MEET CATHY McMORRIS, A RIGHT WING EXTREMIST IN WASHINGTON, EXPERT IN COVERING UP FOR REPUBLICAN SEXUAL PREDATORS

A couple weeks ago I persuaded my pal AB to tell us a little about the remarkable Democrat running for Congress in Washington's 5th CD, Peter Goldmark. Since then people have been asking why there wasn't much information about Peter's opponent, Cathy McMorris, one of the dozen most extreme right wing members of Congress. Because McMorris had a role in covering up for Washington's most notorious sexual child molester, her close friend and colleague, Jim West, I asked AB to give us the whole Cathy McMorris story and show how neatly it ties in with the Republican cover-up of the Mark Foley scandal. Here's the report:

The Republican values on parade as desperate Denny the Hastert flails about, trying to figure out which way is up, are a disgrace. Venality, financial corruption, ignorance and incompetence are bad enough. But this spectacle of national leaders so far gone in their sacrilegious cult of "it can't be all that evil if it serves my partisan political interests" as to have lost their basic human decency, is a horror. 

This isn't the first time the Republican leadership has been caught in a pedophile cover-up. Two years ago this very situation exploded in eastern Washington when it came out that his Republican colleagues had twiddled their fingers for 15 years while out of control sexual predator Jim West used his political clout to hunt down boys right in there front of them. 

Lucky for the GOPsters, the local Roman Catholic diocese was in the midst of an even more sordid pedophilia scandal at the time and the Republicans managed to dodge the bullet. Wriggling out of responsibility for colluding in decades of child abuse worked out that time, so no wonder Denny "not one of our leading intellectuals" Hastert considered Mark Foley's abuse of power for the sexual pursuit of kids to be an insignificant matter. It's not like Foley was a brilliant lawyer, soldier and patriot who had irritated George Bush by winning a case before the US Supreme Court. The really bad people like that are kicked out of government in a matter of weeks.  

Congresswoman Cathy McMorris, who represents Washington's 5th District, is an old hand at the pedophile protection racket, having worked closely with Jim West for 20 years in the Legislature. Cathy also has one of the most disgusting voting records in Congress. She has spent her entire life in the pocket of her father and his corrupt political cronies, and they have led her down a sorry path.

That seems to be the case more often than not when Republicans indulge in what they like to think of as mentoring, counseling, helping, guiding, advising. And who is more deserving of this kind of special attention than young people? Just last week it came out that Sheriff Hairspray, aka "Congressman Frank Drebin" of the 8th District, had taken time off from his relentless pursuit of the Green River killer to bring a teenage prostitute into his home so that he might "have a positive effect" on her.  

Put a mother in charge of our House. Vote for a Democrat.


MENTORING: A VERY SPECIAL REPUBLICAN FAMILY VALUE

In 2004, the Democratic Party Empty-Suit-du-Jour running for Congress in Washington's 5th District faced the usual dilemma: what to talk about without taking a position on anything substantive? Democrats thought it would be a bright idea to sneer at Republican State Legislator Cathy McMorris because she had spent some of her hard luck childhood in a foreign country. Due to this idiotic xenophobia and other lame stunts on the part of what purports to be an alternative to Republican Party rule, McMorris trampled her opponent like a first growth cedar falling on snowman.

The McMorris family struggle to scrape out a living all over the Northwest, which despite manmade boundaries, has been a geographically, historically and culturally unified region for thousands of years, was an asset for Cathy. In fact her experience of the region was one of her few qualifications. Cathy had never held a full-time job; never had any job whatsoever that did not involve nepotism and the kindness of elderly Republican gentlemen; never managed a household or raised a family; and, except for 3 days a month for a year or so at the state university, while simultaneously serving in the state Legislature, she had had virtually no formal education.  


Born in 1969 on the west side of the Coastal Range, down in Salem; before long her folks had moved across the mountains to the Yakima Valley where they tried to make a go of it in the walnut farming business. But things didn't work out, and in 1974 Wayne and Corene McMorris set out again, this time to follow their dream to live off the grid and the family settled in the British Columbia wilderness with neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. This was followed by a series of moves around the Northwest. Nothing working out, until Wayne finally found his niche... in the bowels of the Stevens County Republican Party.

Cathy finished out her last two years of highschool at an all-white Christian academy and helped out in the family peach orchard and roadside stands. While managing the family fruit operation and teaching part-time at Cathy's school, Wayne began to build himself a powerbase in eastern Washington politics, schmoozing his way up the ranks of the Chamber of Commerce and the GOP. But, unlike kids who graduate from public highschools in the 5th District, Cathy didn't have an opportunity to pursue a higher education because she "graduated" from a tiny (4 teachers for 13 grades) unaccredited school. And, unfortunately for our Cathy, universities generally do not accept students from schools where the ideological has supplanted reality-based education, because it's just too hard for the kids to keep up. In fact, small unaccredited religious "colleges" only require an ability to pay and a willingness to unite with the sect's preferred doctrine. At the close of the only two years Cathy would ever live in eastern Washington full time, she packed up and moved to Florida to enroll in the most politically correct school in America, Pensacola Christian College.

PCC denounces Bob Jones University as too squishy.  PCC is for real Christians. Christians who don't smoke, don't drink, don't dance, don't listen to most music, don't watch most tv, don't use the Internet, don't see movies, and don't touch each other on pain of immediate expulsion.

After 4 years of hard work at McDonald's to pay for her cult-like indoctrination, Cathy was again faced with the lack of opportunity open to an ambitious and intelligent young person with only a pretend academic degree. Graduate schools and jobs that required a college degree were unavailable to her. The Republican Party on the other hand...

Luckily by the time the end of senior year rolled around, dad was a player.  Wayne, "Boss Hog" McMorris was now powerful enough in Republican circles to leverage a job for Cathy in the campaign of one of his political cronies. Cathy was 20 years old. And when Bob Morton shortly won election to the state legislature, she went down to Olympia as his aide. Bob was "impressed with her ability to look over reports." When he moved up the political ladder in 1994, he and Wayne strong-armed the party into appointing Cathy to Bob's seat in Olympia, plus, managed to suppress any primary opposition for an entire decade. Wayne McMorris and Bob Morton were the fairy godfathers of Cathy McMorris' political career and the first of a cadre of old and older men who have manipulated, directed and counseled her since childhood.

In the 1990's the Washington state Republican Party was in the throes of a nasty power struggle between the wingnut wing and the "moderate" wing represented by the McMorris clan. Yes, Cathy McMorris, the Congresswoman with the ugliest voting record in the House, is a mainstay of the left, or as we like to call it, the figleaf wing, of the Washington state GOP. Wayne won. The McMorris family purred along.

While Uncle Bob Morton and Wayne were off trying to pry baby brother Jeff McMorris from his dead end job as assistant manager of the Spokane outlet of the Laser Quest! gaming franchise and launch him on to the gravy train of the legislative assistant/right-wing think tank circuit, Cathy was cementing her relationships with two more older members of the eastern Washington Republican establishment: George "term limits for everybody except me" Nethercutt and infamous Republican pedophile, Jim West. And honing her ability to bring home the bucks. She's got a knack for helping donors forget what it is the Republican Party really stands for. Like Mark Foley, Cathy turned into an ace fundraiser and was likewise rewarded with important positions in the party. It's not integrity or legislative ability that propelled them up the ranks, it's all about the money, the second most important Republican value.

When GOPsters deluded themselves into thinking George Nethercutt could win statewide office and forced him to give up his seat in the House, Wayne and the "mentors" anointed Cathy to his old position. She was soon swept up in the corruption and self-dealing of her new wise men, Doc Hastings, Richard Pombo, Ted Stevens, Denny Hastert and the whole crew of future felons of America. Repudiating the Christian principles of her youth, Cathy got in bed with the non-non-smoking, non-non-drinking, non-non-pre-maritial/post-maritial/extra-marital serial-sex-offenders, the prevaricators and law-breakers, the whoring, cursing, dancing gambling fools and significant campaign contributors: Tom Delay ($5,000), Duke Cunningham ($1,000), Bob Ney ($2,500), and leading pedophile protectors Roy Blunt ($13,000) and John Boehner ($11,241). In return Cathy does everything they tell her to do, up to and including shielding a child predator. Her career depends on it. Not to mention Wayne's career. And Jeff's career.

Cathy is Republican Party family values all the way. She openly defends legalized bribery and the corporate theft of public funds. She wants to eviscerate the Environmental Protection Act even though it will turn our country into a sewer. She says things aren't so bad in Iraq and is willing to let more of other peoples' kids get killed and maimed because it would look bad for Republicans to look responsible for that catastrophe. Saying you take responsibility is a Republican family value.  Actually taking responsibility is not.  

She votes for irresponsible deficit spending and draconian bankruptcy laws. She ignores the fact that her district is in the Economic Intensive Care Unit. She wants to prevent regular people from obtaining justice in the courts from greedy corporations that have wronged them. She cannot and will not pressure the federal government to clean up their decades of nuclear waste oozing towards the Columbia River water table; heartbreak dead ahead.  

Now she's got herself mixed up in her second GOPedophile scandal in less than two years. The deal with serial Congressional page stalker Mark Foley and the leadership of the House of Representatives is a familiar one to Cathy.  She spent 15 years as an insider in the state legislature where she had plenty of practice in Republican Party standard operating procedure of ignoring/enabling child sexual abuse. She was not alone.

McMorris and the rest of the Republican political establishment knew Jim West was a child sexual predator for 15 years and looked the other way, even as he cynically pushed a raft of vicious homophobic bills through the legislature. In fact plenty of Republicans in eastern Washington had known since the 1970's, when West and the fellow law enforcement officers in his molesters club would openly rip the pants off boy scouts. Like Foley, West posed as a mentor to young people. He used public money to take "troubled juveniles" for week-long "leadership" experience. He used his power as a Sheriff's Deputy to fuel his perversions, fighting the War on Drugs by searching for marijuana down the front of a boy's pants. Moving up to the state house meant more political power and authority which meant more opportunity to corrupt young people.

And his fellow Republicans knew it. Jim West was so confident his colleagues wouldn't say a word that he could "joke" about his own pedophilia right there in the Senate Chamber. In 1990 for instance, he made a pass at a teenager in front of the boy's own mother. Senator Pam Roach was initially horrified, but her fellow Republicans were able to convince her to do the right thing and let it pass. 

The GOP values only one thing: follow the leader. Loyalty is their sole criteria for distinguishing right from wrong.  Morality? Ethics? Obey the law? Basic human decency? That's just stuff to talk about when you're on TV.

West's crimes were only revealed to the public because the Spokane Spokesman-Review stumbled over them in the course of investigating the enormous pedophilia scandal that has since bankrupted the Spokane Catholic Church. (In 1986 the Bishop of Spokane was arrested by the Chicago police for choking a male prostitute, who had the priestly penis in mouth at the time; like Foley, Kolbe, West, et al, the prelate claimed he was "counselling." You see, like politicians, priests are very big on mentoring. The powers that be managed to keep this, and lots worse, hushed up until 2002.)

It is not known how many hundreds of children were sexually molested in the THIRTY YEARS West spent preying on kids with total impunity because his friends and political associates in the small world of the Washington state Republican Party were literally covering his ass. When public servants commit crimes, we are all implicated. That's why public servants who break the law are so much worse than regular criminals.

Cathy McMorris was so close to Jim West that he spoke of wanting to marry her; convenient. He thought she could enhance his political career by helping him conceal his criminal perversions. Why should she have objected to Mark Foley's unseemly interest in teenage boys when she had turned her head away for 20 years while her mentor and colleague Jim West was doing exactly the same thing?

She sold her soul and her autonomy and her reputation to these hoodlums. And they still disrespect her. In the closing weeks of a tight re-election campaign she only realized too late she could lose, Cathy was publicly humiliated by her own party when she had to find out about hundreds more layoffs at Edwards Air Force Base from the news. McMorris, who is a member of the Armed Services Committee no less, was not only helpless to stop it, she wasn't even informed of it. So much for clout.

It's not that Cathy is not interested in her constituents; she genuinely loves to chat and exchange small talk back in the district. What she's not interested in is representing their interests in Congress.

Cathy McMorris claims her political associates, her views and deeds, not to mention her failures to do the right thing, are representative of the electorate in the 5th district.  Cathy McMorris is wrong. The voters in the 5th District do not consider shielding sexual predators to be an appropriate price to pay for anything, much less to maintain the Republican Party in power. 

The metastasizing incompetence and criminality of the GOP nationwide has forced the traditionally ultra-conservative 5th District to re-evaluate its affectionate and protective feelings about Cathy McMorris the person, against the reprehensible deeds of Congresswoman McMorris, gang member.

Defend eastern Washington family values. Clean up Congress. Elect a Representative with integrity who can think for himself. Support Peter Goldmark.