A Dirty Cave-In

November 10th, 2007

Legacy of Filth

By Todd Morehead

The moral majority has been a thorn in the side of the GOP since the
Reagan administration.

It seems to have become the rule, no longer the exception, that as
soon as one Republican rallies his Christian constituents with
rhetoric on the sanctity of marriage and the homosexual scourge,
another high-ranking GOP official across town gets caught diddling a
13 year old boy in a public restroom or groping a sleeping passenger
on an airplane.

Sure, the kinky sex scandal is a hallowed, time-honored tradition in
American politics, traced back to the night Thomas Jefferson first
donned his waistcoat and powdered wig to sneak out to the female slave
quarters.

And neither side of the aisle is immune.

But the Republican degeneracy of the last seven years, the sheer scope
and back-alley sleaziness, has so far set the bar at an historic new
low.

So, why is the GOP prone to such sex scandals?

Are deviants drawn to the party in a last-ditch effort to reform
themselves?

And how much more guilt by association can the average conservative
voter bear?

After all, when a 16 year old congressional page who’s just been
propositioned on the House floor is placing blame, at least a portion
of that blame could, in theory, be directed to the voters who put the
pederast on Capitol Hill to begin with.

Sure the Democrats are no strangers to scandal, but the GOP and the
conservative culture to which they cater has turned the sex scandal
into a form of art, a level of hypocrisy so staggering that it
inspires both revulsion and awe at the same time.

“I damn sure wouldn’t want to take my kids trick or treating at Mark
Foley’s house,” Wil Brown, current chairman of the Richland County
Executive Committee of the S.C. Democratic party told City Paper on
October 31.

“The conservatives have set the standard too high for themselves to
stick to it. Some of these legislators spend so much time convincing
themselves they aren’t gay that they get to the point where they just
can’t help themselves.”

And, since the Republicans took power in 2000, they have indeed helped
themselves to plenty:

to interns, House pages, high-end call girls, street corner male
prostitutes, Parisian fetish clubs and unsuspecting members of the
general public.

And those are just the stories that made the papers.

For all we know, there is a sheep breeder on the outskirts of D.C.
biting his tongue and counting his money, trying desperately to shake
the memory of that night the shiny black limo with government plates
pulled up to his barn door.

But there are a few scandals we do know about.

Take Galen Fox, for example:

Galen Fox, former Hawaii House minority leader, is currently serving a
three-year probation sentence for fondling a sleeping woman on a
United Airlines flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles in 2004.

He was also required to register as a sex offender.

Having served Hawaii for nine years as a Republican state legislator,
the offense cost Fox his career in politics.

The 27-year-old Asian woman was seated next to Fox en route to Las
Vegas with her parents who were seated across the aisle.

The woman told authorities that she took a Dramamine to calm her
during the flight, covered her lap and legs with a blanket and went to
sleep.

While sleeping, her leg pressed against Fox, who says he took the
action as a flirtatious advance.

He then claimed to place his hand on her thigh.

He took the sleeping woman’s lack of protest as further invitation and
moved his hand under the blanket.

When she finally awoke, her jeans were unbuttoned and Fox was,
according to a report in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, “rubbing her
crotch.”

She alerted flight attendants and was later moved to a different seat,
while Fox pretended to sleep.

When they landed at L.A.X., federal agents were waiting to nab Fox,
whose political career was quickly zipped shut.

In 2004, after defeating all comers in the Illinois Republican
primary, Jack Ryan seemed a worthy opponent to Democratic nominee,
Barack Obama in the Senate race.

Sure, the general public was turned off by the fact that he had one of
his aides tail Obama and videotape everything he did in public for
close to a month.

Obama complained that he was filmed making private calls to his family
and was even filmed on his way to the restroom on occasion.

Once the media was alerted, the Ryan campaign vowed to discontinue the
videotaping, shrugging it off as just part of politics.

And it turned out that Ryan would soon be on the business end of the
“just politics” stick.

Ryan, once dubbed the “establishment candidate,” was married to TV
star, Jeri Ryan until their divorce in 1999.

He ordered that his divorce records stay sealed during his 2004 run
for Senate but the Los Angeles Superior Court granted access to the
Chicago Tribune.

The records detailed numerous trips (Ryan described them as “romantic
getaways”) in 1998 to sex clubs in the U.S. and France.

One club featured whips, cages and “other apparatus hanging from the
ceiling,” according to Jeri’s testimony.

Jeri Ryan claims that Jack asked her to have sex with him at a club in
front of another couple and she refused.

A few months later, he talked her into going to a club in Paris.

“People were having sex everywhere,” she said.

“I cried. I became physically ill.”

Jeri not only left the club that night; she left the marriage.

And when it went public in 2004, Jack Ryan left the Senate race.

Jim West, served the Washington state senate from 1986 to 2002 and
later became mayor of Spokane.

Aside from proposing legislation to make sexual activity by persons
under the age of 18 illegal, he also supported bills that would
disallow gays and lesbians to work in schools.

Oh, and was accused of molesting two boys when he was a Boy Scout
leader and Spokane County sheriff’s deputy back in the 1970s.

Those charges were never substantiated, but his online gay tryst at
Web site Gay.com with an undercover reporter for the Spokane
Spokesman-Review was harder to dismiss.

According to one report, West offered the reporter, who West believed
was an 18 year old boy, “gifts, favors, and a city hall internship.”

West dismissed the chats as simple “role playing” and that the
“anonymity element” of the Internet allowed him to get carried away.

West was removed from office in 2005 and died of colon cancer the
following year.

On the lighter side of scandal, if anyone knows the best way to drive
away from a police stop with your Johnson hanging out of your pants
and a methadone-addicted prostitute in the passenger seat, please let
U.S. Congressman Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) know.

In 1993 Calvert, named one of the “20 Most Corrupt Members of
Congress” by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington,
was roused from a “talk” with a known prostitute in his parked car by
police cruiser headlights and an officer tapping on his driver side
window.

In his report the Corona, Calif. officer described that the woman had
her head “laying in the driver’s lap.”

“I noticed,” the report continues, “that the male subject was placing
his penis into his unzipped dress slacks and was trying to hide it
with his untucked dress shirt.”

Calvert, unable cover himself, simply put the car in gear and
attempted to flee the scene.

The cop eventually got the congressman to pull over and stop the
vehicle.

No serious charges were ever filed and congressman Calvert continues
to serve to this day.

Curiously, when the GOP pushed for Clinton’s impeachment over oral
sex, guess which California congressman voted for impeachment?

As far as Bush-era sex scandals go, Mark Foley’s truly sets the bar
for hypocrite conservative pederasts everywhere.

In September 2006, Foley, at the time chairman of the House Caucus on
Missing and Exploited Children, resigned after years of perverse
emails and text messages to teenaged congressional male pages came to
light.

Foley is believed to have entered into sexual relationships with at
least two pages after they left the program.

Prior to the scandal, Foley worked to establish a national sex
offender database and it remains to be seen if he’ll be able to keep
his own name out of it.

According to reports, Foley invited one 17-year-old page to stay at
his house in exchange for oral sex and asked another to email a photo
his genitalia.

“[I]m still 17 till feb 23,” one teen revealed to the Congressman via
text message.

Foley’s reply: “see you feb 24th.”

And in April 2003, it was discovered that Foley engaged in cybersex
with an 18-year-old former page while on the floor of Congress, as the
House voted on an Iraq War appropriations bill.

Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), then Speaker of the House, was forced to step
down after it was revealed that many on Capitol Hill knew of Foley’s
predilection for teen boys but took no action, in essence giving their
blessing to that behavior.

The GOP lost control of Congress in 2006 and many believe the Foley
scandal was a direct contributor.

Meanwhile, the boys in the House page program are undoubtedly
breathing a collective sigh of relief.

Lucky for Missouri state house pages, Republican Andrew Buhr, lost his
bid for a state senate seat in 2000.

In 2002 President Bush appointed Buhr, still a rising player in the
Missouri GOP, to the Committee on Presidential Scholars.

A month later, Buhr was forced to resign after criminal sodomy charges
were filed against him, stemming from a 2001 sexual encounter in a
public school bathroom with a 13 year old boy.

Illicit gay bathroom sex is nothing new to Republican legislators.

Just ask Idaho Senator, Larry Craig.

Last June, Craig was charged with lewd conduct after being caught in
police sting operation in a Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport
men’s room, allegedly cruising for gay sex.

Craig initially plead guilty to the charge, but later motioned to
reverse his plea.

The court denied the motion last month.

Despite being asked to resign from the senate, Craig says he will
finish out his term.

After the story went public, a man in Craig’s home state accused the
senator of cruising him in a sporting goods store.

Craig responded to the charges in an interview with the Idaho
Statesman.

“I don’t go around anywhere hitting on men,” he said.

“And by God, if I did, I wouldn’t do it in Boise, Idaho! Jiminy!”

Jiminy, indeed.

That’s probably what David Vitter (R-La.) was thinking when Deborah
Jeane Palfrey, the madam of a Washington, D.C. escort service,
released her phone records to the media in 2006.

Vitter a proponent of abstinence-only sex education who once called
marriage “the most important social institution in human history”
contacted the escort service five times between 1999 and 2001, while
his wife and children were back at home.

Two calls were placed during actual House roll call votes.

Last summer, an escort service in New Orleans alleged that Vitter was
a regular customer in the 1990s.

Last September, according to the Times-Picayune the New Orleans
prostitute who made the allegations against Vitter passed a polygraph
test related to her relationship with the senator.

The list of recent scandals goes on:

Randall “Duke” Cunningham the former Republican congressman from
California and Vietnam War flying ace, who recently pled guilty to
accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars (and a couple of
prostitutes) in bribes.

There’s Larry Jack Schwarz, the former Republican legislator from
Colorado, who allegedly molested his stepdaughter, was found in
possession of a large cache of kiddie porn and who, after leaving
politics, moved to California to work for hardcore porno outfit,
Platinum X Pictures.

The company also employs his biological daughter, porn actress, Jewel
De Nyle, star of “Pink Hotel on Butt Row,” “Face Down, Ass Up 2,”
“Sodomania Slop Shots 10,” and most recently “The Black Bastard 12.”

Or how about the Puerto Rican Republican congressman Edison Misla
Aldorando who was convicted of serving alcohol to his daughter and her
17 year old friend, before tossing back a few of his own and then
trying to rape the friend.

He got 13 years for that and another 10 for fondling his daughter.

Can it get any worse for the GOP?

Sure, many Republicans of the Bush-era have either been led out of
office in shackles or forced to pack up their butt plugs and slink out
the back door, but at some point the bad apples should eventually be
weeded out.

Or are there just that many bad apples?

It remains to be seen.

In the coming year, chances are the party will try to reign in the
child molesters and sodomites (or at least the ones they know about),
shorten their leashes until after the presidential elections in 2008
and certainly–

Wait, hold the phone!

Fresh off the AP wire:

only two days ago, Richard Curtis a Republican lawmaker in Washington
state resigned just days after a police report surfaced stating that a
male prostitute took the legislator’s wallet after they had sex in a
Spokane, Wash. hotel room.

Curtis, who voted against gay rights legislation, was attending a GOP
retreat in Spokane and met the male prostitute at an erotic video
store, according to the police report.

The prostitute, Cody Castagna, claims that Curtis reneged on the $1000
he initially agreed to pay him for the man-sex and intended to hold
the legislator’s wallet until he was paid.

Curtis claims that Castagna originally agreed to $200—admittedly a
fairer price for a guy picked up in an x-rated video store—but then
changed his mind and threatened to expose Curtis’s gay lifestyle to
his wife in an attempt to extort him.

The legislator’s countermove:

he went to the police, filed a report on the public record and thus
exposed his gay lifestyle to the entire nation.

Doubtless, he’s wishing for a do-over on that one.

Well, it looks like we’re in for another wild year.

Lock up your young sons, conservative America. …Or at least instruct
them to get payment in advance.

 

A Beautiful Corpse: Sixteen Sure Signs That The Regressive Right Is Over

David Michael Green, OpEdNews, November 9, 2007

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_david_mi_071109_a_beautiful_corpse_3a_.htm

Lordy, lord, it's been a mean season, hasn't it? And a long one, too.

We human beings (those bipeds lucky enough not to have been born a conservative or killed by one, that is) have suffered through the endless depravity, stupidity, duplicity and incompetence of the radical right for what now seems like forever. It's been awful, and it's been depressing, and that's putting it mildly. To have had even a fraction of a heart this last decade means to have lived in Hell.

Finally, though, the end is nigh. The signs are all there. The regressive right is cracking up, a complete and utter victim of its own success at winning power and of its own absolute failure in wielding it.

The markers are everywhere, bubbling just below the surface. Here are sixteen of them, sure signs if ever there were that the era of destructive government is (nearly) over:

* FOLLOW THE MONEY: If you know anything about how American politics has been played over the last century, you know that the concept of Democrats out-fundraising Republicans is about as likely as likely as George W. Bush getting an honorary degree from anybody besides Bob Jones U. It could happen, to be sure (especially in some freaky parallel universe), it's just that it just ain't very likely. But guess what? It's happening now, and it's a sure sign of the regressive apocalypse (where do I order tickets for that party?). What is even more telling than empty GOP coffers is that even the big corporate money is going to Democrats. Imagine Enron contributing to Al Gore's campaign, and you'd just about have the picture. Is it possible that the healthcare industry had a recent change of heart and decided that guaranteed national healthcare is now more important than corporate profits, after all? It would be possible (though massively improbable), if they had ever had a heart to begin with. A much more plausible explanation is that the lobbyists for these fat-cats who are paid to sniff out power can see which way the wind is blowing, and that it ain't to the east anymore, ladies and gentlemen. Even the finance, insurance and real estate industries are funneling more money to Democrats than to the Reprobatlicans. (Talk about your truly bizarro parallel universes! This is the stuff of science fiction novels.) House Democrats have $28 million in the bank right now, while the GOP has $1.6 million for its congressional races (no, that's not a typo). When did that ever happen?

* KEEP FOLLOWING THE MONEY: Has there ever been an economy this precarious for this long without throwing a rod or seizing an engine? Given how reviled Bush and his clones already are now, can you imagine how sour the public mood will be if there is a recession or worse in the coming year? When you start seeing stories about roving gangs of furious soccer moms beating up random Republicans caught without their Blackwater guards on K Street, you'll know why. Just watch the American flag pins start flying off of lapels. Stay tuned for more on this one. Gasoline is now selling for five bucks a gallon in parts of California, and that was being headlined by the Drudge Report, that bastion of anti-regressive journalism. I smell a twenty-first century Whiskey Rebellion a-brewin'.

* FOLLOW THE LEADER: Everybody's talking about him on the presidential campaign trail. It's just that they all happen to be Democrats. Republicans desperately want to pretend that Bush never existed (though not as much as they will want to after another year of his follies). So much, in fact, that they don't even mention his name in their debates or on the stump. The New York Times just reported that Democrats mentioned the lil' Bush feller 47 times in their last debate. Republicans? Twice, with one being a critique by Ron Paul. And this is while they're campaigning for conservative, pro-Bush votes, mind you. Did you know that Ronald Reagan (or, more accurately, the myth of Ronald Reagan) was still alive and in the White House? Neither did I, but if you listen to these bozos for more than five minutes you could certainly walk away with that impression (not to mention tinnitus and a whopping good brain hemorrhage as well, but that's another matter). It's a sure sign that your movement is in deep trouble when you can't say the name of the sitting president who so completely exemplifies its principles, for fear that doing so will destroy your candidacy.

* FOLLOW TUCKER: Right out the door, in fact. Woo-freakin'-hoo. Was there ever an unctuous little bow-tied twit of a punky spoiled brat that you just wanted to slap silly more than Tucker Carlson? Well, guess what? His ratings are doing it for you. Seems that nobody is terribly interested anymore in what the young master debater has to say, and MSNBC is getting ready to pull the plug on him, bow-tie and all. Bummer, dude. Maybe you could become a liberal now! Or, hey, if you're looking for a job, maybe you could get Bush to appoint you as ambassador to Smarmiland?

* FOLLOW KEITH: The reason MSNBC is getting ready to untuck the wee Carlson is because they want to make room for what viewers are actually interested in, which is more progressive politics, like the regular savagings of the rabid right by Keith Doberman. Apparently, even Joe Scarborough – fingers and toes all in the wind – is talking like a liberal these days. What was that Dylan line about not needing to be a weatherman...? You could almost come to love the free market, after all, eh?

* FOLLOW JON: Stewart, that is. And Stephen Colbert. Every night, incessantly, they do what sometimes seems like the only rational thing imaginable given the inanities of regressive politics in our unfortunate time. They mock it mercilessly. The good news is that for many people, especially young folk, this is their sole source of news about current developments. Is that a pretty serious indicator of the tragic state of the American polity? You betcha. But it could be a lot worse. People could be getting their ‘news' from Fox, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, or even CNN or NBC. I think a very serious argument can be made that you learn more about the real world we actually inhabit from Stewart and Colbert than from the more subtle comedy shows presented every day by the mainstream disinformation media in the guise of ‘newscasts'. Brian Williams may be a more honest source of information than was Baghdad Bob, but not by much. Until The Nation becomes required reading and Democracy Now! the most watched news broadcast on television, Comedy Central may be the best alternative we've got.

* FOLLOW THE KIDS: Speaking of the young folk, they are becoming as scarce in the Republican Party as a good vowel in Kyrgyzstan. And why not? Who wants to be in the party that's wrecking your environment, spending your future earnings, killing your friends for lies and telling you who you can sleep with? (Hint: You can't sleep with anybody. Unless, of course, you're a television preacher or a blow-hard regressive politician, in which case you can sleep with everyone. And everything. Baaaah.) What a fun bunch to hang with, eh? The even better news is that there is pretty strong evidence that people tend to stick for life with the party affiliation they adopt when they're young. As in so many other ways, therefore, George W. Bush will be the gift that keeps on giving. Thirty years from now, when regressives are an extinct species visible only in dusty museum showcases, we may wonder why we weren't as happy as little clams at a mollusk orgy to have had the Bush Leaguer around, doing a better job than we ever could have of smashing his ideology to bits.

* FOLLOW DOBSON: Please. Somebody get this destructive demon of the religious right into the home for doddering Precambrians where he belongs. As it happens, he might be taking care of it himself. It seems that Ol' Jimmy is outraged that none of the Republican front-runners are as obsessed with controlling other peoples' sexuality as his custom bible tells him they should be. He is therefore threatening to run a third-party candidate, thus ripping asunder the GOP, in which case I might just be forced into believing in god, after all. (Even better would be if McCain also launches a desperate last-call shot at the presidency with his own independent bid after losing the GOP nomination. Splitting the Halloween set vote three ways is definitely my version of heaven on earth.) Meanwhile, all indications are that the entire religious right is in complete disarray (oh, so that's what they mean by "Hallelujah!"). Loads of its troops are disenchanted with politics, disenchanted with regressivism, disenchanted with the GOP candidates, and otherwise just generally reeking of betrayal, rage and a large dose of your garden-variety steroid-enhanced mass surliness. This does not a successful political movement make.

* FOLLOW THE POLLS: Which have been showing for a long time now that Americans are really pissed off about what has happened to their country, and in record numbers. That's not exactly what you wanna hear when you're an incumbent running for reelection, or trying to keep your party in power. It gets better yet, though. As Paul Krugman noted this week, political research is now showing that the American public is not just aimlessly angry, but is more liberal in its attitudes than it has been since the early 1960s. And the Baby Boomers haven't even retired yet! Something tells me that killing stem-cell research and gutting Social Security, coupled with homophobia, environmental destruction, reckless aggression abroad and bankruptcy at home are not going to be big vote-getters in the coming decades. Call me crazy, but I'm going to go ahead and make that wild prediction.

* FOLLOW THE RUDE DUDE: Giuliani's popularity in the GOP indicates that even those nuts have turned away, however reluctantly, from their own social conservatism. And now the nuttiest of them all, Pat Robertson, has just endorsed this nasty little Rottweiler with the sorta liberal social policies. There's really only one viable explanation for that. Sex-obsessed pseudo-Jesus regressivism is a completely spent force, and the Pat Robertsons of this world have only two remaining choices: They can either jump on the bandwagon of sheer hypocrisy (Remember Robertson's post-9/11 rant about the abortionists, and the lesbians, and the feminists, etc.? Remember how he once sued a certain mayor of New York City to block the latter's support for gay marriage?), or they can demonstrate their utter irrelevance. Ol' Pat has made his choice. He did both.

* FOLLOW MOVE-ON: Sure, they're not perfect, but they may be the best thing happening on the left these days in terms of real work with a real chance of success. More importantly, they've already shown that they know how to play hardball, and now they're learning how to play sophisticated hardball. In many ways, they're copying the playbook that the right adopted in the decades since the Goldwater ocean liner had its encounter with the proverbial iceberg, bringing the GOP back to the drawing board. Regressives have been winning for so long in part because they've been fighting smart, and in part because nobody was fighting back. The Democrats, of course, are still doing neither. But they're not the only ones with fists. Look for the right to crumple like any schoolyard bully the minute somebody stands up to it, just as Move-On is now doing.

* FOLLOW THE RETIREMENTS: Republican politicians are retiring in droves now. There are 14 so far who are quitting their House seats, including Ohio's Deborah Pryce, one of the top members of the GOP leadership. Who wants the pleasure of defending the Republican record in next year's election cycle, followed by a drubbing and an ignominious pink slip? Or, if you're lucky enough to survive the tsunami, a lonely gig kicking around in forgotten wilderness of the mega-minority?

* FOLLOW THE NUMBERS: As if the gods weren’t angry enough (perhaps at Robertson for backing the pro-gay rights Giuliani?), Republicans will have to defend twice the number of Senate seats up for election next year as will Democrats. That may seem like sheer coincidence, but there is actually a perverse irony here. This is the fruit of the GOP’s pyrrhic victory in 2002, when they used the Iraq war vote and general security hysteria to pummel hapless Tom Daschle-like Democrats. Now those very seats are up again, only this time the chicken has since come home to roost, and it’s an angry little fowl. That’s some awfully nasty karma to be carrying on your ledger, man. You might call Election 2008 the Revenge of Max Cleland.

* FOLLOW THE CONVERSIONS: Just as might be expected, Republicans are starting to change their party affiliations, even in places like Missouri and Kansas (really!). And, just as also might be expected, you’re hearing the classic (and true) explanation for their move: "I didn’t leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me". Sorry Ronnie Raygun, but what comes around... Watch for a whole lot more of this, especially after November 2008.

* FOLLOW THE FOOD CHAIN: They’re eating their young now. Predictable, to be sure, but still so much fun to watch. Did you hear that five conservative authors – including one of the Swift Boat hatchet-men, no less – are now suing their publishing house, Regnery (did they actually mean to call it ‘Degeneracy’ but it just got by the spell-checkers somehow?), and its parent company, Eagle Publishing? It seems they’re a little upset that Eagle "orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate", and thus rip the authors off of royalties owed to them. No kidding – really? I’m sorry, guys, but just who exactly did you think you were dealing with here? Look in the mirror! You cut a deal with a conservative press to publish your fraud, deception and self-dealing and you expected them to treat you better than George Bush did when he gave the gift of freedom and democracy to the Iraqis? And what’s up with your wanting fair treatment and fair pay for your labor? You guys are starting to sound like a bunch of whiney socialists, fer crissakes! And tort-reform-needing litigious ones, at that! This is America, Dudes. Your America. Get used to being scammed by people who are richer than you.

* FOLLOW THE FALLOW: The right’s agenda is not only bankrupt of real policy ideas, but nowadays it’s even bankrupt of effective red-herrings as well. Yesterday’s tried-and-true tropes no longer have that old magic anymore. "Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. Gays, gays, gays." Yawn, yawn, yawn. "Honey, have you seen the remote? I really need to change the channel. And what time are we supposed to pick up Johnny from Little League practice?" Ho. Hum. This show is over. Regressives would like to thank everyone in the audience for their participation. Unfortunately, neither your wallets nor your articles of clothing are available for return to you at this time...

If the signs of the looming conservative apocalypse get any clearer, even blind cave fish will be reading them. These guys are getting ready to crumble like a poppy seed muffin six days past its sell-by date.

It certainly couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch, could it?

I hope they get every little thing that is coming to them.

Except, of course, their Regnery royalties.