Shucks, our latest Hoosier hero, former Rep. Dan Burton, is just a plain ol' Hoosier Azerbaijani patriot-for-hire

A crucial piece of information was left out of the Daily Caller's presentation to readers of former Congressman Dan Burton as the right-wing whoring dirtbag used its space to pimp for the fascist thugs of Azerbaijan.

by Ken

There's a good chance that if you're denounced as "a gossip monger" by a certified right-wing whoring dirtbag, it can be taken as a badge of honor. And today's gold star goes to washingtonpost.com's Erik Wemple Blog.

It was mere hours ago that we were commiserating with the proud bigots of Hoosier country who are in mourning for the damage to their great state's reputation ("Oh no! Has Indiana's reputation for 'Hoosier hospitality' been tarnished?") caused by the orgy of organized homophobia represented by the state's pioneering Gotta Hate Them Homos Act, so proudly signed into homo-hating law by right-wing whoring dirtbag Gov. Mikey Pants and his proud circle of homo-haters -- before, to their great amazement, all heck broke loose.

Poor Hoosiers! Of course, one important question had to be asked regarding the alleged hit to the Hoosier State's reputation: What reputation? There are, after all, good reasons why the state's other popular nickname is the Right-Wing Whoring Dirtbag State. And tonight we're gathered to pay tribute to yet another proud Hoosier right-wing whoring dirtbag, former Congressman Dan Burton.

"A couple of months back," the proprietor of the EWB reported the other day, "the Washington Times ran an opinion piece from Dan Burton titled 'Why Azerbaijan is important to America and the free world.' " The EWB noted a problem, however.

As initially published, the Washington Times disclosed that Burton was a former Republican congressman from Indiana. But not his other, more relevant title: current chairman of the Azerbaijan America Alliance, which in its own words strives to be the “premier organization dedicated to promoting a lasting partnership between Azerbaijan and America.” Burton’s piece appeared in the same edition of the Washington Times as a special section titled, “Azerbaijan: A Quarter Century Since Restoring Independence, A Thriving U.S. Ally.”

After the Erik Wemple Blog alerted the newspaper to Burton’s nonexistent disclaimer, it added in his chairmanship of the Azerbaijan America Alliance.

THE SAME BOUT OF AMNESIA AFFLICTS ANOTHER
ORGAN OF RIGHT-WING WHORING DIRTBAGGERY

Can you believe that the very same omission was made by the Daily Caller, edited by celebrated bow-tied right-wing whoring dirtbag Tucker Carlson? Back to the EWB:

Witness a Burton-penned March 12 piece in the Daily Caller titled, “Is Armenia America’s Ally Or Iran’s?” What follows the headline is an out-and-out hit piece on Armenia. This passage represents the tone pretty capably:

Further evidence of Armenian/Iranian friendship is plentiful. Both Tehran and Yerevan have pushed hard for progress on the construction of the Southern Armenia Railway, which will more closely link the two countries. Meanwhile, in May 2014, Iran and Armenia increased weekly flights between the two countries from three to 50. That’s not tourism. That’s business.

Elsewhere, Burton writes that Russian President Vladimir Putin is vested in promoting “the burgeoning Armenian/Iranian partnership. And we have everything to lose.” Those words sound like just the sort of thing you’d expect from the chairman of the Azerbaijan America Alliance. After all, Azerbaijan and Armenia have become “perilously close to open war,” as the New York Times put it in late January. There have been recent reports of clashes between the two.

"So how," the EWB asks, "does the Daily Caller present Burton to its readers?" There was, first the sunny graphic I've popped atop this post. And then there was "a tagline at the bottom of the piece":

Dan Burton is a former Member of Congress representing Indiana’s 5th Congressional District. He served in Congress from 1983 until 2013 notably serving on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Note: "An inquiry to Tucker Carlson, the Daily Caller's top editor, went unanswered." Color me surprised.


SO THE EWB TRIED THE AZERBAIJAN AMERICA ALLIANCE

And the result was "not much luck."

The Erik Wemple Blog sent an interview request to the organization yesterday and didn’t hear back by this morning, at which point we presented ourselves at the Pennsylvania Avenue address listed on the group’s Web site. After a short wait, a woman appeared to hear our request. She said that the questions I had were properly directed to Burton. When we asked for assistance in contacting Burton, she declined to provide any.

FINALLY, STRAIGHT FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH

Yes, finally the Erik Wemple Blog establishes direct contact!

In a short phone chat with Burton, the advocacy group chairman asked, “Are you the one who’s been calling everyone about my op-eds?” Yes, responded the Erik Wemple Blog. “I don’t really want to talk to you,” said Burton. Why not? “Because you’re a scandal monger and I don’t want to talk to you. I have no desire to talk to you,” he said. A plea to hear out the Erik Wemple Blog fetched no response.

Th-th-th-that's all, folks!

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How Do You Shut Down An Outrageous Hypocrite? Take a Tip From Russ Baker, The Reporter Who Forced Dan Burton To Pipe Down

Last night I had dinner with Russ Baker, who I have sitting on the other side of the room signing copies of Family of Secrets. The book's amazing and we wrote lots about it when it came out last year. We'll be giving autographed copies as soon as I figure out a good contest. Meanwhile, though, Russ told me this fascinating story about everybody's least favorite Hoosier, Dan Burton. Or at least he used to be everybody's least favorite Hoosier... until Russ rubbed his snout in his own crap and smacked him upside the head with a rolled up newspaper. One of America's foremost and most thorough investigative journalists, Russ spent a good part of 1998 digging into a sleazy right-wing congressman best known for calling President Clinton a "scumbag." At the end, he wrote so extensive an exposé of the predatory congressman's womanizing and financial shenanigans that Burton swears Russ was working for the White House-- patently absurd-- and forswore the kind of reprehensible and outrageous partisan behavior that brought him to the nation's attention.

A "simple majority" of our current elected officials have overstepped boundaries. Our focus should be to correct this erroneous behavior. I want to guide us out of this unconstitutional thinking, closed door meeting, and back room dealing existence.

I am a conservative American that demands a fair, noble, and constitutional abiding government. The amount of "big government" existing in our nation needs to be reduced. We will have greater success providing less government and more freedoms. We need to find real solutions to our problems and compromise egos to make them happen. I believe the recently passed healthcare bill is constitutionally questionable and should be repealed.

That quote wasn't from Dan Burton. It's from a self-described anti-choice, anti-cap & trade, pro-"free" trade conservative Democrat, Tim Crawford, running against Burton. There's a lot he could run on-- starting with Russ' article about Burton's post. But he'd rather talk about how much he loves the NRA and how he wants to repeal healthcare reform. Nate Silver rates his chance of beating Burton "zero." I'm relieved. A smart Democratic candidate might want to take up the story of how Burton, who was one of President Clinton's most vociferous critics, admitted to having fathered a child out of wedlock. And that's the least outrageous part of the Dan Burton story that few in Indiana know and-- with candidates like Tim Crawford-- will never know.

Burton's political career has been punctuated by uncompromising sermons on personal morality in high places [and]... as chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Burton cast himself as a moral watchdog for political fundraising... Burton's critics and not a few of his friends find it strange, however, that the congressman is given to such strident moralizing. He has repeatedly faced questions about his own campaign fund-raising tactics, including accusations from a lobbyist that Burton strong-armed him for contributions and threatened to destroy his career if he did not pay up.

Burton receives a 100-percent rating from the Christian Coalition for voting its positions on key issues. Yet the championing of family values by this father of three is undermined by a personal history of marital infidelity. In September, fearful of revelations that might surface in an article by this reporter, then scheduled for publication in Vanity Fair, Burton admitted that he had fathered an illegitimate son in an extramarital affair in the early 1980s.

This did not come as a complete surprise to reporters following Burton, who had been hearing rumors about a former Burton mistress with an out-of-wedlock "love child" for years. The woman involved, who is now in her late 40s, told Salon she worked for a Cabinet-level state agency when Burton came calling, wooing her with flowers. The woman, who declined to be interviewed at length or on the record, did affirm reluctantly that Burton is her son's father. The boy, who recently turned 15, would have been conceived during the 1982 campaign when Burton was first elected to Congress as "a man who cares."

But Burton's moral standing is further clouded by allegations of on-the-job sexual harassment, including an accusation that he groped a lobbyist from Planned Parenthood in the mid-1990s when she visited his Washington office. According to several sources, Burton has also maintained sexual relationships with women on his congressional and campaign payrolls.

...Burton is regarded by many colleagues, even in his own party, as an obstructionist and something of a kook. Glowering or smiling through gritted teeth, he delights in blocking committee action by raising procedural issues, talking until his allotted time is up, then, after losing a voice vote, demanding a recorded count -- thereby flushing indignant colleagues from their offices for an exercise in futility. "More than a decade of contention on many issues has purchased Burton a reputation in Congress as something of a flake," wrote the Indianapolis Star's George Stuteville in 1993. "Members of the Hoosier delegation ... note privately that virtually everything Burton proposes is bound to be defeated."

Burton regularly makes headlines with attention-getting stunts. In 1993, he fired a rifle at a "headlike thing" in his backyard in front of a homicide expert to prove his theory that Clinton advisor Vincent Foster did not commit suicide but was murdered and that his body was moved to a Virginia park. In 1995, he wrote Clinton, demanding to know whether taxpayers were footing the cost of stationery and postage for the fan club dedicated to Socks, the first cat. (They were not.)

...Burton, the family-values champion, has been married for 38 years, but he is known to have a marked weakness for attractive women. "All of the important people know the truth about Burton and pretend he's upstanding," says Harrison Ullmann, a former Indianapolis Star reporter who edits NUVO Newsweekly, Indianapolis's alternative paper. After Burton's September admission that he had fathered an illegitimate child, Dick Cady wrote in the Indianapolis Star, "During part of the 1970s and '80s, Dan Burton was known as the biggest skirt-chaser in the Indiana legislature ... Privately, some of his fellow Republicans expressed embarrassment. Lobbyists whispered about the stories of Burton's escapades. Statehouse reporters joked about him. Yet no one ever wrote about, or probably thought about writing anything. To the people who sent him first to the legislature and then to Congress, Burton was Mr. Conservative, the devout husband and father who espoused family values."

...From the time of Burton's election to Indiana's General Assembly in 1966 at the age of 28 to his departure for Washington 16 years later, there were a number of alleged incidents involving women -- stories not only of philandering, but also of an established pattern of sexual harassment. "Everybody who was around him at the Statehouse and everyone who knows him at all says the same thing: God, how did Dan Burton get away with this?" grumbles a female Statehouse lobbyist.

"None of the [female] staff wanted to be caught in a hall with him," recalls retired Indiana legislator Hurley Goodall, a Democrat who served with Burton until 1983, when Burton left for Washington. "Then, when he ran for reelection and they had a picture of his family in the paper, everybody wanted to puke." One woman, a former staff attorney for the Indiana legislature, recalls being with Burton one day after hours: "He put his hand on the back of my neck and said, 'Would your husband, your boyfriend, be upset about you being here late with me tonight?'" Just then, she says, a male staffer appeared-- "bless his heart," the woman added.

A man who worked for the GOP in the state legislature says Burton propositioned his daughter when she was a secretary there. "She was very upset," the man recalls. "I said to him, 'Dan, I would appreciate it if nothing more like that happened.'"

Virginia Blankenbaker, a former Republican state senator (Burton attended a fund-raiser for her recent, unsuccessful bid for a neighboring congressional seat), says that her late husband, who was director of public safety for Indianapolis, told her of numerous Burton problems, and she recalls one of her own. "One of my interns-- I don't remember if she also worked for him -- was flattered when he invited her to dinner at the end of the session in 1981 or 1982, and then was most embarrassed when he propositioned her," she remembers. "It's bizarre he's so outspoken on moral issues." The former intern, Judith Murden, now a federal employee, would confirm only that Burton had commented on her appearance, suggesting that she had rebuffed an advance, and noting that "nothing goes anywhere if there is a red light."

Other Hoosier women seethe with anger over Burton's hypocrisy. "I know wise men who in political life have had affairs," says Beth Green, a retired civil servant for the Indiana legislature who knew Burton. "There are many whom I think handle those relationships with respect. Perhaps there are mutual benefits. And, yeah, it's OK what they do. But I do care when they're up there preaching family values. My feeling is that [Burton] is not sincere about anything."

One woman who worked for an Indiana government agency and saw Burton frequently at political events remembers that when she was in her early 20s Burton came on to her in a "friendly" way by inviting her for a drink. They did not have a relationship, only a "one-night stand ... at my place," because "I suspect that he was worried that I was going to say something to somebody else in politics, and I didn't," she recalled. "It has been a source of both irritation and amusement to me over the years to hear him campaign and tout himself as having such strong family values and being such a defender of the conservative point of view, because I think, 'This is so much bullshit. What a hypocrite!' Even though I am a registered Republican and have been all my life and have worked both formally and informally on political campaigns, my favorite candidate is whoever is running against him."

In 1983 Burton put an Indianapolis woman, Rebecca Hyatt, on his Washington congressional staff as "assistant to the administrative assistant." Hyatt, according to a former boyfriend, James Rutledge, said that Burton had pressured her into an affair when she baby-sat for the family. "She said, 'I've got a problem at work. Dan wants me to have sex with him. He keeps bugging me every day,'" recalled Rutledge, who dated Hyatt in the early 1980s. After she and Burton began an affair, Rutledge said, "He took her up there [to Washington]. He promised her a job, everything." Hyatt's ex-husband, Byron Hyatt, says she told him of the affair with her boss. When contacted recently, Rebecca Hyatt, who left Burton's staff in the mid-1980s, said, "I don't talk to reporters."

Still an extreme right-wing loon, since the publication of Russ Baker's story, Burton has toned down the show considerably and does his best to stay off everyone's radar. He's happy embezzling what he can out of his nifty congressional job and keeping his philandering private... without casting stones at anyone else. I hope whomever is investigating closet queen and homophobic fanatic Trent Franks (R-AZ) will be as successful with him as Russ was with Burton.

Yes, There Are Congressional Districts Where Obama Won Less Than 25% Of The Vote

Nathan Deal & Mac Thornberry- accurate reflections of 2 uber-reactionary districts

Indiana's Republican Establishment has never much liked 14 term Congressman Dan Burton. It has nothing to do with his political positions or ideological predilections. He's an extreme right wing maniac and always has been, just like Indiana's Republican Establishment. His personality, on the other hand, is grating and he doesn't share his graft with the state party. They made a move to unseat him last year and John McGoff almost beat him in the primary. This year McGoff plans to try again-- as do 3 other Republicans. I was reading about this at The Hill yesterday and the article ends disappointingly: "The candidate emerging from the Republican primary would be favored in the reliably red district."

How reliable, I wondered. Well, the PVI is R+20. That's reliable. No other district in Indiana is afflicted with as many Republicans. Burton wound up with 66% of the vote in November and McCain-- who lost the state-- racked up his biggest majorities in Burton's district (59%), just as Bush did in 2000 and 2004.

But since my head was all in a statistics way I decided to see what districts, nationally, were even more reactionary than IN-05. I saw that there were dozens of districts that gave Obama far less than the 40% he got there-- far less. In fact there are plenty of districts that gave Obama less than a third of their votes! And these were, for the most part, the hardcore KKK districts-- in some cases where Kerry actually did better than Obama. Let me profile a couple of the standouts, to get an idea about what Democrats are up against in some parts of the country (primarily in really backward parts of unreconstructed former slave-holding states).

Worst of all is Texas' mammoth 13th CD that stretches across most of the northern part of the state. Mac Thornberry is a right-wing extremist first elected in 1994. The PVI is a startling R+25 and the district is 74% white Anglo and about 18% Hispanic. Bush won with 74% in 2000 and after his first 4 years of misrule, he was rewarded with 78% in 2004. McCain did nearly as well in 2008 as Bush did in 2004-- 77%, his best performance in any of the crazed Texas districts . McCain did 55% statewide. Thornberry won with an even greater margin in the district than McCain did-- 78%.

Let me quote from the CQPolitics Alamanac's description of the district that manufactures all of our country's nuclear bombs:

The conservative 13th encompasses much of the Texas Panhandle, including the city of Amarillo, then extends east along the Oklahoma border to take in the South Plains and much of the Red River Valley. It juts south twice to add more agricultural territory as well as pick up Jones County's small portion of Abilene. The district takes in Wichita Falls and reaches east to haul in the western half of Cooke County, about 50 miles north of Fort Worth. Monstrous and mainly rural, the 14th includes all or part of 44 counties, 40 of which have a population of under 25,000.

...The 13th is one of the most Republican districts in Texas. The GOP excels in many of the rural small towns that dot the area, particularly around Amarillo. Ochiltree County, in the Panhandle, gave 92 percent of the vote to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Closer to blue-collar Wichita Falls, voters have traditionally favored Democrats at the local level, but even this area votes solidly Republican in state and national elections.

TX-13 is the bottom of the barrel for Texas and for America. But there are other districts that are almost as reactionary and almost as steeped in ignorance, fear, superstition, darkness, and gross bigotry. TX-11 is almost as bad. A west-central Texas backwater, it's got the same R+25 PVI, same kind of rubber stamp extremist loon Representative, in this case Mike Conaway, and a 24% vote for Obama. Texas shares the distinction for being the most reactionary and politically backward state in the U.S. with Georgia and it's there that we find another district that gave Obama less than a quarter of its votes, GA-09, in the rural northern part of the state where chicken processing is the #1 industry. The congressman is a backward yahoo, Nathan Deal, who was first elected as a Dixiecrat Dem in 1992 but quickly realized all the like-minded kooks were on the other side of the aisle, which he skipped over to as soon as the GOP won majority status in 1994. He has been an important cog in screwing up American health care and has worked diligently to wreck the organic food industry. Deal won re-election with 75% of the vote in November, the same that McCain took there. CQPolitics Almanac again:

Anchored by North Georgia mountains, the 9th runs across most of the state's northern border... The 9th's economy has long depended on poultry processing and carpet manufacturing industries rooted in Gainesville and Dalton. As Atlanta expands northward, a surge of new residents in the district's south has brought white-collar and service sector jobs to the 9th and has helped diversify the local economy. The southern portions of Forsyth and Hall counties host suburbs full of Republicans and housing subdivisions.

...The 9th has the state's smallest proportion of black residents (3 percent), although its Hispanic population is expanding due to job opportunities in both the poultry processing and carpet manufacturing industries. More than half the school children in Dalton and Gainesville are Hispanic.

Deal, of course, is a rabid xenophobe and a tireless union-buster. You know how I love talking about how the same kind of right-wing obstructionism that the GOP is currently throwing against Obama resulted in just 88 Republicans in the 1936 House (and 16 Republicans in the Senate)? If trends continue in that direction in 2010 and 2012, Mac Thornberry and Nathan Deal will be among that small number of Republicans returning to Congress, with nothing to fear when espousing the most radical right destructive nonsense that educated and discerning voters in most of the country wouldn't put up with for one term.

But I want to leave this post on a hopeful note. Below are the Republican congressmen in districts that Obama won in November. Some were very close calls and some were landslides. Each of these seats should be carefully targeted by Democrats, although I fear that the DCCC is more interested in-- and will spend all its money on-- retaining Republican-voting incumbents in red districts like Bobby Bright (AL), Parker Griffith (AL), Walt Minnick (ID), Travis Childers (MS), Chris Carney (PA):

CA-03- Dan Lungren
CA-24- Elton Gallegly
CA-25- Buck McKeon
CA-26- David Dreier
CA-44- Ken Calvert
CA-45- Mary Bono-Mack
CA-50- Brain Bilbray
DE-AL- Mike Castle
FL-10- Bill Young
FL-18- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
IA-04- Tom Latham
IL-06- Peter Roskam
IL-10- Mark Kirk
IL-13 Judy Biggert
IL-16- Don Manzullo
LA-02- Ahn Cao
MI-03- Vernon Ehlers
MI-04- Dave Camp
MI-06- Fred Upton
MI-08- Mike Rogers
MI-11- Thaddeus McCotter
MN-03- Erik Paulsen
NE-02- Lee Terry
NJ-02- Frank LoBiondo
NJ-07- Leonard Lance
NV-02- Dean Heller
NY-03- Peter King
NY-23 John McHugh
OH-12- Pat Tiberi
OH-14- Steve LaTourette
PA-06- Jim Gerlach
PA-15- Charles Dent
VA-04- Randy Forbes
VA-10- Frank Wolf
WA-08- Dave Reichert
WI-01- Paul Ryan
WI-06- Tom Petri