Will John Ensign Share A Cell With Duke Cunningham? And What About Coburn?

Las Vegas betting parlors will be changing the question from "When will John Ensign resign from the Senate?" to "How many years will John Ensign serve in federal prison?" Although the national media has been far more titillated with the circus Fox created out of Eric Massa's breakdown, regardless of the fact that Massa resigned and is getting (real) medical help, than in Nevada Senator Ensign's scandalous saga, it is never far from the front page or the nightly news. The national media is being forced to deal with it again too.

This week Las Vegas' local CBS affiliate was all over the case and instead of listening to modern day Know Nothings with tricorner hats drooling on themselves and screaming "read the bill," people in Nevada are being urged to read the subpoena.

Nevada Senator John Ensign is in the crosshairs of a Department of Justice criminal investigation.

The criminal probe stems from a romantic affair Ensign had with the wife of his key staffer and close friend, Doug Hampton, and what Ensign has done to help Hampton financially.

Subpoenas have been issued to at least six Las Vegas businesses. The Justice Department came to Las Vegas to interview several prominent business and political figures in what appears to be a wide-ranging and deadly-serious criminal probe.

The Las Vegas Sun was far harsher than KLAS (Channel 8). This morning they began their Ensign coverage with "It’s no longer a question of 'if' but of 'when' between now and January 2013 that John Ensign’s short, previously happy, suddenly unhappy life as a senator will end."

The parlor games are all great fun: Would Gov. Jim Gibbons appoint his opponent, Brian Sandoval, to Ensign’s seat if it came to a resignation and would Sandoval take it? Or: Can Rep. Shelley Berkley really compete for that seat she now covets as lustily as Ensign coveted his neighbor’s wife?

But the nagging, all-too-serious question is this: Is Ensign so self-absorbed and delusional that he is willing to bring down folks of varying innocence with him-- either people loyal to him now having to hire attorneys to defend themselves because of the senator’s scandal or those whose tangential roles in his life have them under federal scrutiny.

Politicians are notoriously solipsistic, but Ensign’s behavior since his confess-and-run news conference June 16 has set a new nadir. It’s one thing to be exposed as a spectacular hypocrite, a moral crusader with feet of clay, and yet try to hang onto your Club of 100 membership as if it were more important than anything. But it’s quite different to become the focus of criminal and ethics probes and continue to clutch onto the senatorial ring despite the carnage-- real, quantifiable human carnage-- you are leaving in your wake.

What about reputable businessmen and businesses who have had shadows cast over their reputations by Ensign’s behavior-- trying to get the cuckolded Doug Hampton a job-- essentially ensnaring them in his massive cover-up? Ensign couldn’t care less about the effect on them when feds show up at their doors with subpoenas, the existence of which is inevitably leaked to the media.

What about John Lopez, who had an impeccable reputation on the Hill, but who now must hire a lawyer and be placed in the ineffably awful position of having to implicate his former boss? And my guess is he can. Lopez, given a soft landing at R&R Partners, may be the key to the entire case against Ensign in the probe of whether he conspired to help Hampton violate a cooling-off law.

What about Mike Slanker, the veteran political consultant who Ensign tasked with finding Hampton clients without, it appears, fully disclosing why, and forcing Slanker and his wife, another ex-Ensign aide, to defend themselves? I know many Democrats who despise Slanker for his brutal campaigns are feeling a sense of schadenfreude, but no one-- no one-- deserves that kind of treatment from someone who received loyalty for so many years.

And most of all, what about Ensign’s family having to continually endure the Chinese water torture that the senator could easily end with a simple announcement? If he were in private life, his wife and children would not have to constantly read more about his all-too-public transgressions.

We also learned Thursday that the subpoena-spreading around Nevada and Washington included the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The multitasking Ensign headed the committee while he was pursuing Cynthia Hampton. Again, good, faceless people are at risk because of Ensign’s unyielding impulse for self-preservation.

And what of the contributors at the time? As one wag put it, “Give to the NRSC and win a free trip to Washington to appear before a federal grand jury!”

That’s funny. But this story has little humor left, despite the rich lampooning vein for late-night comics and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

It’s clear from interviews conducted here and by national newspapers that Ensign abused his power as a senator to cover up his affair and to try to buy Hampton’s silence. But the senator may never admit to wrongdoing or be found technically guilty of anything. He is hardly innocent, though-- guilty at least of unethical conduct by normal barometers, and of selfishly using those close to him to help cover his tracks and then jeopardizing their livelihoods.

Hmm. Sounds almost exactly what President Bill Clinton did to cover up his indiscretion. And John Ensign called on him to resign.

Senator, heal thyself.

Rachel Maddow hasn't gotten back into the Ensign scandal the way you know is coming. But she's always up for talking about the C Street cult-- lately in regard to anti-Choice fanatic-- and that always means that C Street cultist John Ensign is going to get mentioned... as he was last night:

Comedy This Morning: Doonesbury's Senator X, finding absolution on C Street, is inspired to new heights in his affair

[Click to enlarge]

Apparently, fellowshipping with the C Street Christian bros not only is good for the soul but, er, enhances performance.

(We've got the whole C Street series-to-date up here.)


UPDATE: Howie's Two Cents

At this point it's impossible to cover the myriad scandals at the secret C Street house without talking about fascism and without at least skirting pornography. Even the chairman of the NRSC, John Cornyn (R-TX), is now refusing to endorse John Ensign for re-election!

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A show of hands: Are there any Crap Christian moralizers out there who aren't having affairs or doing other dastardly deeds?

When Chip Pickering announced in August 2007 that he wouldn't run for reelection to Congress (actually, he wound up quitting without even serving out his term), he said he wanted to spend more time with his wife Leisha and their five sons, ages 8-17. How'd that work out, Chip?

by Ken

So now it's former Mississippi Congressman Chip Pickering, the latest addition to the parade of C Street sleazebags, along with Nevada Sen. John Ensign and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. The estranged Mrs. Pickering has filed an alienation of affection suit against the Chipster's mistress. And yes, you guessed it, our Chip is another C Streeter -- and indeed, in his new career as (what else?) a lobbyist, part of a phalanx of Family members working a C Street-K Street axis.

So Rachel Maddow had to drag poor Jeff Sharlet away from his intended vacation yet again last night, for another session on the fundamentalist cult he infiltrated, and eventually wrote a book about it, The Family. (Jeff, by the way, while acknowledging that the C Street Family house has the atmosphere of "a fundamentalist frat house," thinks all the philandering is less important than the pipelines to power being established by the morality-be-damned C Street fundies, and that there are still some really explosive stories waiting to explode.)



Isn't there some point at which we have to wonder about what drives a person to enter religious or political service to bully helpless fellow citizens into adhering into moral precepts they don't even think about practicing in their own lives? "Hypocrisy" doesn't begin to cover it. Surely we're talking about some recognized pathology?


MEANWHILE, THINGS AREN'T LOOKING
SO ENCOURAGING FOR SENATOR ENSIGN

Margaret Carlson reported today on The Daily Beast that Senate Republicans, who welcomed Sen. John "My Mommy and Daddy Say You Should Oghtta Stop Being Mean to Me" Ensign back so enthusiastically when he made his triumphant return following his admission that he had, er, strayed, have become a lot less sympathetic in the face of the barrage of subsequent revelations, with no end in sight. Those GOP senators, concerned about holding the Nevada Senate seat currently occupied by Senator Ensign, and they want him to help by doing something -- namely, quit.

GOP Plots Ensign's Ouster

Republican Sen. John Ensign did what any red-blooded American would do upon returning to the floor of the Senate after the revelation that his parents paid off his mistress and her family. He gave a speech about a bill to help families of our wonderful veterans and brought his young son along as a human shield.

But compared to the first time Ensign showed up on the Hill after news broke that he'd had an affair with the spouse of his top aide, the reception was much less fulsome. The earlier attitude was the whole thing would blow over. Members of the Club are never eager to discipline another member of the Club unless the conduct in question is clearly outside the bounds of accepted sexual deviance. Calls for Sen. Larry Craig to quit were immediate and loud.

Ensign, said a colleague, should “leave now so the Republican governor can appoint someone new who has time to get a leg up on holding the seat for the GOP.”

At first, Ensign's case seemed closer to that of Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter, who apologized, wife at his side, for his brush with the "D.C. Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey and held on—although he could have a rough reelection race in 2010. Now Ensign’s standing is shakier. On the heels of his cameo at the Capitol on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, asked whether Ensign should stay and run for reelection, replied brusquely "Sen. Ensign will have to speak to those issues himself" before walking away from reporters. . . .

Even the strategy of muscling Ensign out of the Senate is far from surefire, as Margaret notes:

While cool heads in the GOP would like Ensign to disappear, the part of the plan where the Republican governor appoints a successor is complicated by the fact that Nevada’s current governor is a media circus all his own. Just last week, a court ruled that the lawsuit filed by a cocktail waitress against [DWT fave] Gov. Jim Gibbons for hitting her outside a Las Vegas nightclub could go forward. Gibbons' wife is suing him for a divorce that gets nastier by the day.

Records came out recently showing that Gibbons had texted a woman not his wife 800 times over six weeks on a state cellphone. He arrives at his office mid-morning, if at all, calls meetings he doesn't show up for, and is ignoring his state's economic freefall now that tourism and housing have cratered.

Meanwhile, the Republican lieutenant governor, Brian Krolicki, is facing prosecution on felony charges that he mishandled a multibillion-dollar college-savings program when he was state treasurer. Unsurprisingly, the nonpartisan National Journal just ranked Nevada the second most dysfunctional state in the country after New York, where all state business has ground to a halt because the legislature locked itself out of the Capitol.

As they say, you can't make this stuff up.


UPDATE: Are ALL Republicans Prostitutes?

It would be wrong for Americans to just think of ugly old white men paying younger women (or boys) for sex when the topic of Republican whores comes up. Sure, the GOP has an astounding record of sexual hypocrisy to live down, but an even more serious problem is that they're all willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder, invariably Big Business. Today Politico broke the latest Republican pay-to-play scandal:

The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group’s support in a bitter legislative dispute, then the group’s chairman flipped and sided with UPS after FedEx refused to pay.

For the $2 million plus, ACU offered a range of services that included: “Producing op-eds and articles written by ACU’s Chairman David Keene and/or other members of the ACU’s board of directors.

Republican Party publicists Michelle Malkin and Erick Erickson are weeping. -- Howie

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Republican Party Continues Disintegrating. PLUS: Billo blows a gasket

Does it surprise anyone that right-wing hack Bob McDonnell is soft-pedalling the fact that he's a Republican in his race for Virginia governor? Neither his TV nor his radio ads mention his party ID. On the other hand he's appealing to wealthy Republican business interests for his campaign financing. Marco Rubio, the far right extremist candidate for the open Florida Senate seat, on the other hand, is broadcasting his Republican Party heritage from the rooftops. He's been kicking mainstream conservative Governor Charlie Crist's ass in one GOP straw poll after another. And yesterday he won another one-- in Lee County (the notoriously right-wing Ft Meyers area).

While the Illinois Republican Party-- with the NRSC behind it-- pushed right-winger Andy McKenna out of his bid for the open Illinois Senate seat, to make room for mainstream conservative Mark Kirk, Florida and Beltway Republicans have been unable to do the same for Crist and it really looks like Rubio has a shot to knock him out during a primary-- even if someone with positions as extreme as his are would have no chance to win a general election in a moderate state like Florida.

John Ensign told the Las Vegas Sun that he has not only decided not to resign but that he intends to run for re-election. “I’m going to work to earn their respect back," he said of Nevadans who were appalled by his personal duplicity and lack of morals and human decency. Presumably Ensign, who is intimately involved with the shadowy neo-fascist group, The Family, figures denying Nevada working families health care is how he intends to win their respect back. No more talk about a run for the presidency though.

In a televised interview last week with Sun columnist Jon Ralston, Doug Hampton said Ensign paid his wife more than $25,000 in severance-- a sum that raised alarm because it was not reported, as would have been required, on campaign disclosure statements.

Knowingly failing to report such a payment could be a felony violation of campaign finance law, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The organization has filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and the Senate Ethics Committee and asked the Justice Department for a criminal investigation.

Doug Hampton also said Coburn had suggested a payment to the family, a claim Coburn has strenuously denied. Coburn has said he suggested only that Ensign repair the damage he had done.

Ensign’s father is a wealthy former casino mogul, and his parents structured the payments in a way that allows them to avoid taxes, each providing four members of the Hampton family payments of $12,000 each-- the ceiling for gifts... Ensign’s colleagues failed to rally to his side late last week as Ensign revealed the payments.

Meanwhile CQPolitics reported yesterday that 2 of the most extreme right members of the House, Mike Pence (R-IN) and Eric Cantor (R-VA) want to run for president... of the United States. The Republicans need someone; CNN is reporting that even a majority of Republicans feel that Palin is unqualified. "Only 33 percent of Republicans questioned in a CBS News survey released Monday night say that Palin would have the ability to serve effectively as president." Pence and Cantor, high level House Republican leaders under tobacco lobbyist John Boehner, are likely to find themselves leading a smaller caucus come 2010. With Mark Kirk and Mike Castle likely to run for the Senate and Jim Gerlach to run for the PA governorship, three blue-leaning seats are likely to fall to the Democrats, on top of Ahn Cao's in Louisiana. The Republican response to their dilemma? Shamelessly stoking the racism of the shrinking Republican base with gratuitous and unfair race-baiting attacks on the first Latina nominated to the Supreme Court; vicious internal bloodletting instigated by extremist maniacs and fanatics like Jim DeMint; demagoguing against Democratic plans to fulfill American families' wishes for viable health care reform; covering up an unending stream of hypocritical sex scandals among GOP leaders from senatorial whore mongers like Ensign and Vitter to bizarre behavior from religious cultists like Mark Sanford and Tom Coburn; and more clownish antics from RNC head Michael Steele. All good for winning primaries among the 20% or so people who think of themselves as hard core Republicans; not so good when trying to appeal to normal Americans.


RICK PERLSTEIN LOOKS AT THE BUSTED REMAINS
OF THE GOP, AND DRIVES BILLO BATSHIT BONKERS

by Ken



On the subject of "Whither the Republican Party?," our friend Rick Perlstein takes a really thought-provoking look, "Beyond the Palin," in the July 20 Newsweek. For the first time in a long while, the Republican Party may have to reconsider who its natural constituents are, and there are substantial factional disagreements. Populist appeals, for example, have "never been an entirely comfortable fit for elite conservatives," who can't help fearing "that the temptation to woo working-class voters will, you know, shade into policies that actually advantage the working class." And there's an additional factor in the current mix: "It's harder to persuade the economically less fortunate to respect conservative orthodoxy during a recession. That's starting to make conservatives nervous."

"Another thing that makes some elite conservatives nervous in this recession," Rick writes, "is the sheer level of unhinged, even violent irrationality at the grassroots," especially when "the line between the violent fringe and the on-air harvesters of righteous rage has been harder to find" than in the cases of the "panicky, violence-prone underbrush has always been revealed in moments of liberal ascendency."

This spring the alleged white-supremacist cop killer in Pittsburgh, Richard Poplawski, professed allegiance to conspiracist Alex Jones, whose theories Fox TV host Glenn Beck had recently been promoting. And when Kansas doctor George Tiller was murdered in church, Fox star Bill O'Reilly was forced to devote airtime to defending himself against a charge many observers found self-evident: that O'Reilly's claim that "Tiller the baby killer" was getting away with "Nazi stuff" helped contribute to an atmosphere in which Tiller's alleged assassin believed he was doing something heroic.

Billo attacks Perlstein the "far-left zealot"
(Boo! Hiss! String the commie bastard up!)

Cries of outrage have already risen from from Billo, seconded by his currently prized henchschmuck Bernie Goldberg. It would simply be impossible to imagine two human brains any more ignorant or dishonest than this pair. (Even the retarded Bernie notes that the schism in the Republican Party described by Rick is real. He goes so far as to call it a "civil war.")

Billo brands Rick as a "far-left zealot" and repeatedly denounces Newsweek for passing him off as a Newsweek correspondent instead of identifying him as, you know, a far-left zealot.

Of course Billo goes on the warpath every time someone provides an impossible-to-ignore public reminder that he's gone so far off the deep end that he is now an active fomenter of right-wing violence and an accomplice to (if not actually instigator of) murder -- and he could hardly be prouder. As to the substance of his attack, well, alas, there isn't any. He's peeved about all those extreme liberals who just totally dismiss his Princess Sarah (do you suppose he has falafel fantasies about her?), but because he's too lazy, stupid, and dishonest to do a lick of actual work, and obviously couldn't be bothered to read Rick's piece, he's blissfully unaware that the starting point for the piece is the fact, noticed even by Bungling Bernie Goldberg (gadzooks, how humiliating!), that half the fractured Republican Party, including much of the conservative "intelligentsia," is viciously dismissive of the princess.

By the end of this orgy of imbecility, it looks as if one of the poor-schmuck staffers who have to clean up the shit after the diseased elephant has gotten word to him that, as usual, his facts are 100 percent incorrect, that in fact Rick is in fact identified, quite correctly, as the author of what the liar-in-chief promptly dismisses as some book nobody ever heard of. The note in fact reads: "Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America." As the liar-in-chief knows perfectly well, most people who deal in the reality of American politics or modern American history not only have heard of Nixonland but regard it as one of the more important volumes of American history produced in the last decade. If Billo had a working brain and the slightest interest in reality, he could learn a lot from it. (Yeah, like that's going to happen!)

While Rick makes no secret of his progressive orientation, what he is, professionally, is a gen-u-wine historian, and a first-rate one too. His books Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America are the current go-to political histories of the '60s and '70s and the shaping of the modern conservative movement, which eventually brought us the disaster of the Bush regime. He's now working on a book that will complete a trilogy covering this chunk of history.

Rick writes carefully and deeply researched books on the political movement whose critical juncture he has written about in Newsweek, and his journalism is the product of the same rigorously investigating mind. It would be harder to drum up better credentials for sensible observation of the current combatants, now split into factions fighting over the future of Princess Sarah (as even poor sad Bernie Goldberg has noticed) and a great many other things.

Of course on the Right they would have no idea what a "historian" is. They think it's just somebody who opportunistically distorts or just plain fabricates stories based on the past to support their Unitary Ideological Truth. Meanwhile, on Fox Noise in particular, but also on all the cable and even many of the network "news" shows, it is now standard practice to have as guests unadulterated far-right zealots who are not only not identified as such but are allowed to masquerade as objective observers while they deliver unadulterated and usually unchallenged propaganda.

This much you have to give to Billo: He is correct in his perception that there are zealots shitting all over his little one-ring circus tent. He just doesn't seem to realize that it's a mirror he's looking into. And who can blame him? How would you react if you saw that staring back at you from the mirror?

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Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann dig deeper into the "Family" connections of Sen. John Ensign

I've added a "Saturday Update" to my post last night about the power-mongering religious cult the Family, which included Rachel Maddow's riveting Thursday-night segment, with guest Jeff Sharlet, who literally wrote the book on the subject.

Rachel herself was so overwhelmed by the subject that she felt compelled to do a follow-up segment last night, with Jeff Sharlet back, focusing on the weird system of "life coaching" apparently practiced among the members. She's especially taken with the newly revealed tale of Sen. John Ensign being browbeaten by his Family coaches (including, most famously, OK nutjob Sen. Tom Coburn) to break off his affair, even forcing him to write a letter to his heartthrob breaking it off and then dragging him to FedEx to send it -- except that the wily adulterer managed to sneak off to a telephone to call the lovely Cindy to tell her to pay no attention to the letter, and flew out to, um, "be" with her.

Come to think of it, Keith Olbermann also went wild over this story, and was in fact driven to a new installment of his, er, legendary Puppet Theater (there's also a follow-up with interview with Margaret Carlson on the political ramifications, which she thinks will now be dire):



Here's what I'm wondering: Do you think "Shut up, Coburn" is going to be the next big catch phrase?

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We think of them as crazies, but you know, the people who wander in and out of the Family's lodge house on C Street have clout in D.C.

A lot of jaws dropped last night when Rachel Maddow presented this segment on the fundamentalist sect The Family, which turns out to provide a creepy linking factor between those princes of "family values" NV Sen. John Ensign and SC Gov. Mark Sanford -- and that curious, cranky, and crazy loon and noodge, OK Sen. Tom Coburn.

by Ken

Even though the Family isn't totally unknown, I know a lot of people whose eyes were popping out during this segment about its connections to the Ensign and Sanford scandals. Among Rachel's guests was Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone who actually infiltrated the Family and literally wrote the book on it, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, now out in paperback.

The Family, first published last year, is yet another of those books from recent years that are by all accounts utterly splendid, which I've forlornly added to the "must read" list that I know I'll never get to. By way of summary, Jeff posted the jacket copy on his blog when the book was published, in February 2008:

They are the Family—fundamentalism’s avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the new chosen, congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential cells, to pray and plan for a “leadership led by God,” to be won not by force but through “quiet diplomacy.” Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have written from inside its walls.

The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the Far Right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a “family” that thrives to this day. In public, they host prayer breakfasts; in private they preach a gospel of “biblical capitalism,” military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao, the Family's leader declares, "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't."

Sharlet’s discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the Cold War, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not “What do fundamentalists want?” but “What have they already done?”

With regard to the political connections popping out now, our esteemed colleague Marcy Wheeler has been exploring the Ensign and Sanford ties to the Family lodge house on C Street: "Did the Ensign Confrontation over His Affair Take Place at a 'Family' Gathering?" (June 19), "Did 'the Family' Force Sanford to Ditch His Mistress?" (June 24), and "WaPo Discovers C Street" (June 26).

The infamous Family house on C Street

SATURDAY UPDATE: RACHEL DOES ANOTHER SEGMENT
ON THE FAMILY, WITH JEFF SHARLET RETURNING

And it turns out that what I've been calling the Family's C Street "lodge house" is actually . . . a church!

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