How Ted Cruz Became The Rhoda Penmark Of The U.S. Senate

While I was researching this morning's lesbian piece, I saw how, in 1997, ambitious Buffalo closet case Bill Paxon used the power position Speaker Newt Gingrich had appointed him to, chair of the NRCC, to attempt a coup against Gingrich. Paxon plotted with House Republican power brokers Dick Armey, Tom DeLay and John Boehner to oust Gingrich, whose bizarre behavior had become a drag on Republican election prospects. However, each of the plotters saw himself as the next Speaker and when Armey sensed the plum was falling into Paxon's gay lap, he snitched to Gingrich. Gingrich forced Paxon to end his congressional career and, rather gratuitously, had Armey-- a real sleaze ball-- out his lover, Sandy Hume (Brit's son, a 28 year old journalist who committed suicide). The night before shooting himself with a hunting rifle, Hume had been jailed for drunk driving and tried to hang himself with a shoelace. (Joe Scarborough, who was a Republican congressman at the time and hadn't yet been implicated in the death of a young female staffer, included the ugly incident about the coup and the suicide in his book, Rome Wasn't Burnt In A Day.)

According to Scarborough, Armey was bereft of common decency, a shameless liar who betrayed his colleagues. Armey worked hard to destroy the career of a young reporter. After that reporter's suicide, Armey helped spread rumors about a gay affair between the reporter and Bill Paxon, a congressman who angled to replace Armey as House Leader. Paxon immediately retired from politics, while Armey stayed on.

…Sandy Hume's career seemed to be thriving. He specialized in "the juicy inside stuff" as he described it to the New York Times. "I can spend all day on the Hill and not know what a single vote is about… Almost everything they vote on is irrelevant to our mission.'" The son of Fox News anchorman Brit Hume was going places. On February 21, 1998, he accepted an offer to join U.S. News & World Report. "He seemed very well connected on a workaday level with the GOP power structure," U.S. News editor James Fallows told the Village Voice, "and for the foreseeable future that was going to be an important story."Later that same evening, according to reporter Andy Humm, Hume showed up at a Republican fundraiser, also attended by Bill Paxon.

But then, writes Scarborough, "Sandy passed away on February 22, 1998, at the age of twenty-eight." The Village Voice reported the details of on Sandy's "passing." At 2:20 a.m. on February 22, 1998, in Bethesda, Maryland, Sandy Hume's BMW was stopped for going 75 mph on a 45 mph zone. Hume was drunk and taken to a police station, where, in a holding cell, he was caught trying to choke himself with a shoelace. At 9:30 a.m., Hume was admitted to the city mental health clinic for psychiatric evaluation. Hume was released later that day, and he returned home, where he shot himself in the head.

"Hume's death represented an opportunity for revenge for some in the Armey camp," writes Scarborough, who recounted a phone inquiry from a Wall Street Journal reporter. "Someone in Dick Armey's office just told me that Sandy got the coup story by having a gay affair with Bill Paxon. Both knew the story was coming out and that's why Paxon resigned and why Sandy killed himself," said the reporter.

The obvious insinuation was that Sandy Hume killed himself because he was mortified at suffering the kind of fate borne by Monica Lewinsky, whose affair with Bill Clinton had been first reported one month earlier. Hume frequently appeared on Fox News, an outfit obsessed with the politics of personal destruction.

Two days before Hume's suicide, Bill Paxon contacted dozens of members to prepare a bid to oust Armey as Majority Leader. "House Republican renegades have issued a stern warning to Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) about influencing leadership elections: Fight for Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) at your own risk," wrote Sandy Hume in The Hill just before Paxon started calling. George magazine had commissioned a lengthy profile on Paxon, written by Sandy Hume.

Two days after Hume's death, Paxon, 44, retired from politics. He announced, "I will never run for office again. Never. Not even for dog warden."

Paxon was hardly the first ambitious congressman looking to displace a party leader. Even today, another young Republican, Ted Cruz, still a freshman, is working to accrew as much naked power as he can grab. Most Republican staffers see him as the kind of narcisistic personality type who will stop at nothing to get to the top. I've never heard any contemporary American politician compared to Hitler as much as Cruz-- and not just because they are both right-wing extremists. It's all about the sociopathic behavior. Cruz is the Rhoda Penmark of the U.S. Senate.



Yesterday, Cameron Joseph, reporting for The Hill, looked into Cruz's refusal to play nice with his GOP colleagues. "The defiant Republican’s brutal criticism of Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-Miss.) reelection campaign on Tuesday-- and the involvement of a group he is technically a vice chairman of, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC)-- is just the latest example of the Tea Party hero refusing to play nice," he wrote.

That brazen approach has exacerbated already fragile relations with establishment Republicans, who believe the freshman senator is intentionally undercutting them for no reason other than furthering his own political career.

Meanwhile, his conservative base is rejoicing that he’s refusing to be cowed.

…National Republicans hoped they could tame Cruz when they gave him the NRSC position. But he officially took a hiatus from the group earlier this year when it became clear that it would be involved in helping incumbents win against Tea Party challengers.

But Cruz still remains vice chairman, and reiterated he won’t resign.

“It was unfortunate to see the D.C. political machine spending substantial money to urge 30,000 to 40,000 Democrats to vote in a Republican primary. And they did not do so in an effort to grow the party, to attract their support substantively on ideas. Rather the ads that were run made false racial charges and made no effort to secure those votes in the general election,” Cruz told reporters Tuesday, echoing comments he’d made the night before to conservative radio host Mark Levin.

He went on to criticize the Senate GOP campaign arm’s involvement specifically.

“When I signed on as vice-chair of the NRSC it was based upon an explicit commitment from leadership that the NRSC was going to stay out of primaries. Had they not made that commitment I would not have taken on that role,” he said.

“I participated in the NRSC early on as long as they honored that commitment, and when the decision was made for them to do otherwise I stopped participating because I think Washington insiders are notoriously poor at picking winners and losers in primaries. And indeed the Mississippi primary is Exhibit A for why the NRSC should stay out of primaries.”

…This is far from the first time Cruz has antagonized the GOP establishment by intentionally bucking its members to grab big headlines. He led the charge to defund ObamaCare that shut down the government last fall, which badly damaged Republicans’ poll numbers. Cruz has also pointedly refused to endorse his GOP colleagues in many races-- even those without serious challengers, like former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, who’d backed him in his own race.

…[N]ational Republicans privately say Cruz did almost nothing to help the NRSC even before they started getting involved in primaries.

“He’s a VINO, he’s a vice chairman in name only,” said one national Republican. “I’m not sure what the alternative is. Should we strip him of his vice chairmanship that he doesn’t actually do anything with? The hope is judging by his own words he’ll be helpful in the general election.”

But not everyone is so optimistic he’ll come around.

“Senator Cruz has every right to express himself,” said GOP strategist Ron Bonjean, a onetime leadership aide to former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).

“But does it make any sense to have a vice chairman of the NRSC dispute the certification of the Mississippi Senate election in favor of a sitting Republican incumbent?”

Some Republicans are plotting to get rid of Cruz by pushing him to run for president against Hillary Clinton, knowing he will lose-- lose humiliatingly-- and be gone from the Senate. The problem with that scenario is that the kind of landslide defeat outside the South that Cruz would engender for the GOP could result in Senate losses in 9 states, Arizona (McCain), Florida (Rubio), Illinois (Kirk), Iowa (Grassley), New Hampshire (Ayotte), North Carolina (Burr), Ohio (Portman), Pennsylvania (Toomey) and Wisconsin (Johnson) and possibly even Kentucky (Paul) and Missouri (Blunt). If Hillary has any kind of coattails-- and if Israel has been removed as DCCC chair-- a Cruz presidential run would almost surely take back the House for the Democrats as well. Little Rhoda is bad news-- a lot of bad news.

You Still Don't Read Much About Lesbians In American Politics, Right?

So wrong... in so many ways-- Gingrich, Molinari, Paxon

Chekov's last play, The Cherry Orchard, was performed for the first time in 1904. There's a production of it in New York next week-- free no less-- starring Ellen Burstyn and one of my friends snagged some tickets. I'm a Chekov fan; he's a Burstyn fan. I don't know much about her except that she was in The Exorcist and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore back in the '70s. I knew even less about Karen Burstein who I mixed her up with.

But Karen Burstein wasn't getting Academy Award nominations in the '70s and Ellen is the only Burstyn/Burstein in the NYC area she wasn't related to. Karen grew up on Long Island-- a 5 Towns gal-- and her sister was a state Supreme Court judge ands her sister was an editor for People Magazine and author and the other sister, Ellen-- the reason for my confusuion-- was a TV news anchor when I was growing up on Long Island. In the 70s Karen was a state senator and later worked for the good Cuomo (Mario) and then as a NYC family court judge. She ran for the Democratic nomination for Attorney General in 1994 and came in first of four candidates, beating an incumbent and a young Eliot Spitzer.

1994 was a bad year for Democrats. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was reelected to the Senate but Cuomo, running for a 4th term, was beaten by Republican George Pataki. Democrat Carl McCall was reelected Comptroller anyway but Burstein narrowly lost her bid to a third rate Republican from Buffalo, Dennis Vacco, 2,294,528- 2,206,188. [In 1998 Vacco was defeated by Eliot Spitzer and went on to a life as a sleazy lobbyist who barely managed to avoid a prison term.] But the reason he was able to defeat Burstein was because of Staten Island Republican boss Guy Molinari (who is still the Staten Island Republican boss). A couple of days before the election, Molinari outed Bustein as a lesbian. From the NY Times editorial:

Complaining that the Republican candidate for State Attorney General was "too much of a gentleman" to bring it up, Guy Molinari, the Staten Island Borough President, did bring it up. Karen Burstein, the Democratic candidate, is a lesbian, he said at a Columbus Day meeting of a police group, and for that reason not fit for the office.

Mr. Molinari, who is also New York City chairman of George Pataki's Republican campaign for governor, is half right on the subject. He is right to characterize himself as less of a gentleman than the Republican candidate, Dennis Vacco of Buffalo. He is contemptibly wrong to quarrel with Mr. Vacco's position that sexual orientation has no relevance to the job's qualifications.

Ms. Burstein, who has a comfortable lead in current polls, neither conceals nor promotes her homosexuality, and both candidates have rightly been content to treat her life style as irrelevant.

The only relevance of Mr. Molinari's remarks is their negative bearing on his own fitness for borough office and his responsible job with the Pataki campaign. Mr. Pataki was commendably forthright in denouncing the statements and calling on Mr. Molinari to "say that it was a mistake for him to inject this into the campaign."

Mr. Vacco also distanced himself from Mr. Molinari's statements but lamely refused to condemn them, saying he could not control his supporters. "Is my condemnation going to change their attitude, change their minds?" he asked. No, but it would make clear that he will not countenance a two-level campaign, the lower level being the gutter politics that Mr. Molinari brought to street level at the Columbus Day rally.

To make this story even more bizarre, Molinari was succeeded as the Congressman from Staten Island-- every congressman from Staten Island from John Murphy in 1973 to the current indicted mafioso freak, Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm, has been a criminal-- by his daughter, Susan (who now works as a lobbyist for Google and was responsible for Google funding ALEC). But back when she was still in Congress, there were constant rumors that she was a lesbian. She settled that, in the eyes of many, by marrying another congressman, Bill Paxon. Problem was that Paxon was pretty well known in gay circle as a closet case (and was the lover of Brit Hume's son, who Gingrich drove to suicide). He was chair of the NRCC and very ambitious, ambitious enough to lead a coup against Newt Gingrich that would have seen him replace Gingrich as Speaker. Dick Armey snitched-- he wanted to be Speaker-- and Paxon took the fall for Boehner and DeLay, who were both part of the plot. Paxon's political career was over and, naturally, he became a lobbyist (for Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, which handles Boeing).

After Paxon's affair with Hume was exposed and Hume killed himself, Molinari and Paxon blamed the Democrats: "[B]ecause Bill was 40 when we were married and hadn't been married before, the rumors were I was gay and he was gay." Today Guy Molinari is virtually the last Republican official still supporting Grimm. I wonder if he ever connects his outing os Burstein with what happened to end the congressional careers of his daughter and son-in-law.