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 The parents of a 16-year-old Congressional page contacted their congressman, Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.).
Alexander says he contacted both Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) who oversees the page program.
Reps. Shimkus, Reynolds, and House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) admit they knew about it in 2005.
Kirk Fordham, Reynolds’ former chief of staff, told the Associated
Press that three years ago, he had “more than one conversation with
senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives to
intervene.”
Reynolds and Boehner say they told Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), speaker of the house.
Hastert says Reynolds may have told him about it, but he doesn’t remember.
At no time, did anyone contact police or the FBI. Their concerns for
justice were shallow; their fears that a scandal would affect their
re-elections were deep. The conservative Washington Times and several
major conservative columnists have called for Hastert to resign.
For his part, President George W. Bush says he supports Hastert,
doesn’t want him to resign, and called him a “father, teacher, coach
who cares about the children of this country.” Almost as an
afterthought, he said he was “dismayed and shocked.”
What President Bush was “dismayed and shocked” about were the actions
of Mark Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida. The President
apparently wasn’t dismayed or shocked about the cover-up the Republican
leadership undertook to keep the information from the public, the
contacts with Foley to warn him about his conduct, and their failure to
discipline one of their members.
The story broke in early September when a relatively new blog, Stop Sex
Predators (www.stopsexpredators.blogspot.com), reported that Foley, a
six-term congressman who was co-chair of Missing and Exploited
Children’s Caucus, had sent sexually explicit e-mails and text messages
to the 16-year old male Congressional page. Within two weeks, ABC-TV’s
Brian Ross, and then the rest of the nation’s major media, picked up
the story. The day after Ross’s first report, Foley resigned.
Subsequent reporting revealed that Foley may have had other
inappropriate contacts, dating back to at least 2003.
Trying to spin his own actions, Foley said when he was a teenager he
had been abused by a member of the clergy; he now admits he’s gay, and
has checked himself into an alcoholic rehabilitation facility. As for
Reps. Alexander, Shimkus, Reynolds, Boehner, and Hastert, and dozens of
other Republicans who knew of the problem, they shuffled and wobbled,
but never acknowledged why they didn’t take immediate action at least
six months earlier.
Spinning and diverting, Hastert is blaming liberals for their reporting
of the scandal; others have dug through the archives to find that 23
years earlier a Democratic congressman was censured for having sex with
a 17-year-old page. (On the other side of the aisle, and not reported
by the Republicans, a Republican congressman that year had sex with a
17-year-old female page.) Many screeched out about former Sen. Gary
Hart (D-Colo.) and a rendezvous he had in 1988 with a woman on a boat
called “Monkey Business,” and of Ted Kennedy, MaryJo Kopechne, and the
Chappaquiddick incident in 1969, hoping to cloud the blame for their
own problems.
Conservative Republicans devoutly proclaim themselves the party of
“Family Values.” They want the people to believe they have been
anointed with divine wisdom, sacred trust, and the key to the Holy
Morality. Democrats and liberals, they decree, are sin-spewing
heathens. But, truth is not on their side.
Rep. Robert Bauman (R-Md.), homophobic founder of Young Americans for
Freedom and the American Conservative Union, and a darling of the
Christian Coalition, lost his House seat in 1980 after disclosures that
he solicited sex with a 16-year-old gay male; Bauman two years later
acknowledged he was gay. Donald Lukens (R-Ohio) was sentenced to jail
for having sex with a minor. The list of local and state Republican
officials who were arrested and convicted of pedophilia or other sex
crimes would choke even the most forgiving defense attorney. But, let’s
just look at the family values of some of the Republicans recently
elected or re-elected to federal office.
The list of “family values” Republicans who committed adultery, but
continued to preach a doctrine of morality in government, would fill
the telephone book of a small city. Among them are Rep. Henry Hyde
(R-Ill.), and former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), who were leaders of the
impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton; former
presidential candidate Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kansas); former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.); former Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), whom the
Republicans planned to vote into office in 1999 as Gingrich’s
successor, but whose career came unraveled by his admission of “marital
infidelities”; Rep. Don Sherwood (R-Pa.), who had a five-year
extramarital affair with a woman 35 years his junior and who later
accused him of repeated assaults; and former Rep. Helen Chenoweth
(R-Idaho), who told the Spokane Spokesman-Review that God pardoned her
sins.
Chenoweth was a “two-fer,” committing both sexual and legal sins. While
her campaign strategy was loaded with rhetoric about family values and
morals, she accepted illegal campaign contributions and then failed to
disclose receipt of more than $50,000 for her 1994 campaign. She served
three terms before deciding not to run for a fourth term in 2000. Rep.
Randall (Duke) Cunningham (R-Calif.), a seven-term Congressman, who
accepted $2.4 million in bribes, pled guilty to charges of conspiracy,
mail fraud, and tax evasion. Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), an 11-term
congressman, was first forced to resign as House majority leader after
being indicted on charges he conspired to violate Texas state election
laws; amid growing evidence of financial and ethical irregularities
over several years, DeLay resigned from the House in April 2006.
The Republicans, whose “big tent” campaign rhetoric apparently still
doesn’t include many minorities, is represented by Sen. Trent Lott
(R-Miss.). Lott resigned as Senate majority leader in December 2002
after praising segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), suggesting
that if Thurmond had been elected president on the Dixiecrat ticket in
1948, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years.”
Lott—who opposed the Voting Right Act and voted against creating Martin
Luther King Day—recently asked, “Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do
they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.”
The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal touched mostly Republicans, with one
White House official charged with obstructing a federal investigation.
And there’s George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza
Rice, and John Ashcroft/Ambrose Gonzales, whose six year reign is
pepper-shot with lies and violations of even the most basic codes of
ethics. They are the cabal that had nodded off prior to the al-Qaeda
attack upon the United States, and then lied to the people prior to
launching an invasion of Iraq, which had no ties to the 9/11 plot, no
ties to al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups, and no weapons of mass
destruction.
The Administration has also diverted, according to Bob Woodward of the
Washington Post, about $700 million from the war in Afghanistan and the
search for Osama bin Laden to prepare for the invasion of Iraq. They
awarded a no-bid $7 billion contract to Halliburton, which is now
accused of war profiteering, diversion of funds, and numerous other
questionable, illegal, or immoral practices. Billions of other
taxpayer-funded dollars went to other companies that are major
contributors to Republican candidates.
On domestic issues, the Bush–Cheney Administration has violated the
environment, and disregarded health care and the working class, while
holding the pursuit of obscene profits to be their personal god. They
have encouraged the use of torture to gain information from even the
remotest of suspects, and have refused to give suspects a fair trial.
They have created fake news releases, bribed journalists, released
secret information about a CIA agent in retaliation for her husband
speaking out against Bush’s war in Iraq, illegally hacked into
confidential Democrat strategy files, illegally spied upon both
American citizens and the United Nations, invaded innumerable
Constitutionally-protected personal rights of privacy, suppressed
freedom of expression, and instilled fear as justification for its
actions. Perhaps they should no longer be called “neocons,” but
Vegomatic Republicans since they believe they have a divine right to
slice, dice, and chop the Bill of Rights.
Sanctimoniously proclaiming themselves piously religious and patriotic,
they have forsaken both the Bible and the Constitution. George W. Bush,
when asked if he had consulted his father prior to the invasion of
Iraq, devoutly declared that he had spoken to his “higher father.” His
actions prove that he has abandoned both his heavenly father and this
nation’s forefathers. So much for honoring thy father.
The salacious “family values” Republicans have become the party of
right-wing righteous indignation. But the closest any of them will come
to righteousness is their fervent prayers for something tumultuous to
happen so the media and the public forget these latest elephant-sized
transgressions.
[Assisting on this column was Rosemary Brasch. Walter Brasch’s current
books are America’s Unpatriotic Acts: The Federal Government’s
Violation of Constitutional and Civil Rights and ‘Unacceptable’: The
Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina. Both are available through
amazon.com and other on-line sources. You may contact Dr. Brasch at
brasch@bloomu.edu]
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