Republicans: A Long History of Criminality

[Stinky The Clown]

First off, let me start by saying that Democrats are hardly devoid of their share of criminality. But ours tend to be of the 'shoplifter' variety. Small potatoes.

The Republicans, on the other hand, are famous for big crimes.

Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton left office clean. Not only as individuals, but when viewed for the complete administrations. Clinton came closest to actually having some criminality in having the $70M witch hunt against him result in .... what? ..... two indictments followed by two convictions ..... but for crimes having nothing to do with government and which did not take place during his years in office ... and did not really affect actual members of his administration.

Nixon had how many guys go down? All insiders. All for crimes associated **directly** with their actions while in office. Even ol' Dick had to be pardoned.

Reagan similarly had a raft of criminals to clear. Poppy took care of the final sweep and mop job. (Damn fine job, huh Caspar?)

And now we have idiot son. His is shaping up to be a typical Republican administration. Criminals. Thugs. Miscreants. But also moral, even if not legally so, traitors to this country. Power drunk thugs subverting We The People's government for their own nefarious dreams.

The Modern Republican Party is absofuckinglutely an ongoing criminal enterprise. The Enron of politics.

Please, Mr. Fitzgerald, do like Mr. Spitzer. End this criminality. Do as you did in Illinois. Decimate the gang. Reduce them to orange jump suited perps.

Our national body can stand no more insult.

[kentuck]

1. It's hereditary...

and natural ofr them. They think it's their right.

[Joey Liberal]

2. Great post!

[BrklynLiberal]

3. Criminals of MANY types.......

Repugnant Hypocrites

A COMPENDIUM OF SEXUAL HYPOCRISY
You know, with all the ink and air time spent commenting on Mr. Clinton's real and alleged sexual improprieties, you would think that the "fair and balanced" media would note the avalanche of GOP and right-wing sex crimes and hypocrisy. I mean it's not like they don't think sex sells. Consider, it's all Kobe all the time now.
Just to get this off my chest, let's list the ones I know about. This is not an exhaustive list because I have a job that does not allow me to track all this stuff down. As Jackson Thoreau said, "There are just too many Republican mistresses and not enough hours in the day. Nevertheless, <warning>long post ahead</warning>

There's President George Bush accused in a criminal complaint and lawsuit of raping one Margie Denise Schoedinger (who apparently dated Bush years ago when she was a minor) and who is also accused by Tammy Phillips, a former stripper quoted in the National Enquirer in 2000 saying she had an affair with Bush that had ended in 1999. There's the press ignoring extramarital activities by the hypocrites who served on the impeachment committee like Henry Hyde and Bob Barr. And then there's the documented sexual misconduct of Bill Thomas, Bob Livingston, Dick Armey, Dan Burton, Charles Canady, J.C. Watts, Helen Chenoweth, Sue Myrick, Ken Calvert, John Peterson, Dan Crane, Donald Lukens, Jim Gilmore, Scott McInnis and Arlan Stangeland. All Republican hypocrites who attacked Clinton for his affairs and expressed outrage when people put a microscope on their private sexual lives. If you want more, like these randy GOPers, check out the site Congressional Arrest record.

My favorites are Rep. Helen Chenoweth who, during her 1998 campaign, admitted to a six-year adulterous affair with a married associate but noted that "I've asked for God's forgiveness, and I've received it," Rep. Joe Scarborough, and, of course, the Newtster.

Remember the non-stop Gary Condit smear campaign? He admits to an affair with Chandra Levy who, when she goes missing, becomes prima facia evidence of murder, much as Hillary is/was accused of offing Vince Foster. No problem with coverage there. But when a dead woman was found in Congressman Joe Scarborough's office, where was the outrage and the non-stop coverage? Now Joe holds forth on his own MSNBC show, lecturing us about the crimes of the Democrats and the bleating the GOP party line.

That paragon of virtue Newt Gingrich is on his third 3 wife now. (God, I don't mean literally, I hope. That image is just too much too imagine.) Gingrich campaign worker Anne Manning admitted that she gave Newt oral sex while he was still married to his first wife. She told Vanity Fair, "we had oral sex. He prefers that because then he can say, 'I never slept with her.'" Well, where else did we hear that, I wonder. Meanwhile, he dumps his first wife during a visit to the hospital where she is recovering from surgery for breast cancer. Famously, he attributed Susan Smith’s drowning of her children as being due to our “sick system” fostered by the "amoralty" of the Democrats in the White House and then said, "the only way to make it better is to vote Republican.”

Compassionate. Conservative.
But let's not confine ourselves to Congressional Republicans. While we're on the subject of Susan Smith, let's flesh out that story.
Not too much later - although I don’t recall the media pointing this out, Susan Smith’s stepfather publicly apologized to Susan, saying, “You don’t have all the guilt in this tragedy,” because he had molested her early on, then drew her into a full-blown sexual affair later. He knew she was already traumatized by her father’s suicide. As her stepfather, he should have been there FOR her, not there to USE her.
And just who was her stepfather, this man named Beverly Russell? He was a key operative in the South Carolina Republican Party and a Christian Coalition member. Susan testified that one morning after he had been out putting up campaign posters for Pat Robertson for president, he came into her bedroom and put her hand on his genitals and kissed her and fondled her. Later, he made her his full-time sex object.

Then there's Richard Delgaudio. This prominent GOP activist and Bush Pioneer fund-raiser is the head of an array of conservative activist groups. The compassionate conservative helped out a 16-year-old girl who had a baby and dropped out of school, who needed money. Delgaudio paid her for pornographic photo sessions. But then, he continued to raise money without the embarrassment of newspaper stories or non-stop TV coverage from November, 2001, when he was first arrested, until April 23 when he was sentenced after pleading guilty to child pornography.

These GOP leaders seem to have something for pre-pubescent girls. Parker J. Bena, a Virginia GOP activist and Bush elector was indicted and convicted in 2001 for possessing child pornography. Kevin Coan, GOP election official in St. Louis, who found time from altering votes during the 200 election to solicit sex from a 14-year-old girl on the internet. Let's also point out Philip Giordano, the former GOP mayor of Waterbury, who was sentenced to 37 years in prison for soliciting sex with underaged girls.

And, let's not forget Randy Ankeney, rising star in the Colorado GOP circles, who was arrested in 2001 for trying to have sex with a 13-year-old girl he met on Internet. The indictment revealed he warned the girl and her family he’d ruin them if they told anyone. Doesn't that sound familiar? After his arrest, another 17-year-old girl who worked on Ankeney's campaign came forward alleging he sexually assaulted her. In 2002, he pleaded guilty to attempted sexual assault of a child.

How about registered GOP hypocrite John Fund, late of the Wall Street Journal, a prominent anti-abortion columnist and fund raiser? He lost his position after it was revealed that he impregnated the daughter of an old girlfriend and then encouraged her to abort his child.
Besides Oxy-Contin addict and uncharged felon Rush, Florida GOP smear radio host Marty Glickman was arrested in 2001 for giving drugs and money to underage girls in exchange for sex. He kept his show spreading lies and denying the charges until he was convicted, taken off the air only because there was no studio in the Palm Beach County Jail.

The moral corruption on the GOP goes so deep that almost anywhere you scratch, the slime comes to the surface, even out of left field. Remember Mary Kay LeTourneau? You know, the teacher who had a compulsive series of affairs with her students and was the object of much tutt-tutting and outrage by the corporate media. Despite court orders prohibiting any further contact, she sacrificed her career, marriage, and her children to this sexually compulsive behavior. Well, her father, John G. Schmitz was an ultra-conservative Republican congressman forced into retirement by the discovery that he had an affair and children with one of his students. Imagine that! It has been alleged, but not proven (or, unsurprisingly, investigated) that Mrs. LeTourneau's her out-of-control sexuality came sexual abuse as a child.

I'd like to apologize to my readers about this post, this exercise in yellow journalism, in this heretofore highbrow blog, but I just had to get it off my chest.
Posted by Gordon at October 10, 2003 01:21 PM | E-mail Author | Back to main page

Comments
Good work! I've been astounded at this phenomena for a long time. One site I found that dealt only with well verified sexual affairs had 33 Re-Pube-icans and 9 Dems. That is statistically VERY significant. I also Googled "republican hypocrites" and ditto for Dems. The score was 223 to 85. Either the Repubs are far kinder - sure - in their critiques, or Dems are far more unkind and prolific. Or there are more Repub hypocrites.

http://www.weblog.nohair.net/archives/000395.html


Congressional (Arrest) Record
http://www.comedyontap.com/features/congress.html

[Emit]

4. I'm sure this has been posted before, but it's worth a 2nd look

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Republican-Propaganda1sep04.htm


I found this article when I was researching Rob Stein-- I heard about Stein just after the (s)election as he had tried to educate people about the "Republican Message Machine." Robert Kennedy has written about this issue recently, as well.

Anyway, it's a good read:


Tentacles of Rage
The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history
LEWIS H LAPHAM / Harpers Magazine v.309, n.1852, September 2004 1sep04

When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far? —Richard Hofstadter


In company with nearly every other historian and political journalist east of the Mississippi River in the summer of 1964, the late Richard Hofstadter saw the Republican Party's naming of Senator Barry Goldwater as its candidate in that year's presidential election as an event comparable to the arrival of the Mongol hordes at the gates of thirteenth-century Vienna. The "basic American consensus" at the time was firmly liberal in character and feeling, assured of a clear majority in both chambers of Congress as well as a sympathetic audience in the print and broadcast press. Even the National Association of Manufacturers was still aligned with the generous impulse of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, accepting of the proposition, as were the churches and the universities, that government must do for people what people cannot do for themselves.*

* With regard to the designation "liberal," the economist John K. Galbraith said in 1964, "Almost everyone now so describes himself." Lionel Trilling, the literary critic, observed in 1950 that "In the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition." He went on to say that "there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation," merely "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

And yet, seemingly out of nowhere and suddenly at the rostrum of the San Francisco Cow Palace in a roar of triumphant applause, here was a cowboy-hatted herald of enlightened selfishness threatening to sack the federal city of good intentions, declaring the American government the enemy of the American people, properly understood not as the guarantor of the country's freedoms but as a syndicate of quasi-communist bureaucrats poisoning the wells of commercial enterprise with "centralized planning, red tape, rules without responsibility, and regimentation without recourse." A band played "America the Beautiful," and in a high noon glare of klieg light the convention delegates beheld a militant captain of capitalist jihad ("Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!") known to favor the doctrines of forward deterrence and preemptive strike ("Let's lob a nuclear bomb into the men's room at the Kremlin"), believing that poverty was proof of bad character ("lazy, dole-happy people who want to feed on the fruits of somebody else's labor"), that the Democratic Party and the network news programs were under the direction of Marxist ballet dancers, that Mammon was another name for God.

<<snip>>

About the workings of the right-wing propaganda mills in Washington and New York I knew enough to know that the numbing of America's political senses didn't happen by mistake, but it wasn't until I met Rob Stein, formerly a senior adviser to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that I came to fully appreciate the nature and the extent of the re-education program undertaken in the early 1970s by a cadre of ultraconservative and self-mythologizing millionaires bent on rescuing the country from the hideous grasp of Satanic liberalism. To a small group of Democratic activists meeting in New York City in late February, Stein had brought thirty-eight charts diagramming the organizational structure of the Republican "Message Machine," an octopus-like network of open and hidden microphones that he described as "perhaps the most potent, independent institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system."