Remove Denny Hastert

Hey! They’re politicians; what do you expect? Politicians at the highest levels – congress, president, governors, etc. – are the best in the business at what they do: compromise and pretend to lead. They’re our champions, so like football players and rock stars we turn them into celebrities. But their business isn’t catching passes from star quarterbacks or making them at our surrogates, it’s compromising on legislation, pretending to be outraged and waving the flag.

There are no compromises in zero sum games. The running back flies through the hole, runs for hundred yards every week and streaks into the end zone at least once per game: standing `O’ every time he comes out. The wide receiver loses a step or develops short arms and no longer makes the big plays. Boo! Gone!

The star, slim, sleek and sexy, sings directly to us: two albums, please. A little flab here, a tiny sag there: hey, who’s she kidding? Off to the trailer park with her butt. Get me a newbie.

But with big time pols there are two tracks: big enough – committee chair, and up or out – to the Senate, the State capital, and – ultimately – La Casa Blanca.

While that halfback’s scoring touchdowns or the rockette’s a rocking, we don’t care what they’re doing on the side. More than a few of us rather enjoy reading about their escapades, jetting to exotic getaways with glamorous consorts.

But pols are celebrities of a different sort. They’re us as we’d like to be – with nice suits and great hair – even if it's not their own. They’re us as our idealized notion of ourselves: Jimmy Stewart off to Washington. To be big time pols, they must play the role, and whenever they’re being observed – which is a lot of the time – they’ve got to be on stage and in costume. In effect, they’ve given up their humanity to succeed in their chosen field.

As you well know, everybody’s up in arms about the Mark Foley scandal. It seems that Foley was known to many on the Hill and in his home state of Florida to be gay. That was no big deal, but he also liked to over-communicate with under age Congressional Pages in a less than proper manner. It eventually caught up with him and he was gone within twenty-four hours.

The question is rightly turning out to be about the action of the Republican leaders rather than about the disgraced former congressman. It is very clear that more than a few very important House Republican leaders knew about the activities of Foley for a long time and did less than the American people expect in such cases.

In today’s Washington Post, Joe Califano describes how he – a Dem – and Rudy Giuliani – a Republican – were called upon by the late Speaker Tip O’Neill to investigate a not dissimilar page scandal a generation ago. Joe righteously calls on the Republicans of today to get with the program and out the damned spot as they did.

But it’s not as easy as it appears. Tip had it made. The Dems don’t and didn’t represent the goody goodies of the country who know how we should all behave and want it enforced by the government. Poor Denny Hastert and his minion represent God. While O’Neill and his sidekicks may well have been God fearing men, they really didn’t see that they were his representatives on the Hill, so they let the chips fall where they may and went on after the mess was cleaned up.

But the poor Republicans are doing God’s work. They don’t condone gay marriage, abortion, gay bishops, stem cell research, euthanasia, congressmen writing hot letters to kids and host of other issues entrusted to their care by the Christian right. Sure, it’s easy for the Dems to get past peccadilloes; everybody knows they’re human – sex fiends and wastrels all. They’re pigs; so what can you expect?

But despite the fact the Denny and his boys knew they had a problem with Foley, they had another even bigger tsunami bearing down on them, the fall election – which they knew was going to be close even without their bad boy perp. What were poor humans masquerading as heroes to God’s children to do? They had no damn clue, so they did nothing.

Now a humungous posse of God’s other representatives is out for the scalps of Hastert and everyone else who covered up this outrageous scandal. Never mind that the leaders of this pack are simply other humans with a long history of having similar outings from within their own group – Jimmy Swaggert, Jim Baker, and the fictional Elmer Gantry just to name a few.

I’ve got compromise. I want Denny out too. How about we just un-elect his hypocritical butt and those of the other poor slobs pretending to be what they ain’t? The fault of the Republicans in Congress lies in this scandal and a lot more. They’ve had too much power for far too long, and they’ve been corrupted by it.

Let’s get some people who know how to be corrupted without all this guilt. We don’t want people to check themselves into rehab when they’re caught; we want extensive medieval discussions hanging on the conjugation of the verb `to be.’ Then when they’re fully vested in their corruption, we’ll send them packing too.

Vote for Democrats; they’re not quite such hypocrites!

Blog on!

Wild Bill