According to the screaming queen in the fedora last night, the Washington Moonie Times is expected to call today for J. Dennis Hastert to resign as speaker of the House of Representatives. (Hell, no, I'm not linking to either one of those places; if you must go there, you can Google the links for yourself.) They're a little late to the party (I was calling for that three days ago), and their proposed remedy falls way short of what I want--and, I suspect, what most parents of teen-aged boys would want or consider appropriate. But I will give them props for being among the first of the wingnut fringe to recognize that Hastert (and, frankly, others in the Republican leadership, if not the whole of the Republican Party) is nowhere near being in the right in his handling of this sordid affair, and admitting that some punishment is appropriate.
However, I don't think either Drudge or the Moonie Times goes far enough. This is not some pecuniary peccadillo involving kited checks, subsidized stamps, or office furniture we're talking about here. (Not to mention that the last guy who got in trouble for those things wound up in jail and out of politics for good--and rightly so.) We're talking about a pattern of serial sexual harassment over at least five years at best and, if rumblings coming out of ABC News are to be believed, actual sexual intercourse between a 52-year-old congressman and a teen-aged boy at worst. And Hastert both knew it was happening and didn't do a damned thing to stop it.
The only thing Dennis Hastert cared about was to protect the reputation of the Republican Party and keep it in power in Congress. If that meant letting a middle-aged man entice, cajole, solicit, and seduce teen-aged boys, that was OK by Hastert, as long as the middle-aged man in question occupied a solidly Republican congressional seat. (I have no doubt that had Foley been a Democrat, Hastert would have been among the first to shout the news from the rooftops and call for an auto da fe.) Worse yet, Hastert stood idly by and allowed Rep. Foley to continue as the co-chair of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, and to cosponsor legislation (which was passed, and signed into law by the preznit with Foley looking approvingly on) that criminalized exactly the behavior in which Foley himself was engaging at the time.
That Hastert and the rest of the Republican leadership in Congress knew they were in the wrong is corroborated by the fact that they never took what they knew to the police, never acted upon their duty to report even suspected child abuse, and never notified the one Democratic member of the House Page Board of anything involving Mark Foley and his inappropriate conduct with the pages in the board's charge over a period of five years. As Jesus pointedly observed in John's Gospel, πᾶς γὰρ ὁ φαῦλα πράσσων μισεῖ τὸ φῶς καὶ οὐκ ἔρχεται πρὸς τὸ φῶς, ἵνα μὴ ἐλεγχθῇ τὰ ἔργα αὐτοῦ, "Everyone doing evil hates the light and does not go toward the light, in order that his deeds may not be put to the test" (John 3:20, my translation from the Greek quoted here). If this had been merely, in Spokes-Hamster Tony Snow's infamous words, a matter of "naughty e-mails," there would have been no reason for the Republicans to keep both the Democratic member, Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.) and the other Republican member, Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), out of the loop. That the Republican leadership did exactly that, and that Hastert also announced today that he was making changes to the page program's policies without inviting Rep. Kildee to the meeting where they were discussed or asking for his input, tells us all we need to know: this is going to be yet another in a seemingly endless series of Republican smokescreens.
Hastert and the rest of the Rubber-Stamp Republican Congress have proven--repeatedly--that they couldn't possibly care less about the concerns that matter to the average American. They don't care about securing our borders, as long as it means that their corporate masters will have access to an unlimited source of cheap labor. They don't care about protecting the nation from terrorists, as long as they can award ginormous no-bid contracts for fighting the war on terra to their campaign contributors. They don't care about the sanctity of life the instant a fetus draws its first breath, unless the life in question happens to belong to a brain-dead woman from whose sufferings they can wrest a little partisan political advantage. They don't think it's patriotic to question the motives of those in government, unless they happen to be Democrats. And, again, they don't care about what happens to teen-aged pages entrusted to them by their parents for the good of the nation, as long as whoever is abusing those pages occupies a safe seat they need in order to retain the majority.
Well I'm sorry, but that's just not good enough for me. If Hastert, Boehner, Reynolds, Shimkus and all the rest of the House Ghastly Old Perverts leadership can't be trusted to ensure the safety of the young men and women who are trying to serve their country in Congress while completing their secondary education, then how can we trust them to ensure the safety of anything else? (Except their majority, that is: we already know they're very good at that.)
For my money, the whole of the House leadership should resign. And not just their leadership posts, their seats in Congress as well. And if they won't do the right and honorable thing, then it will be up to us, the voters, to hand them their pink slips a month and a bit from now.
To help make that happen, you can donate or volunteer to help John Laesch, running against Hastert in the 14th District, or donate or volunteer for Danny Stover, running against Shimkus in the 19th District.
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