The Pathology Of Conservatism Goes To The Bathroom With Denny Hastert And Mark Foley

When Florida Republican Mark Foley was caught molesting underage male pages, the establishment circled the wagons around their likable colleague and made sure he wasn't charged with years of raping underage boys but just with sending naughty electronic messages. For their own reasons, Rahm Emanuel, John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, John Shimkus and Denny Hastert, all conspired to make sure Foley would never be tried for rape-- and, please keep in mind, that these weren't ancient cases beyond the statute of limitations, but cases in which young boys were still complaining about pain when they sat down.

If there was one part of the Foley sex scandal I found funny, it was that most of the boys he was banging were the sons of wealthy Republican campaign contributors who were honored by having their young sons given places in the congressional page program where GOP perverts like Jim Kolbe (AZ) and Mark Foley had easy sexual access to them. Although the rumors about Republicans using the page program as a dating service had been circulating around Capitol Hill for years-- at least since 1997-- and everyone knew about Foley's lust for boy-men, it wasn't until a 16 year old in Monroe, Louisiana complained to his wealthy father in 2005 about a pain in his ass that the Foley scandal started to publicly unravel. The father went to Rodney Alexander, a Louisiana congressman who got the young son into the page program in return for a steady flow of contributions.

Kolbe (AZ) was best known for years for paying underage Latino boys to perform oral sex on them. I'm betting most of these Tucson boys were from Democratic families. I thought it more appropriate-- a poor choice of words-- that Foley was thrusting himself on rich Republican white boys. And so was Denny Hastert. Yesterday Hastert was given 15 months in prison for... well, for a financial fraud scandal that flowed out of decades and decades of sexually molesting young Republican boys, including at least one brother of a GOP colleague of his.

Although U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin called Hastert a "serial child molester," he said he was giving Hastert a much lighter sentence that he deserved because of Hastert's age and physical infirmities. The Republican establishment had united to get Hastert off the hook with a fine-- as they do with any rich, powerful person caught breaking any law-- but at least Hastert got some punishment for his unspeakable criminal behavior. Child molesters usually fare poorly in prisons, but Foley isn't going to an actual prison but to supervised hospital lockup.

He showed no outward reaction to the sentence. As the dozens of spectators filed from the courtroom, Hastert remained motionless with his mouth downturned, not speaking to anyone.

Shortly before learning his sentence, Hastert had admitted for the first time that he sexually abused boys decades ago when he was the wrestling coach for Yorkville High School.

Hastert approached the microphone in court and apologized to those he victimized, saying he "mistreated athletes." Durkin then pressed for details, asking directly if Hastert sexually abused the victims.

"Yes," Hastert finally said.

Hastert said he did not recall molesting Scott Cross, who had previously been identified as Individual D, one of Hastert's victims, before he took the witness stand Wednesday and testified about the abuse. "But I accept his statement," Hastert said.

Asked by the judge about another alleged victim, Stephen Reinboldt, Hastert called it "a different situation" before finally acknowledging it.

"What I did was wrong and I regret it," Hastert said. "They looked to me, and I took advantage of them."

An emotional Cross, 53, a younger brother of former Illinois House Republican leader Tom Cross, said he decided to go public so that his children and others would know there's an alternative to staying silent. As painful as his decision was, he said, "staying silent was worse."

Cross' brother, a former Kendall County lawmaker who considered Hastert a political mentor, accompanied his brother to the sentencing.

Hastert, 74, is expected to surrender to a medical facility in the federal penitentiary system at an undetermined date.

Hastert's defense had sought a sentence of probation, a punishment Durkin said would not be appropriate in a case of this magnitude.

In lengthy remarks, the judge made much of the fact that when the FBI confronted Hastert about hundreds of thousands of cash withdrawals from banks, he tried to blame another sex abuse victim, identified only as Individual A, claiming he was blackmailing him.

... [T]he judge noted, "I can't sentence you for being a child molester," pointing out that the statue of limitations had long passed.

While Durkin said he was taking Hastert's age and health into account, he noted that much of the former speaker's lying had taken place after he turned 70. More than 4,600 inmates in federal prisons are older than 65, the judge noted.

Still, he said he did not intend for Hastert's punishment to be "a death sentence."

...Cross said the alleged abuse took place on one occasion when Cross was alone with Hastert in a wrestling room.

"He told me he could help me lose weight by giving me a massage," he testified. "I trusted what he was saying and took him at his word."

His voice shaking, Cross said Hastert told him to lie face down. The massage started, but after a few minutes, Hastert asked him to roll over.

Hastert then grabbed his penis and began rubbing it, Cross said.

"I was stunned by what he was doing-- I jumped up," he said.

Cross also told the courtroom about the reclining chair Hastert allegedly put up near the boys' shower, saying he came to accept it because he trusted Hastert. Years later he felt pain and guilt and sought professional help. He just told his parents last year of the abuse, Cross said.

On Wednesday, Cross' brother, a longtime former state legislator, released a statement on behalf of the family.

"We are very proud of Scott for having the courage to relive this very painful part of his life in order to ensure that justice is done today," the statement said. "We hope his testimony will provide courage and strength to other victims of other cases of abuse to speak out and advocate for themselves. With his testimony concluded, we ask now that you respect Scott's privacy and that of our family."

Hastert continued having sex with underage boys and young men for decades while he served in Congress, often paying male prostitutes for sex at night and then waddling into the office the next day to vote against equality and even humanity for LGBT families who refused to live the gay life in the Republican style-- a life of shame, filled with self-loathing and in the closet, conditions which almost inevitably lead to the kind of perversion that gay Republicans always get involved with. Now they don't want to let trasngender women use women's bathrooms, but it's always Republican closet cases who prey on people in bathrooms, not transgender women. There are no cases in history of transgender women bothering anyone in a ladies room but there are few gay Republicans in Congress who don't eventually wind up on their hands and knees in a public toilet annoying innocent men who just want to pee in peace. It's part of the pathology of being a conservative.

Arizona Republican Jim Kolbe Is Getting Gay-Married Today

Kolbe and Foley

Former eleven-term Congressman Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) has been "living in sin" with his Panamanian lover, Hector Alfonso, for eight years. Today they will legally wed at the Cosmos Club in DC. (It's still illegal for same sex couples to marry in Arizona, although recent polling shows 55% of Arizonans support marriage equality.) Kolbe is the first gay congressman who voted for DOMA in 1996 to get married. Back then, Kolbe was a closeted mainstream conservative-- one of many in the House Republican caucus who, for one reason or another-- felt they had to vote against the interests of the LGBT community. The only "out" Republican-- and the only Republican-- to oppose DOMA was Steve Gunderson (R-MN), who had been publicly outed by raging homophobe "B-1 Bob" Dornan on the floor of the House, in an attempt to humiliate him. And the Republicans weren't the only bigots that day. Nancy Pelosi only managed to muster 66 Democrats to oppose DOMA.

Among the Republican closet cases voting for Bob Barr's so-called Defense of Marriage Act were then-closeted Reps. David Dreier (R-CA), Mark Foley (R-FL), Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Dave Camp (R-MI), Jim McCrery (R-LA), Phil English (R-PA), Denny Hastert (R-IL), and Bill Paxon (R-NY). This week, Kolbe told the Washington Blade "Two decades ago, I could not have imagined such an event as this would be possible. A decade ago I could not imagine that I would find someone I could be so compatible with that I would want to spend the rest of my life with that person. So, this is a very joyous day for both of us." Ironically, even though they’ll be legally married, Kolbe will still be unable to sponsor his spouse for residency in the United States because of the DOMA legislation he helped pass.

Yesterday I had a pleasant talk with one of those former closet cases/former congressmen, Mark Foley. Of course, he was genuinely happy for his old friend Kolbe. "Any time people find love," he told me, "they need to celebrate it. And he's not only celebrating it, he's memorializing it with this ceremony." The two used to travel together frequently but have lost touch in recent years. They were members of the moderate Republican Ripon Society and of the House Republicans' Tuesday Group. "We were called the Tuesday Group but we met on Wednesdays. People used to ask if we were hiding from our friends, the rednecks," laughed Foley who regrets that so many of his colleagues from the Tuesday Group have been forced to turn sharply right more recently, for the sake of political expediency (or survival). There were around 40 members then, which, according to the New Republic "provided a private forum for the party’s more moderate members, and, in its own quiet way, it pushed back against the Republican leadership, preventing it from running off increasingly radical rails... While the Tuesday Group occasionally pushed moderate legislation, members freely admit that its greatest impact was behind the scenes. Tuesday’s members worked to squash measures that would inevitably divide the party-- like strict restrictions on abortion and deep cuts to spending on scientific research or education-- 'bills that would never have had any workability and would just further drive the wedge between us,'" explained Nancy Johnson, then a moderate Republican from Connecticut. Foley remembers that he and Kolbe were members, as were Fred Upton, Mike Castle, Sue Kelly, Mark Kirk, Charlie Bass...

Just before the vote for DOMA on July 12, 1996, there was a Democratic Motion to Recommit, an attempt to ameliorate the negative aspects of the bill. It failed 164-249 but most Democrats (134) voted for it, as did 30 Republicans, mostly Tuesday Group members. The only Republican closet cases who voted for DOMA but also took the brave stand of crossing the aisle to vote with the Democrats on the Motion to Recommit were Kolbe and Foley-- NOT Dreier, Rohrabacher, Camp, McCrery, English, Hastert or Paxon, each of whom voted NO. Foley's proud he voted for the Motion but he knows he should have opposed DOMA. "It was always," he told me, " a vote I wish I could have undone... It's a vote I've always regretted." He then reminded me that both he and Kolbe also voted in favor of domestic partnerships for DC and that "very clearly, Hillary Clinton has just evolved on this topic last week."

Kolbe's come a long way. Mazel tov! Watch his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last month:

Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) Who Once Voted For DOMA Is Getting Married To A Man Next Month

Here's one homophobic asshole whose mind Kolbe won't be able to change anytime soon

I had already ended my time as the pop music critic for The Advocate in 1996 when Arizona Republican Congressman Jim Kolbe came out as gay. But I still recall the stir around the magazine because they had decided to publicly "out" Kolbe after he voted for DOMA, which was meant to prevent gay couples from marrying. Since almost everyone in Washington already knew Kolbe was gay, the homophobic vote seemed especially hypocritical. Kolbe decided to beat The Advocate to the punch by calling a press conference and announcing he was officially out of the closet.

Within days of the vote on the Defense of Marriage Act, they began a blistering campaign on the Internet to compel Mr. Kolbe to disclose that he himself was gay, a practice known as outing.

The campaign reached its peak last week with a full-page ad in the Washington Blade, a newspaper that reaches a nationwide gay audience, calling on "all closeted gay and lesbian members of Congress" to "end your silence and defend your community."

On Thursday night, Mr. Kolbe spoke.

He also spoke yesterday-- at the Senate Judiciary Committee, this time urging senators to include gay couples in the immigration bill they're working on. He and his partner, Hector Alfonso, are getting married in May.

Kolbe, a Republican who represented the Tucson area in Congress for 11 terms, has a partner from Panama who had to leave the United States after his work visa expired, bringing his teaching career in this country to an abrupt halt. Under current law, Kolbe could not sponsor his partner for a family reunification visa.

Kolbe's partner was able to return to the United States from Panama a year later after obtaining an investment visa, which allows immigrants who invest in new U.S. businesses to live here. But Kolbe said the process was long and expensive, costing more than many people can afford to spend.

"Our laws should not separate American citizens from their loved ones for such unacceptably long periods of time," Kolbe told the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is holding a series of hearings on an 844-page immigration reform bill drawn up by a bipartisan group of eight senators. Among the bill's authors are Arizona Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake.

The committee chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has introduced separate legislation, the "Uniting American Families Act," that would allow gay Americans to sponsor their foreign-born partners to come to the United States using family reunification visas. That controversial provision is not part of the sweeping reform bill, although gay rights' advocates are urging that it be included.

"While the bill you are considering is an excellent starting point for reform, I submit to you that it is still incomplete," Kolbe told committee members. "Families like mine are left behind as part of this proposal. Equally important, U.S. businesses and our economy suffer because of the omission of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families from the bill introduced last week."

Kolbe's come a long way since voting for DOMA, as has public opinion (not to mention France and Delaware, each of which legalized marriage equality earlier today)... but his party hasn't. The vast majority of Republicans in Congress are still hateful and virulent homophones-- or at least pretending to be-- and oppose marriage equality and immigration equality. Let's see if he can convince any of the Republican closet cases Congress-- like Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Aaron Schock (R-IL), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Dave Camp (R-MI), etc.-- to support the LGBT community even before being officially outed.

ANOTHER HOMOPHOBIC REPUBLICAN POLITICIAN CAUGHT WITH THE MEAT IN HIS MOUTH-- MEET ALABAMA ATTORNEY GENERAL TROY KING

No more closet for you, Mister

Tucson Republican congressman Jim Kolbe wasn't exactly open about his homosexuality, but he wasn't all that uptight about it either. Nor did he come off as a morbid and deranged self-loathing closet queen, like most heavily closeted Republicans in Washington do. When the Advocate told him they were going to spill the beans, soon after a homophobic vote on DoMA, he simply called a press conference and announced that he's gay and went back to work. He was re-elected 4 more times, although once it became clear he was covering up for serial gay rapist Mark Foley and also taking young congressional pages on "camping trips," he bade his congressional career a find adieu and decamped for Tucson where he is best known for chasing young Hispanic boys.

He was never a Larry Craig, Lindsey Graham or Mark Foley, putting excessive energy into pretending to be straight. And he was always a lot less uptight than David Dreier but there is always an air of tragedy around these old right-wing politicians who try denying what everyone knows. Many-- like Grahams and Craig's more than most-- go out of their way to "prove" they're straightness by obsessive homophobia. Sometimes it just seems like a major Republican Party affliction.

Yesterday Wonkette broke the story of another vicious Republican sociopath. Actually the story has been circulating in Montgomery for weeks but you know how polite everyone is down there. Troy King, unless he's already resigned, is the Attorney General of the great state of Alabama. The 40 year old Baptist, with 3 children, was caught in bed with a young man by his wife-- in their marital bed. He hasn't made much of a name for himself in Alabama politics-- except as a crazed homophobe obsessed with sex and vice. Now Republicans are worried that the mushrooming scandal will spill over into 3 hot congressional races where GOP candidates could suffer from what seems like a Republican hypocrisy epidemic.

During the 2005 legislative session, King made headlines by wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet of the kind used by parolees and others under judicial monitoring. King promised to wear the bracelet until the legislature passed tougher monitoring laws for parolees and convicted sex offenders, and removed it when such laws were passed... King was also known for his fight against the sex toy shops in Montgomery.

King has made opposition to gambling a central theme of his administration. In 2006, King asked the United States Department of the Interior to deny an application by the Poarch Creek Band of Indians to expand their gaming operations in Alabama. King later filed a lawsuit against the Department to keep it from pressuring Alabama to permit video gaming on Alabama reservations.

King's obsession with homosexuality can be traced back to his college days when he was writing disturbingly hysterical anti-gay articles for the college paper, the Crimson & White. His TV campaign ad was a doozy of homophobic hysteria too.

After she caught him in the act, his wife kicked him out of the house and she's divorcing him. He's the focus of a lot of negativity because of his hypocritical, smug nature.

The rumor at the time was that Troy's mystery man was his old college roommate who he gave a position to when he took over the AG office in 2004. Supposedly when Troy was out of town so was lover boy.

The story then became that the mystery man was a young man who had just graduated from Troy University and was the Homecoming King (no pun intended) (God that gets confusing...Troy King with the homecoming king who graduated from Troy) and that was who the wife walked in on. Then a few weeks later Troy and his boy toy from Troy were spotted at the YMCA (not kidding) engaging in....ummmm....inappropriate activities. Yeah...at the YMCA...made famous by the Village People. Apparently Troy has no inkling of what it means to be 'discreet'.

There's even a song for poor Troy already:



Maybe Alabama should think about replacing South Carolina as a gay tourist destination now that South Carolina has nixed an ad saying "South Carolina is so gay," which may have been embarrassing Lindsey Graham. And meanwhile, today Bush lost a case in the Federal District Court of Appeals that may lead to the public finding out who in the White House was hiring Republican male prostitute Guckert/Gannon for sleep overs in that building.

UPDATE... AND BY THE WAY, NOT EVERY REPUBLICAN PERVERT IS GAY

Last May I told you about a Republican maniac, Joe McDade, who used to represent part of Monroe County, PA, where I lived. More recently, the extremely corrupt-- like in defense contractor corrupt-- McDade, a lobbyist since retiring from Congress in disgrace in 1999, was arrested for chasing women around a Florida resort and masturbating in public. Yesterday a Florida judge declared him incomptent to stand trial. I wonder if that's how the Bush crew will get off if their day ever comes.


SATURDAY UPDATE: McCAIN MAKES TROY KING AN UNPERSON

King still hasn't resigned or blamed his gay lifetstyle on alcohol or Bill Clinton but McCain apparently knows something is coming down. 1984-style he deleted the page on his website dedicated to the one he used to love, the chairman of John McCain’s Alabama Leadership Team. There is no announcement if King is still allowed to be chairman of the Alabama McCain team or if either gross hypocrisy and what he does in the privacy of his own bedroom disqualifies him.

SOMETIMES HOMOPHOBIA WILL SNEAK UP AND BITE YOU RIGHT IN THE ASS-- GIFFORDS vs BEE (AZ-08)

A few days ago I spoke to a really nice woman running for Congress ins a nearly hopelessly Republican district. The incumbent is so extreme and so far, far, far to the right that she may actually have a chance to win... if the tsunami is big enough. As much as I enjoyed her easy laugh and sweet personality, when I started asking her the standard Blue America questions, it only took a couple for me to realize... well, she may be a nice Democrat but a fearless progressive? Not a chance. In fact she actually told me she couldn't support progressive principles, even in a general way, because she is "afraid of the right." The conversation came to a grinding halt. I wished her luck; she would be doing the nation a great service if she ended the political career of the nut who represents her district now.

Skip a few states west. I wouldn't called Arizona freshman Gabby Giffords horrible but her voting record is far-- very far-- from Blue America standards. Since getting in Congress in 2006 she's been voting from a defensive fear-driven perspective. Look at the ProgressivePunch Chips Are Down scale. Gabby is among the 20 Democrats who vote with the Republicans more than with the Democrats on tough substantive matters. She isn't quote as bad as John barrow or Jim Marshall or Nick Lampson but she's in the small dismal ballpark as nearly Melissa Bean, Chris Carney, Heath Shuler and Tim Mahoney. Predictably, she was one of the minority of Democrats who joined the rubber stamp Republicans to keep the war in Iraq going and also voted to allow Bush to wiretap Americans without a court warrant and to give criminal Telecom companies retroactive immunity from Justice. So... don't look for Gabby Giffords on the Blue America endorsement list any time soon. Our idea of a good Arizona congressman would be Raul Grijalva or Howard Shanker or Bob Lord, not Gabby Giffords or John Shadegg or Trent Franks. That said...

I was catching up with Arizona politics yesterday at my favorite blog from that state, Rum, Romanism and Rebellion when I noticed that Giffords' Republican challenger had just hit a major speed bump on the road to his defeat in November. Arizona Senate president Tim Bee, an eager Bush clone, has been pushing a divisive anti-gay constitutional amendment in Arizona-- one that was already defeated once, but that he feels will help bring out reactionaries to vote for McCain and himself in November. (And as bad as Giffords' voting record has been, she's not an animal. She did vote in favor of the Hate Crimes Bill and even if she's a fear-driven wishy-washy non-leader without many principles, she is a decent person with decent instincts; she ought to follow them more frequently.)

Anyway, last week the much-liked Republican former congressman from Tucson, the one who Giffords replaced, just withdrew his support from Tim Bee. Jim Kolbe, who admitted being gay while in the House and who continued being re-elected several times, didn't appreciate Bee's craven politicization of gay people for the sake of partisan politics. Many people think that his refusal to support another homophobic extremist in 2006, Randy Graf, is what allowed Giffords to be elected-- quite handily-- in the first place. Bee claims Kolbe's withdrawal of his endorsement won't hurt him; he's incorrect. It marks him as an extremist and a radical partisan and will solidify Giffords' claim to be the moderate in a moderate district. Alas, I doubt it will move her away from her fearful outlook on politics.