of Franklin, Tenn., which represents other Fox personalities including Sean Hannity, Dick Morris and Mike Huckabee. Barnes is no longer listed on the Premier website, but the company did not respond to phone or e-mail inquiries about its relationship with him.

• In February 2007, Barnes spoke at the annual  Lincoln-Reagan Dinner held by the Republican Party of Fort Bend County, Texas — home of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who purchased a ticket to the event. The party organization’s filing with the Texas Ethics Commission shows two payments of $5,000 each on April 26, 2007, to Premiere Speakers Bureau (with the notation “LRD 2007 Speaker – Fred Barnes”) and travel expenses of $1,823. Photos of a smiling Barnes with various local dignitaries at the event, which netted a reported $70,000 for the party, can be viewed  here.

• In early March 2008, Barnes served as the keynote speaker for the Republican Party of Palm Beach County at its annual Lincoln Day Dinner. Whether he received the customary $10,000 is not clear because the party’s  filing with the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections show only a single payment of $5,500 to Premiere Speakers Bureau on Feb. 18. The committee reported net $120,000 in net proceeds from the event.

Barnes didn’t return a call seeking comment. Neither did a Fox News spokeswoman. The question they avoided answering is whether accepting money from party organizations is appropriate for any political journalist, and whether such payments fall within the ethical guidelines of Fox News. Whatever Fox might say, the Murdoch network’s  long history of excessive coziness with Republican politicians and organizations offers little reassurance.

I hoped to ask Barnes whether he agrees that being on the team payroll means he is indeed “on the team” — the Republican Party team. Understandably, he may prefer not to respond. But he ought to reflect on his standing to criticize the behavior of other journalists, left or right, before he mounts his high horse again.

The other thing they have in common, of course, is Alex Gibney, who has made movies about all those subjects, including the Oscar-winner “Taxi to the Dark Side,” the box-office breakthrough “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” which wasn’t a big hit but strikes me as a key work in understanding what Gibney is up to. He thrives on those oversize emotions mentioned above, channeling them into intentionally ambiguous pop documentaries that inhabit a nuanced middle ground between journalism and entertainment.

As he would be the first to admit, Gibney’s films depend on the work of old-school investigative journalists, those lumbering sauropods who take months or years to reach their destinations. His particular genius lies in taking their facts and figures, their reams of insider testimony, and spinning them into compelling on-screen yarns, loaded with archival news footage, goofy animations and special effects, dramatic re-creations and comic-relief moments. Yet if Gibney’s films are a long way from the purist cinema-vérité documentary tradition, they’re closer in spirit to old-fashioned muckraking than to the clown-prince pranksterism of Michael Moore. (Gibney’s voice can be heard in his films, both literally and figuratively, but he never appears as a character.)

Even by Gibney’s prolific standards, 2010 is shaping up as a bonanza, or perhaps an unmanageable pileup. When I met him recently at the New York offices of Magnolia Pictures, we were officially talking about his explosive, hilarious and eye-opening Abramoff film, “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” which Magnolia releases in theaters this week. But Gibney also had — count ‘em — three other new movies premiering in the Tribeca Film Festival, at least if you count his section of the anthology documentary “Freakonomics,” adapted from Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s bestselling books. (Other co-directors of that film are Seth Gordon, Eugene Jarecki, Morgan Spurlock and the “Jesus Camp” duo, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady.)

Gibney also unveiled a sneak preview of his as-yet-untitled Eliot Spitzer documentary at Tribeca, along with “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” a film based on journalist and author Lawrence Wright’s solo theater piece about his quest to find the roots of Islamic terrorism. (That film will play on HBO, and perhaps also receive limited theatrical release. The commercial fate of the Spitzer film remains undecided.)

“Casino Jack” veritably revels in the rollicking, stranger-than-fiction details of the Abramoff scandal, in which a brilliant and charismatic lobbyist pimped out much of the United States Congress to big-money corporate clients, along the way defrauding Indian tribes, the territorial government of the Mariana Islands and other easy marks. Beyond that, though, Gibney is fascinated by the scandal’s larger implications — and it’s there that we begin to see the conceptual thread that ties his films together. Abramoff was no rogue out to enrich himself (although he did that too) but a committed right-wing ideologue who permanently changed the rules of the game in Washington. He embraced and embodied that old gag about the Golden Rule: Those who have the gold make the rules.

As always, Gibney was a cheerful, upbeat conversationalist in person. He’s a film buff who stays busy at festivals catching other people’s work, and in an interview context he delivers concise, on-message sound bites, not dark, philosophical jeremiads. Still, as I told him, I sense a pattern here, whether or not it’s entirely conscious: Gibney is documenting the not-so-slow and not-so-gradual demolition of the American dream, the interlinked vision of freedom, democracy and capitalism that has been so influential in the recent history of the world, and now seems to be in potentially terminal decay.

So, Alex, we’re here to talk about “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” but you’ve got two other films that are either complete or almost complete. And then there’s “Freakonomics,” which you directed part of. I think you should write some kind of self-help book on how to get stuff done. Are you one of those people who’s incredibly organized?

Man, that would make everybody who knows me howl with laughter. I may be the world’s most disorganized person. But I do put in the hours. I should probably join Filmmakers Anonymous. Stop me before I say yes again!

You know, you could look at your films and describe them as miscellaneous. Generally you’re taking the work of journalists and adapting it for the screen. But when I look at them, I see a congressional corruption scandal, a major corporate scandal, a disgraced politician and a dead journalist who spent his life excoriating the stupidity and corruption he saw around him. Is there a pattern?

Maybe if you see it, you’ll let me know. [Laughter.] There are clearly certain things that interest me, and I seem to go there. But a pattern? I don’t know.

Well, if I were a graduate student trying to write a thesis about you, I might suggest that these are all aspects of the decline of America since 1980 — the legacy of the Reagan revolution and the triumph of conservatism in American politics.

Well, there’s a theme in that. I think that’s the big story. Now we’re seeing that the net result of the Reagan revolution was the Wall Street meltdown. Take away all the rules and regulations, and what do you get? Meltdown. So I think that’s a theme.

But the other thing that’s increasingly interesting for me is human behavior. What makes people do the strange things they do? How do good people go bad? How do people abuse power? Those are big things for me.

You’re showing your movie about Eliot Spitzer at Tribeca, but it has no title yet and we’ve all been asked not to write about it. So I take it you don’t think it’s ready to roll?

I’m taking my cue on the Spitzer film from what happened with “Casino Jack” at Sundance. We thought it was finished. But seeing it with an audience, who weren’t my friends or anything, you learn things about how it plays. So we made it a lot shorter, we took at some narration, we just shifted stuff around. I would say the Spitzer film is largely finished, and now we’ll see how people respond. We may make a few adjustments.

Your other new film is “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” which — well, how would you describe it? Is it an adaptation of Lawrence Wright’s performance piece?

Yeah, in some ways it is. He did a one-man play called “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” which is like “my summer vacation,” except in the Middle East. What intrigued me was that it was an everyman’s look at al-Qaida — why they attacked us, and why they came to be what they were. In making the film, we filmed the play, but then we enhanced it. The set of the play was Larry’s study, but it also included a TV screen. We made that TV screen significantly bigger on our set, and used it as a magic portal.

There’s a kind of time and space travel in the film, where we go to Cairo, to London. We also travel through space and time to the caves in Afghanistan, to Saudi Arabia, so that you can see and feel these places in addition to traveling on Larry’s personal journey, which is his play.

Getting back to “Casino Jack,” which is a movie about a scandal that was widely covered in the media when the story broke, five or six years ago. It seems as if you’re arguing that people may know Abramoff’s name, and maybe the general outlines of the story, but may not understand its importance.

In some ways, he assembled the tool kit that lobbyists are still using. Now, people will object to that: “Absolutely not! Jack Abramoff was one of a kind! He was completely outrageous.” Well, yes. He was outrageous, and he was way out of control. But he used the same tool kit everybody uses today: the rapacious use of not-for-profits to hide trips, to hide agendas, to hide money flows. The revolving door, where you get staffers from senators’ or congressmen’s offices and put them into your lobbying shops so you can influence votes, influence legislation. The use of entertainment and skyboxes — there are different rules now, but there are also ways to get around them. Biggest of all is the way you manage money to influence legislation, in a way that skirts the prohibitions on quid pro quo. It’s about going inside the kitchen in the world’s biggest restaurant and seeing how the sausage is made. Jack Abramoff was the master chef in the world’s biggest restaurant.

We wonder why Congress is dysfunctional, why they’re not doing the people’s bidding, why everyone seems to hate them. The reason is, the system is broken, because it’s all based on money. By looking at Jack’s story, you can see how that happened.

And Jack’s story — first of all, it’s hilarious and spectacular. It’s globe-girdling, there’s a murder in it, there are sweatshops in Saipan, dirty deals in Russia, arms whistling to the West Bank. But at its heart is the very stuff that is breaking our system of democracy.

This was the biggest congressional corruption scandal ever, at least at the time. But did the level of corruption that Abramoff represented become the new normal, in a sense? Because in the film you suggest that even more dramatic stuff has happened since his downfall.

The dispiriting thing is that Jack Abramoff, in the wake of the financial lobbying of the last few years, looks like a piker. I mean, he’s Podunk! The financial lobbyists, and the medical and pharmaceutical lobbyists, have taken what Abramoff did to a new level.

You mentioned the fact that the Abramoff story is highly entertaining, which it certainly is. And while it’s unlikely that your viewers will find him likable or sympathetic, let’s just say this: He makes one hell of a lead character.

There is another film, which is still called “Casino Jack.” I think they’re going to change the title. It’s a fictional version of this story, in which Kevin Spacey plays Jack Abramoff. I’ve seen the film, and Kevin Spacey is very good in it. But he’s no Jack Abramoff. [Laughter.]

Jack Abramoff is one of a kind. As Neal Volz, a former staffer for congressman Bob Ney who later worked for Jack, says, “Jack could talk a dog off a meat truck.” He was that persuasive. He was the ultimate salesman, but he was also a man of great imagination. He was a film buff, who saw his own life as an action film or a spy thriller. As a result, he imagined himself into situations that, you know, make for pretty good moviegoing.

Suddenly, we’re in Angola, in Africa, where Jack is holding a sort of right-wing Woodstock [in June 1985], shooting machine guns with a bloodthirsty character named Jonas Savimbi and a guy named Adolfo Calero, who used to run the Contras in Nicaragua. And they’re all holding hands after a lot of machine-gun shooting and singing a version of “Kumbaya” with this guy Lew Lehrman, who later ran for governor in New York state, and who gave George Washington’s bowl to Jonas Savimbi, this bloodthirsty dictator. You can’t make this stuff up!

Yeah, I literally couldn’t believe that entire sequence. It’s so amazing. It seems impossible, totally fictional. Was it difficult to find documentation of that event?

It sure was. We got lucky or we were good, one of the two. We tracked down a cameraman who had been there, and he still had 10 hours of footage. We also got Jack’s film, which was amazing. Jack was a film producer. He produced “Red Scorpion,” with Dolph Lundgren [released in 1989], and “Red Scorpion 2.” I think the Angola affair — it taught Jack that it wasn’t a big enough deal. That was his documentary version, and he was always going to make an action film. So he reinvents Savimbi into Red Scorpion, and has Dolph Lundgren as the action hero, shooting up everybody and performing weightlifting tricks. And that’s what Jack was as a young man, a weightlifter. So Dolph Lundgren is standing in for Jack.

I have a fun thing at the beginning of the film. There’s this thing that Jack said to somebody, which we transposed into an e-mail: “Documentary? You don’t want to make a documentary. Nobody watches documentaries. You want to make an action film.”

So to some extent, this film is an action film. That’s what I told Jack: “It’s an action film, man. People are going to be entertained.” I think it’s also a comedy, at least in parts. But unfortunately it’s a comedy in which the joke’s on us.

So you’ve had contact with Abramoff. What was that like?

Very interesting. I visited him in prison, and found him to be a very engaging character, very funny, good storyteller. He loves to quote movies.

Did he know who you were?

He did. I think — no, I know — that there was great reluctance to meeting with me. It wasn’t like I had a big record as a movement conservative, which was something we joked about. We agreed on one thing: I didn’t see him as a bad apple. I saw him as spectacular evidence of a rotten barrel.

He was at the center of things, not on the periphery. Everybody else was trying to make him the scapegoat: “Oh, we got rid of Jack Abramoff. Everything’s fine!” I told him, and I firmly believe, that he was at the center. He was doing stuff to the extreme, yes, over the top. But he was doing the same stuff everybody else was doing.

Well, you make a pretty strong case that Abramoff wasn’t in it for the money, or not entirely. He had an ideological motivation. He actually believed he was doing the right thing.

Right. I think he was a zealot. Unlike his partner, Mike Scanlon, who was in it for the money, Jack Abramoff was a zealot. He believed in the principles of the Reagan revolution. He was very anti-Soviet, but he also wanted to do what Grover Norquist has suggested: make government so small you can drown it in the bathtub. Denude it of its resources. Destroy the government, in effect.

Do you see any parallels between Abramoff and Eliot Spitzer? Here are these two brilliant, headstrong guys from opposite sides of the political spectrum, who appeared to be very idealistic, driven by ideology, but who allowed themselves to become corrupted.

I don’t know that Eliot was corrupted by his ideology, but I think he’s a character who did something that was wildly unexpected. If there is a parallel, it’s hubris. I think Jack became so entranced with his outsize reputation that he began to believe his own press releases. And I think Eliot Spitzer — he started seeing prostitutes at the moment of his greatest political influence. He was on his way to being governor, overwhelmingly popular among both Republicans and Democrats. And at that very moment, at the top of his game, he began to see prostitutes. Dudley Do-Right did wrong.

Of the two of them, maybe Spitzer was the real hypocrite. You can call Abramoff a lot of things, but not that.

I don’t think you could really accuse Jack of being a hypocrite. Jack was corrupt, and I don’t think you can say that Eliot Spitzer was corrupt. But he was hypocritical, there’s no doubt about that. Look, he had increased penalties for johns in New York, and he had prosecuted escort services. Now, I have rather politically incorrect liberal views about whether prostitution should be legal. [Laughter.] But the fact was that it was illegal, and he was the governor of New York, who had convinced people to elect him because he was Mr. Clean. So, yes, he was a hypocrite. And Jack wasn’t.

“Casino Jack and the United States of Money” opens May 7 in New York, Los Angeles and Washington; May 14 in Chicago, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Santa Cruz, Calif., and Seattle; May 21 in Atlanta, Boston, Monterey, Calif., Nashville, Palm Springs, Calif., Philadelphia, Sacramento, Tucson, Ariz., and Austin, Texas; May 28 in Charlotte, N.C., Cleveland, Dallas, Kansas City, Miami, Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., Salt Lake City, San Antonio and Santa Fe, N.M.; and June 4 in Houston and Waterville, Maine, with more cities to follow.

In this Webisode, Gibney explores the elaborate money shuffle through which Abramoff channeled money from supposedly legitimate lobbying clients (like Indian tribes) through Republican PACs and Big Pharma front groups, who in turn wrote industry-friendly legislation that was passed intact by the GOP-led Congress. I’ll have an interview with Gibney and more coverage of the film next week. “Casino Jack and the United States of Money” opens May 7 in major cities, but you’ll only find this clip here (at least until the DVD comes out).

The Times originally investigated Rangel’s finances and fundraising and then published the stories that triggered the official ethics probe. The ethics committee, reorganized by Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2007, ultimately did not shrink from admonishing one of the most powerful and senior Democrats in the House, and continues to examine other allegations against him. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — a watchdog group funded by Democratic donors — twice named Rangel to its annual list of “most corrupt” members of Congress (which is always admirably bipartisan, unlike such lists maintained by CREW’s conservative counterparts).

Yet as the Republicans and their media epigones celebrate Rangel’s downfall, the contrast with their own typical tolerance of corruption in their own ranks is instructive. To draw political comparisons between the cases of Rangel and Tom DeLay, as some mainstream pundits and conservative commentators do, is glib and fatuous if not simply dishonest. 

Keep in mind that none of the GOP pet media outlets, such as the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard or Fox News Channel, has ever initiated an ethics investigation of a Republican in the House leadership. Instead, these outfits habitually devote their efforts to protecting Republicans, no matter how crooked. Indeed, they tend to accuse the Times of “liberal bias” whenever the paper criticizes or investigates a Republican.

Five years ago, when DeLay came under intense pressure from prosecutors, the press and watchdog groups, the National Review urged conservatives to rally around him in an editorial, noting dismissively that “many of the offenses DeLay is being accused of—taking foreign trips funded by outside groups, attending events with lobbyists—are committed by every congressman on Capitol Hill.” Of course taking a foreign trip funded by an outside group (with corporate support) is precisely the transgression for which the ethics committee admonished Rangel.

But the same National Review editorial suggested that official rebukes by the ethics committee are unimportant anyway, at least when directed at a Republican leader: “The [ethics] committee did warn DeLay to be more careful, the ‘admonishment’ that has played in the media as an official sanction, which it wasn’t.” In short, they didn’t believe an admonishment by the ethics committee was enough to get rid of DeLay, but it is reason enough to throw out Rangel — and vote against the Democrats who pushed him out, just because they’re members of the same party.

During the decade or so when the Republicans controlled the House, their stewardship of the ethics committee – and their handling of ethical issues – was deplorably weak. In those days, they didn’t believe DeLay should be removed from leadership because of those wimpy admonishments. Indeed, they didn’t believe that he should have to step down  even if indicted for a felony! That was the permissive viewpoint of the great majority of the House Republican caucus in November 2004, when they voted (just after the presidential election) to change the rules so that DeLay’s expected indictment would not automatically oust him. They held that vote in strict caucus secrecy – and a few months later restored the old rule when public outrage became overwhelming.

Reluctant to punish DeLay for his multiple transgressions and abuses, the House Republican leadership instead eagerly rapped the handful of Republicans on the ethics committee who had admonished him. Here the contrast between the Democrats and the Republicans is striking. Speaker Pelosi may have wished her friend Rangel could somehow escape the consequences of his actions, but she did nothing to hinder or intimidate the ethics committee. 

The Republicans  purged their own members from the ethics committee — and its chairman, Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo. — for the sin of joining committee Democrats in unanimously admonishing DeLay. Replacing them were three more pliable members, who had publicly admitted voting to change the indictment rule. One of those three DeLay stooges was none other than Rep. Tom Cole, who now serves as deputy whip under Minority Leader John Boehner .

When did the Republicans start to worry so much about ethical purity? Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., who replaced Hefley as ethics chairman, was notable only for stalling probes into the truly repugnant misconduct of Mark Foley, R-Fla., Randy Duke Cunningham, R-Calif., and Bob Ney, R-Ohio, as well as his sponsor DeLay. Foley narrowly escaped criminal indictment, while the other two went to prison (where Cunningham will remain for the rest of his life).

The rule that Rangel violated when he took those now-infamous Caribbean trips was instituted by the Democratic majority as part of its ethics reorganization. This was a rules change that Boehner vocally opposed — and it is a rule that Boehner would have violated more than once had it been in effect a year or two earlier. Back in July 2006, the New York Times reported on one of Boehner’s many subsidized vacations:

“Mr. Boehner flew to a golf resort in Boca Raton, Fla., in March for a convention of commodities traders, who have contributed more than $100,000 to his campaigns and are lobbying against a proposed federal tax on futures transactions. During the trip, Mr. Boehner assured his hosts that Congress would most likely not approve a tax they opposed. His leadership committee, the Freedom Project, which in recent months has enlisted the use of corporate planes from Federal Express, Aflac and the Florida Power and Light Company, later reimbursed the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for the cost of the Boca Raton trip.”

Naturally Boehner’s leadership PAC is funded heavily by corporate interests – so he was “reimbursing” one corporation with money donated to him by others. Boehner has always been known as an obsequious servant of business lobbyists, dating back to the moment in 1995 when he was observed handing out checks from the Brown & Williamson tobacco company political action committee on the House floor. (Confronted by a few naive GOP freshmen, he conceded that such brazen grifting “didn’t look good” and was sorry that he had been caught.)

At this point it is clear that Rangel is guilty of hubris and sloppiness, and perhaps worse. It isn’t easy to understand why he should be branded irredeemably “corrupt,” however, while someone like Boehner is considered an honorable public servant. The notion that he and his cronies would restore ethical standards if they regain the majority must be a joke.

As the Oscar-winning director of “Taxi to the Dark Side” and “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” told me in our conversation in a Park City restaurant, the Abramoff case was not an isolated instance of criminality, but a symptom of a much larger disease. As in his earlier films, Gibney dramatizes the work of America’s best investigative journalists, and directly attacks the “bad apple” hypothesis that’s repeatedly employed to explain away disturbing tales of corruption and malfeasance, from Enron to Abu Ghraib to Abramoff.

Magnolia Pictures will release “Casino Jack” in theaters this spring. For now, here’s Alex Gibney on the outlandish Abramoff tale and its rogue’s gallery of supporting players — from Tom DeLay to Grover Norquist to George W. Bush — why it definitely still resonates in the Obama era, and what it means for our imperiled republic.