Chalk Up Hastert's Life Of Raping Underage Boys To One Thing: Conservative Values

Conservative politicians want to give your underage sons some thrills

Denny Hastert didn't just molest 4 boys when he was a wrestling coach. Nor did he just molest 5 boys. While he presided over a viciously homophobic congressional Republican Party, he was still carrying on an active-- albeit closeted-- gay sex life. He'd hire a gay hooker in the evening and come into Congress the next morning and help pass a law to make life more difficult for LGBT families. It wasn't just a Denny Hastert problem; it wasn't even just a Republican Party problem. It's a fatal flaw in the American conservative movement: a tolerance for bigotry and hatred and a willingness to cater to the lowest instincts of the most unevolved and primitive among us to get support for the kind of economic inequality that drastically elevates the billionaires and millionaires against the rest of society. It was an economically and socially rewarding position for politicians like Hastert.

DWT reported about Hastert's homosexuality and hypocrisy for over a decade. The Establishment media knew for all that time and chose not to report it, just as they chose to not report years and years and years of Mark Foley raping underage boys while he was a Florida congressman voting against the legitimate aspirations of gays and lesbians looking for equality under the law. People were outraged that I dared write dozens of posts about Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Dreier, Lindsay Graham, Mitch McConnell, Patrick McHenry and Hastert "without proof," while they continued voting for bigotry and continued having sex with boys and men. I pitied those critics and, in part blamed them for the continuation of outrages against children they refused to protect.

And this is an old story in RepublicanWorld. Former Maryland congressman and right-wing firebrand, Republican Bob Bauman, wrote an autobiography in 1986, The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative, that warned future Republicans against the hypocrisy of the closet. His warnings have gone unheeded by two generations of conservative closet cases in Congress and government. Remember, Bauman wasn't just some run of the mill Republican. He was one of the founders of both the Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union and served as chairman of each. He was a leader of anti-gay hysteria among Republicans in Congress, while he was sneaking around-- a married man-- having sex with underage boys. Eventually he was arrested with a 16 year old, shunned by his colleagues, rejected by his constituents, divorced by his wife... his life a shambles.

Six years ago, in California, state Senator Roy Ashbury-- the penultimate leader of the anti-gay forces in the state legislature-- was pulled over, drunk, with a young male prostitute he had picked up in a bar, his carefully crafted "family values" political and personal life forever shattered. Instead of hiding under a rock like most outed GOP politicians, Ashburn decided to come clean. This is from an interview in the L.A. Times 3 months after his arrest. It's an indictment of hypocrisy and bigotry and the very conservative "value" that insists gays stay in the closet, a value that inevitably leads to the tragedies of congressmen like Denny Hastert, Aaron Schock (R-IL), Mark Foley (R-FL), Ed Schrock (R-VA), Jon Hinson (R-MS) Larry Craig (R-ID)...

For decades you worked so hard to keep your sexual orientation under wraps. This must have been a torment, but in another sense, was there an element of relief?

I'm sensing relief now. I had not consciously decided to come out, but there's no doubt looking back that I had become increasingly bold about attending gay events, like pride festivals, and going to dance clubs and bars. Last year I attended Las Vegas Pride and San Diego Pride.

Were you looking over your shoulder?

A little more in San Diego than Las Vegas.

...At some point, you must have realized a public career was incompatible with being open about your sexual preferences.

Something happened that I guess caused me to realize that. When I was in sixth grade, the police had a raid in the sand dunes [near San Luis Obispo] and a bunch of gay men were arrested, probably charged with indecent activity. That sticks in my mind-- the publicity and the shame around it. One of my teachers was one of the people. The talk among the kids, the talk among the adults, the talk in the community, the press-- at that time the choice was pretty clear: If you were gay and open, it was a life of shame, ridicule, innuendo about molesting and perversion. It was a dark life. Given that choice of whether you come out or whether you're in secret, I mean, there really wasn't a choice.

You worked for members of Congress, then were elected to public office yourself from Kern County. Were your sexual preferences in the back of your mind, or did you just go about your business?

The answer is both yes and no. I was married and had children. And I had a career and a passion. I also had a huge secret. But given my circumstances and my responsibilities, it wasn't an overwhelming issue for me. The desires were always there, but my focus was primarily on-- well, pretty selfishly-- on me and my career and my family.

Barry Goldwater had a gay grandson and didn't think government had any business in anybody's bedroom. But the recent brand of Republicanism has championed anti-gay issues.

I truly believe the conservative philosophy as embraced by Goldwater: that the government has no role in the private lives of the citizens. In the 1980s, there was a coming together of the religious right and the Goldwater right, sort of a marriage of convenience. It propelled Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Reagan never repudiated that but — this is just my view — I don't think he really embraced it either. In no way do I want to put down people of strong religious convictions; I happen to have very strong religious beliefs myself. But it was a merger of those two, and the religious [right's issues] were about same-sex rules, same-sex marriage, abortion, gun rights, these sort of core, litmus-test issues.

Did you feel uneasy with that combination? You did help to organize and speak at a rally in 2005 against a legislative bill sanctioning same-sex marriage.

How I ever got into that is beyond me. I was very uncomfortable with that, and I told one of my confidantes, "I'm never doing that again." It was not what I wanted to do, it wasn't me, but I helped to organize and lent my name.

A lot of people, gay or straight, are probably wondering why you voted even against issues like insurance coverage for same-sex partners.

The best I can do is to say that I was hiding. I was so in terror I could not allow any attention to come my way. So any measure that had to do with the subject of sexual orientation was an automatic "no" vote. I was paralyzed by this fear, and so I voted without even looking at the content. The purpose of government is to protect the rights of people under the law, regardless of our skin color, national origin, our height, our weight, our sexual orientation. This is a nation predicated on the belief that there is no discrimination on those characteristics, and so my vote denied people equal treatment, and I'm truly sorry for that.

When it comes to marriage, I'm getting the feeling that you're mulling over whether government ought to be in the marriage license business at all.

It's a very complicated issue, marriage, but it seems to me that the government's role is to protect a civil contract, whether it's to purchase a home together, enter into whatever financial or legal arrangement, including marriage. The whole issue of marriage as a 5,000-year-old tradition, a religious context, a historical context-- what government's role is, is the sanctification of the legal bond. Then it seems to me a matter for a church or some other societal organization but not for government.

What have you been talking about with the gay groups you've been meeting with?

The same things we're talking about. I don't have an agenda. I don't have a plan. I don't have an expectation. I just want people to know who I am and what's in my heart. I kept that from people. I concealed it from everyone for almost all my life, so I'm [now] privileged to work with people from all aspects of life, including organizations devoted to advancing the rights of gay and lesbian and transgendered individuals.

Recently in the Senate you spoke in favor of a resolution calling on Congress to repeal "don't ask, don't tell.''

For that day I knew I had to say something. I already had prepared what I was going to say about serving in the military, and I actually had it written out because I wanted to be precise. But I had to preface it with something else, to give context to why all this time in elective office and being so deeply hidden, why was I now standing and speaking on this subject matter, and so I did.

...You're divorced, with four daughters and grandchildren. So here's where I ask about your family, and you can tell me to buzz off.

The things we're talking about were my choices. It was my choice to keep it secret; it was my choice to be a gay man and be married and have children. It was my choice to build a life on lies in order to conceal myself. That obviously had a big effect on my marriage and my children in ways that I don't fully comprehend, but it's my responsibility and not something to be talked about in interviews.

Thanks to Pelosi there was no trial and Foley still insists it was just naughty e-mails

Until this weekend, Hastert had been granted unofficial deniability from the justice system. He's myriad legal cases were never specifically about child rape. And Hastert, who paid millions of the dollars he earned as a sleazy lobbyist to cover up his sex crimes, is now insisting he shouldn't go to prison for several reasons, one of which is that he was punished enough when his official Speaker of the House portrait was taken down. Comedian Andy Richter was a student at the high school in Yorkville where Hastert was raping his students and the interview he did with USAToday isn't funny.

Federal prosecutors alleged in a court document filed Friday evening that Hastert abused or had inappropriate contact with at least five minor boys during his time at Yorkville High School, west of Chicago. Hastert taught at the high school for about 16 years before leaving in the early 1980s to launch his political career.

One of the victims, identified in court documents as "Individual D," told prosecutors that Hastert "put a 'Lazyboy'-type chair in direct view of the shower stalls in the locker room where he sat while the boys showered."

Richter, a sidekick on Conan O'Brien's TV show on TBS, said in a series of posts on Twitter that he remembers the chair.

"I went to Yorkville HS '80-'84 & I remember this chair. Purportedly 'to keep boys from fighting,'" Richter posted.

...Hastert, 74, pleaded guilty in October to one count of illegally structuring bank withdrawals. In the new court filing, prosecutors detail how the bank fraud was part of a scheme by the former lawmaker to pay off one of his alleged victims. It also details the other alleged incidents in which Hastert molested or committed sexual acts on boys in his charge.

The statutes of limitation on the sexual misconduct allegations have expired, but prosecutors raised the alleged wrongdoing in their pre-sentencing memo ahead of Hastert's scheduled sentencing later this month.

The former speaker faces up to six months in prison.

He was raping boys as young as 14.

The Hastert Case Isn't Just About Him Raping A Handful Of Underage Boys-- Is It Bigger Than Watergate?

On the day the House was bidding a fond adieu to one corrupt Speaker, the corrupt Republican who played Speaker before Boehner, Denny Hastert, pleaded guilty to one carefully constructed charge of "structuring," evading reporting requirements in connection to a multimillion dollar blackmail scheme. As part of the deal Hastert admitted he knew what he was doing was illegal and said "I didn’t want them to know how I intended to spend the money." The part of the indictment that charged Hastert with lying to the FBI was dropped as part of the plea deal. The sentencing isn't until February 29 but federal prosecutors recommended a teeny-weeny wrist slap-- a fine and between zero and six months in prison.

For several years, we've covered the actual basis of Hastert's dilemma-- his serial rapes of underage males. But there's another aspect of this that been whispered about in Washington also for as many years. Yes, Hastert was being blackmailed by some of the boys-- now grown men-- who he used to rape. But was he also being blackmailed by foreign intelligence agencies? DWT has been writing about it since 2006. Last week, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, writing for the American Conservative brought up Israel and Turkey.

As former House Speaker Dennis Hastert prepares to plead guilty in accordance with a deal he has made with federal prosecutors, most media will focus on the crimes the FBI mentioned in his indictment. Since Hastert was charged in May, the public has been shocked to learn that the former high-school wrestling coach allegedly spent large sums trying to cover up past sexual abuse. But one prominent whistleblower has been speaking up about the possible misdeeds of Hastert for years now-- and the way that they may have compromised national security.

Longtime readers of the American Conservative are familiar with the Sibel Edmonds saga. Edmonds, an FBI translator who revealed large-scale corruption throughout the government, has received multiple gag orders under the State Secrets Act. She has nevertheless persevered in spite of concerns that she would be prosecuted and possibly imprisoned. TAC interviewed her for a feature article in 2009, and I also reviewed her claims multiple times over the last few years, including when her book Classified Woman came out in 2012.

Many of Edmonds’s claims involved Turkish and Israeli front groups seeking to influence U.S. policy while sometimes also engaging in illegal activity. The scope of the corruption allegedly involved bribery of senior government officials and congressmen, arranging for export licenses to countries that were embargoed, and the exposure of classified information. Edmonds has been questioned by a congressional committee, by individual congressmen and staffers, as well as by the FBI inspector general, and her information was found to be “credible,” “serious,” and “warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review.” She also provided interviews for “60 Minutes” and Vanity Fair, both of which were able to confirm key elements of her story.



...In the course of her various media appearances, Edmonds provided significant information on Congressman Hastert, who was under FBI investigation while he was speaker of the House, a role he assumed in 1999 and held for eight years. In her TAC interview, Edmonds related that “In early 1997, because of the information that the FBI was getting on the Turkish diplomatic community, the Justice Department had already started to investigate several Republican congressmen. The number-one congressman involved with the Turkish community, both in terms of providing information and doing favors, was Bob Livingston. Number-two after him was Dan Burton, and then he became number-one until Hastert became the speaker of the House. Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, was briefed on the investigations, and since they were Republicans, she authorized that they be continued… In 1999, [FBI agents in the Chicago field office] wiretapped the congressmen directly.”

In a deposition given in August 2009, Edmonds identified Hastert as “one of the primary U.S. persons involved in operations and activities that are not legal, and they’re not for the interest of the United States but for the interest of foreign governments and foreign entities.” She detailed what she believed to be Hastert’s wrongdoing: “This information has been public. The concerns, again would be several categories. The acceptance of large sums of bribery in forms of cash or laundered cash and laundering is to make it look legal for his campaigns, and also for his personal use, in order to do certain favors and call certain-- call for certain actions, make certain things happen for foreign entities and foreign governments’ interests, Turkish government’s interest and Turkish business entities’ interests.”

When asked in the deposition, “Did you have reason to believe that Mr. Hastert, for example, killed one of the Armenian genocide resolutions in exchange for money from these Turkish organizations?” she responded, “Yes, I do… Correct… and not only taking money, but other activities, too, including being blackmailed for various reasons.” At the time of the deposition Hastert had left Congress and was working for the Washington lobbying firm Dickstein Shapiro as a registered lobbyist for Turkey, reportedly earning millions of dollars in commissions.

Edmonds described her work on Turkish-language transcripts of investigations relating to Hastert covering the period 1996 until January 2003, elaborating on the possibility of blackmail. She recalled that Hastert “used the townhouse [in Chicago] that was not his residence for certain not very morally accepted activities. Now, whether that was being used as blackmail I don’t know, but the fact that foreign entities [Turkey and Israel] knew about this, in fact, they sometimes participated in some of those not maybe morally well activities in that particular townhouse that was supposed to be an office, not a house, residence at certain hours, certain days, evenings of the week. So I can’t say if that was used as blackmail or not, but certain activities they would share. They were known.”

In testimony before congressional staffers and committees, Edmonds has reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast of their secret relationship with a “Hastert.” They discussed giving him tens of thousands of dollars in clandestine payments in exchange for political favors and information. Many of the transcripts involved a suspect at the city’s Turkish Consulate, as well as several members of the American-Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, business entities that some FBI agents believed served as occasional covers for organized crime. Some calls appeared to be referring to drug shipments and other possible crimes.



...Fast forward to the Dennis Hastert case making the rounds today, which focuses on relatively minor federal banking laws and ignores the other evidence that has been collected by the FBI on Hastert for the past 20 years. One has to ask, “Why Hastert and why now?”, but there does not seem to be a simple answer. It might be little more than the result of frustrated FBI investigators demanding that some action be taken.

Edmonds, for her part, has described how the Hastert case has been ignored by the media and has predicted that it would eventually be made to go away by the government. Indeed, legal action following up on the original indictment has been delayed through postponement after postponement and more recently sidetracked into a plea bargain that will allow the former congressman to plead guilty to reduced charges while at the same time sealing forever the unsavory details linked to his being blackmailed.

Hastert and his lawyers understand that they are well placed to effectively threaten the government prosecutors because Hastert knows where a lot of bodies are buried, metaphorically speaking. By demanding that the investigative files on him-- which could include reports of illegal activity by a broad range of former officials-- be released as part of his defense, he can force the government to drop or mitigate the charges against him. It is a ploy similar to that used by alleged AIPAC spies Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman in 2009, which led to the presiding judge’s dismissal of the case.

Glenn Greenwald writes that “Those with political and financial clout are routinely allowed to break the law with no legal repercussions whatsoever. Often they need not even exploit their access to superior lawyers because they don’t see the inside of a courtroom in the first place-- not even when they get caught in the most egregious criminality.” There is a particular irony here: criminals in high office may avoid punishment through their willingness to implicate their peers who are engaged in much the same practices, in effect blackmailing the government to leave them alone or face the consequences. That is what the Dennis Hastert story appears to be all about.

Oh, and you might want to listen to this report too if this case interests you and you think we should have less corrupt people in government. If not, nevermind.

UPDATE: Irony?

On the same day that Hastert plead guilty, the House Republicans seem to have ended the odious Hastert Rule which dictated that only legislation that had at least 50% of Republicans backing it could come to the floor for a vote. Yesterday, within hours of Hastert's judicial disgrace, Patrick Meehan (R-PA) brought up the compromise Budget-- with co-sponsors Tom Reed (R-NY) and Peter Roskam (R-IL)-- and it passed with just 79 Republican votes. 167 GOP nihilists and extremists voted NO. The Southern Republicans were foiled when every single Democrat-- 187-- joined with the 79 Republicans to pass the budget and prevent another of the government shutdowns that Ted Cruz and the crazed and venal anti-USA faction love so much.

The Latest Denny Hastert Cover-Up-- And How That Undermines Law And Order

I guess I sound especially bloodthirsty the way I always advocate ultra-harsh sentences for politicians caught breaking the law. There's a reason for that, of course. Someone given a position of trust who abuses it should, of course, be held to a high standard. But there's more. History shows that if a politician gets away from criminal behavior, it encourages other politicians to give it a try. Saying, "well he served the community (or his state or country) so well, we should go easy on him," is the opposite of what we should be doing as a society. This special treatment for-- and sympathy-- for politicians who get caught in criminality is self-defeating for society. They don't deserve special consideration, unless special consideration means much harsher punishment.

And that brings us to former House Speaker, Denny Hastert, a corrupt Republican pile of crap who has a long history of anti-social behavior, not just of molesting boys but also of using his public office to line his own pockets. In 2006, when Rolling Stone named the 10 worst members of the worst Congress ever, Hastert was numero uno. Almost a decade ago, Tim Dickinson's blurb-- The Highway Robber: Dennis Hastert (R-Ill)-- summarizes the Culture of Corruption that sickens Americans about their political elites:

Hastert could well be the weakest House speaker in history. Tapped by Tom DeLay to serve as the mild-mannered frontman for the GOP leadership, the former wrestling coach ceded most of his power to the now-disgraced majority leader, allowing Republicans to treat the Capitol as their private piggy bank. Last year, Hastert got in on the action himself, secretly inserting $207 million into the budget for the "Prairie Parkway"-- a highway that will speed development of 210 acres he owns in Illinois. Before the year was out, Hastert sold part of his land-- soon to be the site of a sprawling subdivision-- for a profit of $2 million.

"Here's a guy who saw a chance to profit from his official acts and took it," says Bill Allison, who uncovered the late-night earmark as a senior analyst for the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "Most of us aren't speaker of the House, and most of us don't have a $200 million earmark running through our back yard. Hastert does, and he made a fortune from it."

The speaker at least functions as a bipartisan defender of congressional corruption. In February 2005, he purged the chairman of the House Ethics Committee for daring to admonish DeLay. And after Rep. William Jefferson's offices were raided by the FBI last spring, it was Hastert who lodged the strongest protest on the Louisiana Democrat's behalf.

Hastert is especially good at turning a blind eye to scandal: An aide says the speaker's office knew about Rep. Mark Foley's penchant for page boys three years ago, yet Hastert took no action to protect minors working for Congress.

In another secret budget deal, Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist joined forces last December to give the pharmaceutical industry a Christmas gift worth billions. After the "final" version of the defense budget emerged from conference, the duo added a provision that gives drug makers immunity from liability lawsuits-- shielding them from claims that their mercury-laden vaccines sparked the current autism epidemic.

Back in October 2006, we mentioned that heading into the midterm elections, No one is talking about Hastert's improper real estate deals now. And no one, except his Democratic opponent John Laesch, is mentioning much about the hundreds of thousands of dollars in legalized bribes he accepted to push a Big Business agenda that has been devastating to his middle class constituents, bringing them-- and us-- higher gas prices, higher drug prices, a devastated educational system, endless wars, polluted water and air... the whole panoply of what the Bush Regime is all about. Instead, people are asking why Hastert conspired to cover up Foley's predatory behavior towards young male pages for whose safety he was ultimately responsible.

Depending on which poll you look at, between 43 and 68% of Americans think Hastert should resign from Congress-- not just from the Speakership, from Congress! No matter what happens at the polls nationally in 4 weeks, Hastert will not be Speaker in January. His constituents in IL-14 should take that into consideration when they vote. Republican candidates certainly have.

Today the Prince of Darkness writes in his Chicago Sun-Times column that the Republican Party is in a bit of a pickle this week because of Hastert. The Party which is never embarrassed about anything, is embarrassed about what to do about the one-eyed elephant on the rocking chair. Or, as Novak puts it: "The survival of J. Dennis Hastert as speaker of the House of Representatives will produce an uncomfortable scene Thursday at the Hilton Chicago. President Bush is the principal attraction at a reception to fund congressional candidates in two suburban Chicago districts-- once thought safely Republican but where Democrats now lead. In the wake of the Mark Foley scandal, Hastert's presence at the reception will be an embarrassing distraction. 'We look on this as a Bush event, not a Hastert event,' an aide to one of the Republican candidates told this column. But the invitation to the $1,000-a-ticket Chicago fund-raiser lists Hastert, in large type, as its principal host. The speaker seems certain, unwittingly, to take attention away from the congressional candidates. As the most prominent Republican officeholder in Illinois, Hastert could not be removed from this event, as he has been from five congressional campaigns as of this writing."

A few weeks later, the House Republicans lost 30 seats and Hastert was forced to hand over the Speaker's gavel to Nancy Pelosi. There had been a swing of 5.5% of voters towards the Democrats in this midterm. Democrats picked up 2 seats in Arizona, one in California (where powerful Hastert ally Richard Pombo was finally dislodged), one in Colorado, two in Connecticut-- turning the state entirely blue-- two in Florida, three in Indiana, where right-wing loons Chris Chocola, John Hostettler and Mike Sodrel were all defeated, two in Iowa, one in Kansas, one in Kentucky, one in Minnesota, both New Hampshire's seats, three in New York, one in North Carolina, one in Ohio (where corrupt Republican Bob Ney was headed off to prison), four in Pennsylvania, one (DeLay's seat) in Texas, and one in Wisconsin. Soon after, Hastert announced he would be retiring from Congress.

But that didn't end the saga of Planet Denny Hastert. This week he agreed to a plea bargain that protects him from serious child rape charges while he only admits that he paid $3.5 million in hush money. He'll plead guilt October 28.

The plea negotiations, first revealed in a hearing late last month, mean many of the details surrounding Hastert's prosecution might never be publicly aired, including the identity of Individual A, the mysterious figure who prosecutors say took cash from Hastert to keep quiet about a dark history with him.

...Hastert, 73, pleaded not guilty in June to one count each of evading currency reporting requirements and lying to the FBI and remains free on his own recognizance. He did not attend Thursday's brief hearing.

Jeffrey Cramer, a former federal prosecutor, told the Tribune on Thursday that it was possible both sides have agreed to a specific prison sentence for Hastert as part of the plea deal. Hastert's attorneys could also reserve the right to seek probation for him.

Cramer also raised the possibility that the defense could seek to waive a sentencing hearing entirely to keep the salacious details underlying the charges from becoming public. That would be a highly unusual move, though, especially for such a high-profile case, and would require the approval of the judge.

"Dennis Hastert wants to avoid a sentencing hearing probably more than any other public official in history," said Cramer, who heads the Chicago security firm Kroll. "Normally a public figure wants to present all the good things he's done in his life. But that opens the door for prosecutors to bring in their own evidence."

The indictment unsealed in late May alleges that Hastert agreed to make $3.5 million in hush money payments to Individual A to cover up wrongdoing from Hastert's time as a high school teacher and wrestling coach in Yorkville. According to the charges, Hastert lied about the reasons he withdrew $952,000 in cash over the previous 2 1/2 years when the FBI questioned him in December.

Though the indictment only hints at the alleged wrongdoing, federal law enforcement sources have told the Tribune that Hastert was paying to cover up sexual abuse of a Yorkville High School student years ago. The FBI also interviewed a second person who raised similar allegations against Hastert, sources said.

Cramer said that prosecutors "are going to be looking for" a prison sentence for Hastert. In exchange, Hastert's attorneys could have negotiated for the plea agreement to leave out the details behind his payments to Individual A, he said.

"It could be pretty vanilla," he said. "The charges allege Mr. Hastert moved money around in structured withdrawals to avoid detection by authorities. There may be nothing in the plea agreement about why he did it. We may never know."

But we do know. Not all the "salacious details" of course, but it was no secret in DC-- although it was back home, of course-- that the anti-gay congressman from northern Illinois was actually gay himself. "Everyone" knew... except Illinois Republican voters back where Hastert had grown up and attended the local evangelical Christian college. Last month Chicago Magazine reported that "the town at the center of the molestation accusations still struggles to understand what may have happened." That would be Yorkville in Kendall County, Illinois (population 16,921-- up from 6,189 at the 2000 census, 1,500 when Hastert was growing up). The city is 96.99% white and the median household income is $60,391, about $7,000 higher than the medium household income for the state. Aside from Hastert, no one notable claims to be from Yorkville but comedian Andy Richter, Conan O'Brien's sidekick.

On May 28, Yorkville and the rest of the world would learn that Hastert, 73, had been indicted on charges of breaking federal banking rules regarding large cash withdrawals and lying to federal agents in order to conceal some unspecified “prior misconduct.” Prosecutors claim that since 2010 Hastert had been paying off someone, identified in court documents only as Individual A, to the tune of $3.5 million to keep quiet about this alleged misconduct.

The next day, various media outlets, citing law enforcement sources, reported that the unnamed recipient of Hastert’s alleged hush money was a former Yorkville High student who claimed that Hastert had sexually molested him decades earlier. A few days later, a Montana woman came forward, accusing Hastert of a years-long sexual relationship with her older brother in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when the boy was the student equipment manager for Yorkville’s wrestling team. (That man, Stephen Reinboldt, can’t be Individual A: Reinboldt died of AIDS in 1995, 15 years before Hastert began his alleged payments.)

Beyond the initial shock and awe (“Hometown Rocked by Scandal,” “Shadow over All-American Town”), virtually nothing was written about Yorkville, where the alleged abuse took place. As the days went by, unanswered questions nagged at me. If Hastert had indeed sexually abused Reinboldt and Individual A when he was a high school coach and teacher, I wondered, could there be more victims? And in a tiny place where everybody knew everybody’s business, how could such behavior have stayed secret for so long?

...On one thing everyone can agree: one can agree: Dennis Hastert was obsessed with wrestling. Even in class, “wrestling was all he ever talked about,” said Jeff Nix, 63, a former Yorkville High wrestler who graduated in 1970. (He currently owns a shop in nearby Plano that digitizes old videotapes.) “When we took history with him, we talked about wrestling. When we took government, we talked about wrestling.”

The coach set out to build not just a winning program but a dominating dynasty, Nix told me. He devoted innumerable hours to his young charges: before class, after class, in the gym. He scheduled tougher competition against bigger schools. He got his student wrestlers terry-cloth robes so they could feel like prizefighters. He took vanloads of boys to wrestling camp in Virginia, where they learned the famous Granby roll, an advanced escape move that was virtually unknown here at the time.

Hastert’s involvement with young people went beyond sports and academics. He also volunteered at the International YMCA and led an Explorer Scout group, chaperoning male students to the Grand Canyon and on diving trips in the Bahamas. And he liked to take kids for rides in his Porsche 911. “Denny was a bachelor at the time,” recalled Nix. (Hastert married Jean Kahl, a Yorkville gym teacher, in 1973, when he was 31.) “And he got a brand-new Porsche every year. A red one, a black one, a blue one. Back then, it was a pretty hot car. All of us liked cars. We thought that was cool.”

Each year, the Yorkville Foxes got better. As they did, the old gymnasium where the high school held its wrestling meets, known as the Pit, began to fill to capacity with, as the yearbook put it, “vivacious crowds.” That was no exaggeration, longtime Yorkville residents told me: The meets were town-wide events. “The days when Denny was here, it was the biggest thing,” said Frank Babich, who was Yorkville High’s principal from 1985 to 2003.

Hastert’s wrestling teams racked up a trophy case’s worth of medals and titles: 14 conference, six regional, and four sectional championships; second- and third-place finishes in 1974, 1977, 1978, and 1979; and, of course, the top prize in 1976. Forty-eight of Hastert’s wrestlers qualified for the state tournament, more than half of them placed, and eight won individual championships. In 2003, Hastert was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

Echoing the dozen or so former Hastert wrestlers who have spoken to reporters, Nix said that he was dumbfounded by the accusations against his old coach. “If it’s true, I don’t have a clue why no one knew,” Nix said. “Back then, if you got a crewcut at the barbershop, everybody knew you got a crewcut before you got to school. There were no secrets anywhere. Maybe we just all had our blinders on. Maybe we had the wool over our eyes.”

From everything I'd heard about the legendary political kingmaker of Kendall County, I figured he would choose a power spot to meet for lunch, some dark-paneled, white-tablecloth restaurant that served thick steaks, where we’d sit in his regular booth and get sucked up to by the old-timey maître d’. But Dallas Ingemunson wanted Buffalo wings. So we met at Wings Etc., a franchise restaurant with loud music and flat-screens galore in a nondescript strip mall a couple of doors down from a Dollar General...[T]he quintessential big fish in a small pond, for more than three decades, he made or broke local political careers-- most famously, Hastert’s.

Over those wings, Ingemunson recalled the first time he met Hastert: “He came to me in my state’s attorney’s office one day and said, ‘I’m gonna run for the statehouse, and as a matter of courtesy, I’m telling you.’” Ingemunson giggled in a high-pitched titter that belied his age. “He wasn’t asking.”

Hastert lost that race, a primary campaign in 1980. But Ingemunson came away impressed by his work ethic, his moxie, and his seemingly genuine desire to help people. “Some people want to get into the political business and I question why they’re doing it. I never questioned Denny’s reasons. Whether it be in sports or politics, or whatever else, he’s always wanted to help people.”

Ingemunson described how Hastert was able to rise from wrestling coach to the heights of power in Washington. Thanks to Ingemunson’s maneuvering, when an incumbent died unexpectedly not long before the 1981 election, Republican Party leaders put Hastert on the ticket for the Illinois House. Several years later, after another congressional incumbent had to withdraw because of poor health, Ingemunson again helped slate Hastert. Both times the candidate ran in considerably shortened campaigns, avoiding public primary contests altogether. In doing so, he circumvented much of the intense scrutiny that candidates typically face.

Hastert’s eventual ascension to the speakership was practically accidental. His fellow Republicans hastily drafted him into the role during a media frenzy that focused on the extramarital misdeeds of his two predecessors, Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston. (Hastert was viewed as the safe, no-skeletons-in-the-closet choice.) In Hastert’s 2004 memoir, his longtime chief of staff half jokingly summed up his boss’s charmed path to the speaker’s chair: “Illness, illness, scandal, and dumb luck.”

But his rise wasn’t all happenstance. Hastert also appeared to have in spades two qualities that the best politicians possess: relatability and trustworthiness. It’s nearly impossible to find a profile of or anecdote about the man in which he isn’t hailed as a “straight shooter” or a “regular guy.” Plain of appearance (“He looks like an unmade bed,” a Democratic pol once described him) and of speech (“He speaks in a sticky downstate-Illinois monotone,” the author Jonathan Franzen observed in a 2003 New Yorker profile), Denny epitomized the ordinariness of his hometown. As a Yorkville resident told the Sun-Times the day after Hastert was named speaker in 1998: “He was the kind of guy you see at Pizza Hut.”

Once in office, Hastert kept a low profile. Friends say that he never sought out the political limelight, which he was by nature ill suited for anyway. Neither did his wife. Jean shunned the campaign trail and the political social circuit, staying in Yorkville (Hastert shared an apartment in D.C. with Scott Palmer, his chief of staff) and keeping her gym teacher job as she raised their two sons. (Josh, 40, works as a lobbyist in D.C., and Ethan, 37, is a lawyer and a partner at Mayer Brown in Chicago.) “I think people respected that Denny never got caught up in the celebrity Washington power structure,” said Ray LaHood, the former Illinois congressman and U.S. secretary of transportation and a longtime friend of Hastert’s. “He never forgot where he came from.”

It endeared Hastert to the town that even as he became a figure in American history books, famous around the world, he never acted like he was bigger than Yorkville. “Not a lot of people have come out of here and been successful and stayed,” another local Republican insider told me. “To say he was the patron saint of the town is no exaggeration at all.”

Hastert’s knack for getting along with people-- he had lots of political allies-- also kept him from being a target of those looking to dredge up personal dirt. After that one close first race for Congress, he cruised to reelection every two years, facing little to no scrutiny and typically winning 2 to 1, sometimes 3 to 1, over the Democratic sacrificial lambs.

Another reason constituents loved Hastert: He consistently handed out more pork than a swine barn holds at a county fair. He funneled hundreds of millions of federal dollars toward transit and infrastructure projects in Kendall County and the rest of his district, for example, including the ultimately scrapped Prairie Parkway, which would have connected Interstates 80 and 88 and for which Hastert earmarked $207 million. Once he even slipped $250,000 for the Yorkville candy company Amurol Confections, a subsidiary of the chewing gum giant Wrigley (now part of Mars), into the federal defense budget. (The funds were to study a caffeinated gum; Hastert claimed the project would create 400 jobs.) Due in part to such largess, Kendall was the fastest-growing county in the nation-- you read that right-- from 2000 to 2010, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Hastert managed to shrug off controversies that could have torpedoed other politicians’ careers, from the House check-cashing scandal in 1992 to various dustups involving his mentor in the House, Texas firebrand Tom DeLay. Consider the 2006 revelation by a nonpartisan D.C. watchdog group, the Sunlight Foundation, that Hastert, Ingemunson, and their old Yorkville friend Thomas Klatt had amassed 130-plus acres of farmland near the proposed route of the Prairie Parkway. The trio quickly flipped the land, and Hastert raked in a cool $2 million profit. Critics assailed the “Hastert Highway” deal, likening it to insider trading. (“Highway Robbery,” Salon harrumphed.) But the scandal barely registered on Yorkville’s public outrage meter. If it wasn’t illegal, why couldn’t Denny make a buck like anyone else? Besides, for everything he’d done for the town and the rest of the district-- heck, for the whole country-- over the years, he deserved it and then some.

A few months later came Pagegate. As you’ll recall, in September 2006, Republican representative Mark Foley of Florida abruptly resigned after it was revealed that he was sending sexually suggestive emails and instant messages to young male congressional pages. It soon came out, in the press and after a House ethics committee investigation, that at least two of Hastert’s colleagues, including John Boehner, had warned the speaker about Foley’s graphic emails months earlier. Hastert failed to intervene, and Foley’s reckless behavior continued.

After his 2007 retirement, Hastert told the Daily Herald that he and other Republican leaders “did what we could with what we knew.” The ethics committee found “a disconcerting unwillingness to take responsibility for resolving issues regarding Representative Foley’s conduct.” Nevertheless, Yorkville once again gave its hometown hero a pass.

...Robyn Sutcliffe has lived in Yorkville for 21 years. One afternoon I stopped at her ice-cream shop, Foxy’s, a cheerful pastel-painted shack right on the banks of the Fox River, in the heart of downtown. I asked her why so few people around Yorkville seemed to believe the allegations against Hastert. She plugged her ears and chanted, “La, la, la, la, la!

“People just don’t want to believe it,” she finally said. “People don’t want to think badly of someone they love and respect. And Denny’s just so well loved.”

Among some Yorkville residents, however, doubts were beginning to settle in, for two main reasons: the huge sum of money allegedly involved and Hastert’s silence.

In Yorkville-- where the median single-family house sells for about $200,000-- $3.5 million is practically Trump-like. Even some Hastert supporters can’t explain why on earth he would have agreed to pay somebody so much money. “Jeez, it’s staggering,” said his friend Klatt, 76. Wondered Nix, the former wrestler: “What was he paying somebody for? If it wasn’t for [those alleged payments], I wouldn’t believe any of [the sexual allegations].”

Then there were the lengths to which Hastert allegedly went to conceal the payments: accounts at four different banks in the area; 15 withdrawals of $50,000 each between June 2010 and April 2012, which bank officials began asking him about; then, prosecutors say, scores more withdrawals of increments below $10,000 each-- an illegal practice called structuring. “I think it’s obvious the only reason to do that is to hide it from the wife and kids,” said a Republican insider who asked not to be named.

Other than the not-guilty plea entered by his lawyers, Hastert has said nothing publicly about the allegations in the indictment or-- more troubling around here-- about the sexual abuse accusations. Of course, defense lawyers generally think it’s a bad idea for their clients to say much, if anything. (Through his attorney, Thomas Green, Hastert declined my interview request.) But to a lot of folks here, legal rationales don’t mean squat. They see honesty as a more straightforward concept, straight from the lesson of George Washington and the cherry tree: If you did it, own up to it. If you didn’t, speak up. Defend yourself.

...[H]ow could the secret have stayed hidden for so long? I called Carla van Dam, a psychologist in Washington State and a noted expert in child sexual abuse. Instead of answering my question directly, she told me the story of Gary Little.

Little had coerced teenage boys into having sex with him in the 1970s when he was a young lawyer and a teacher at an exclusive prep school. Even as Little went on to become an assistant state’s attorney general and then chief counsel for the Seattle School District, his victims apparently said nothing.

Little was elected to the King County Superior Court in Seattle in 1980. By 1981, a judicial commission had reprimanded the judge-- privately-- for taking children to his home. Little continued seeing youths outside the courthouse, but that same commission did nothing. In 1985, he was transferred to nonjuvenile cases.

One day in August 1988, Little learned that theSeattle Post-Intelligencer would be publishing a story about his secret life the next morning. A few hours later, he shot himself in the head in the hallway outside his chambers.

After Little’s suicide, it became clear just how many people had known his secret. Lawyers who handled juvenile cases were aware of the judge’s sexual predilection for blond, blue-eyed boys. When they had clients who fit that description, they would try to get their cases assigned to him in the hopes of a more favorable ruling. Many in the media, too, had found out about Little’s behavior by the mid-’80s but didn’t go public. One TV reporter even confessed that he had walked in on Little kissing a male student two decades earlier. “Everybody knew,” said van Dam, “but nobody knew.”

Though she stressed that she wasn’t privy to any details of the Hastert case beyond those in news reports, van Dam said that she has studied enough cases over the years to be dubious of the public narrative that has emerged so far. “People know. Especially in small towns, people know who the drunk is on the block. People know. They choose to do nothing because it’s too hard.”

According to Sarah K. Cowan, a sociology professor at New York University who studies secrecy, several forces could have been at work here. Sometimes well-meaning people keep quiet in the belief that they are protecting victims from damaging attention-- especially common in sexual abuse cases. Add a powerful figure into the mix and their hesitation to speak grows, Cowan told me. The likelihood of secrets spreading about people in positions of authority often depends on whether those secrets are likely to be believed. “To accuse a beloved community leader of something salacious and illegal and then not to be believed?” Cowan said. “The accuser would be an outcast.”

I immediately thought of what Burdge recalled her brother saying when she asked him why he hadn’t told anyone about Hastert: In this town, who is ever going to believe me?

DWT has made a habit of exposing homophobic office holders who, like Hastert, are gay themselves and living in the closet. For over a year before Mark Foley (R-FL) was caught and forced to resign, we had done dozens of posts about him and young boys. We were always accused of lying by dim-witted Republicans. Same in cases like Larry Craig (R-ID), Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), David Dreier (R-CA), Jim McCrery (R-LA), Adrian Smith (R-NE), Phil English (R-PA), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Aaron Schock (R-IL)... I remember a Blue Dog on the East Coast who didn't like very much-- horrible voting record and very gay. I couldn't wait for him to take an anti-gay vote so I could expose him. He never did though-- and I never did expose him, not even today.

Former GOP Speaker Denny Hastert Was No Petty Criminal-- He Was A One-Man Major Crime Wave

John Laesch was one of the sharpest, most fearless and most dedicated congressional candidates Blue America ever got behind. John ran against powerful, unassailable Speaker of the House Denny Hastert in 2006 and again in 2008 (although Hastert was forced to resign from Congress as the campaign season started heating up). Noam Chomsky and Studs Terkel joined Blue America in the endorsement. Although Laesch won the primary against an Establishment Democrat (and with 66% of the vote!), Hastert won the general election 114,385 (60%) to 77.065 (40%), the DCCC giving Hastert a free pass and doing all they could to sabotage Laesch.

Leasch's campaign helped shine a powerful spotlight on the massive corruption and abuse of power that were the hallmarks of Hastert's time as Speaker. Hastert's corruption wasn't unknown in the Beltway while he held power-- nor was his sexual preference for young men-- but "mum" was the word... on both counts. But not any longer.

And it's not just using earmarks to get expensive federal highways built out to investment property in the middle of nowhere that became far more valuable after the roads were built. Hastert's office-- much like Boehner's is today-- became ground zero for GOP institutional crime. Now a wheelin'-dealin' lobbyist in DC, he was finally indicted, by a Federal grand jury, Thursday-- charged with violating banking laws in a bid to pay $3.5 million because of "past misconduct" against an unnamed individual from their hometown west of Chicago. He covered up-- or tried to-- withdrawals that totaled at least $950,000 from his bank accounts, violating several federal banking laws in the process.

The indictment did not spell out the exact nature of the "prior misconduct" by Hastert against the individual from his hometown, Yorkville, but noted that before entering politics in 1981, Hastert spent more than a decade as a teacher and wrestling coach at the local high school. This unnamed individual mentioned in the indictment has known Hastert for most of their life, the indictment states.

...Prosecutors said that in 2010, when the unnamed individual confronted Hastert about the allegations of misconduct, the former speaker agreed to pay out $3.5 million "to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against" this person.

Over the next five years Hastert withdrew about $1.7 million in cash from his various bank accounts, at one point in 2014 delivering $100,000 a month, the indictment alleges.

Beginning in 2013, the FBI and Internal Revenue Service began investigating "possible structuring of currency transactions to avoid the reporting requirements."

You can tell which one is Coach Hastert but... which one is "Individual A?"

Hastert told FBI investigators that the reason he withdrew $1.7 million in cash was because "he did not feel safe with the banking system," although he never shared those dire concerns with his constituents. A more reasonable assumption is that Hastert withdrew the large sums of money to pay blackmail to one of the underage boys he had been coaching-- and raping. Remember, even if a youngster "consents" to carnal relationships with an authority figure like Hastert, it is still statutory rape. But Hastert is only being charged with banking monkey business, not, at least not so far, with raping children. Nor, you might want to contemplate, was Mark Foley ever charged with anything.

So now everyone is guessing what exactly the "prior misconduct" was that Hastert was trying to cover up with $3.5 million in hush money. The only clues were that it happened in Yorkville where he was the high school wrestling coach and the purpose was to "compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against Individual A." The indictment goes on to state that Hastert has known Individual A for pretty much his entire life, indicating that it was probably a younger person. There have long been rumors that Hastert had been molesting his wrestling students, rumors that were fueled once people observed his conduct when he got to DC. Hastert also moved rapidly to protect Mark Foley after he was discovered having sex with under-age male pages. Hastert's efforts on behalf of Foley kept Foley in office for several years after it was fairly well-known that he was raping boys in the congressional page program. Ultimately, the Foley debacle wrecked Hastert's career as well as Foley's, and led to massive losses for the GOP in the 2006 midterms. Today both Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh were calling Hastert a homo on their hate talk radio shows. And Wayne Madsen and Alex Jones revealed some pretty shocking details. Meanwhile, the Illinois House put plans to erect a statue of Hastert in the Illinois State Capitol on indefinite hold. Funding had just been approved 2 weeks ago. And yesterday Hastert was forced to resign from his job as a lobbyist for Dickstein Shapiro and to leave the board of directors of CME Group.

Remember being in high school? What if this beast tried to get into your shorts?

UPDATE: Oh That Denny Hastert!

The media is starting to remember the Culture of Corruption theme that drove Denny Hastert's entire political career. Writing for the Daily Beast today, Ana Marie Cox, reminded her readers that "indicting Hastert on the financial charges and lying to investigators rather than on whatever misconduct occurred seems to indicate that those charges were the best investigators could come up with. Presumably, if the misconduct was illegal, they’d have mentioned that-- and indicted him for it. If the conduct was sexual abuse, as sources are saying, then the statute of limitations has run out. It follows that Hastert wasn’t paying hush money to stay out of jail, he was protecting his reputation."

How did Hastert happen to have enough money lying around that paying out $3.5 million was even within the realm of possibility?

Hastert’s ability to participate in the blackmail is, after all, itself a general indictment of D.C.’s “revolving door” money culture, in which former lawmakers move easily from government into lobbying. In Hastert’s case, the ability to profit off of one’s legislative position is especially galling: While in office, Hastert used the earmarking process to turn his investment in some Illinois farmland into a profit of 140 percent when a federal highway project just happened to make its way through those very fields. Indeed, it was this instance of a completely legal form of insider trading that helped prompt Congress to end earmarks.

And, of course, Hastert made even more money once he was out of office. One study found that, on average-- and when the information is publicly available-- former lawmakers get a 1,425 percent raise when they make the jump from Capitol Hill to K Street. Hastert, who was worth between $4 million and $17 million when he left Congress, was making $175,000 as a representative. His K Street bump would be to almost $2.5 million a year.

Okay, he made his money as a lobbyist, doing presumably sneaky lobbyist things. That raises the next question: How can Hastert’s reputation even be worth $3.5 million?

Hastert is a former member of Congress known to have profited off of a shady land deal and he’s a registered lobbyist-- these are already the two professions that Americans regard as the most disreputable careers available. They are literally last (lobbyist) and second-to-last (congressman) on Gallup’s list of what jobs Americans regard as “honest” and “ethical.” What would one have to do to be thought even less of?

Child rape?

After Bibi: Maybe the solution to the Boehner Problem is to consider whether we really, absolutely need a House speaker

Plus some thoughtier thoughts than Bibi's on Iran


Okay, I admit I fell crazy mad in love with this "manufactured" image when our colleague Gaius Publius shared it in his pre-speech post yesterday, and I would likely have taken advantage of any remotely contrivable opportunity to recycle it. But that doesn't mean that, post-speech, it isn't still the defining image of Prime Minister Bibi's Iran policy.

by Ken

So, at last, Prime Minister Bibi has spoken. Sure, it's a national disgrace, but haven't our right-wing brethren been working their chubby butts off to ensure that the U.S. is never anything but a national disgrace? At least we Americans can congratulate ourselves on our civic-mindedness in playing our part in the Israeli election process, even at the price of further muddling the already-difficult question of how to deal with Iran. (Now at least we have an easy first step: Pay no attention to anything Bibi said.)

Technically, this Borowitz Report from yesterday -- and so, of course, in advance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign speech address before a joint session of Congress today -- is "satire."

“Even as the President threatens us with provocative acts, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s support for us has been unwavering,” Boehner said. “He understands what many of us have long known: that peace with this enemy can only be achieved through total victory.”

Netanyahu had equally high praise for Boehner, saying that “no one has been more steadfast and dedicated in the struggle against your President.”

“This foe is not to be trusted or appeased,” Netanyahu said. “Your resolute refusal to find any common ground with him whatsoever has earned my undying respect.”

As the press conference drew to a conclusion, Boehner appeared to fight back tears as he called Netanyahu “a brother in arms” in the ongoing hostilities with Obama.

“A wise man once said that my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” Boehner said, choking up. “You, sir, are my best friend in the world.”

IT'S SATIRE BECAUSE --

It doesn't seem likely that "Sunny John" Boehner actually said publicly of Bibi: "Even as the President threatens us with provocative acts, Prime Minister Netanyahu's support for us has been unwavering. He understands what many of us have long known: that peace with this enemy can only be achieved through total victory." And it doesn't seem likely that Bibi actually said publicly of Sunny John that "no one has been more steadfast and dedicated in the struggle against your President."

But does anyone disbelieve that Boehner 'n' Bibi were thinking it?

It's hard to know how Sunny John thought this stunt he cooked up with right-wing political operative Ron Dermer would play out. It could be that Dermer (who, you'll recall, was a GOP player before he decamped to Israel and worked his way up to become "Bibi's brain" and his new country's ambassador to the U.S.) was merely playing him for a hapless schmuck, which certainly would have been an apt call on Dermer's part. But if Sunny John thought this political stroke was going to solidify his shaky leadership, well, that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

The other day, in a WaPo op-ed pondering the effective breakdown of House Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner's, er, leadership as reflected in his inability to get House Republicans to support his 20-day extension of DHS funding on Friday, followed by his resort to accepting Democratic support to pass the 7-day extension ("Boehner's defeat was actually really unusual. Here's why"), University of Virginia Prof. Jeffery Jenkins noted that calls for Sunny John to step down are increasing, obviously from his increasingly out-of-control far-rightward flank.

"His only saving grace," Professor Jenkins wrote, "is that there is no obvious alternative."

No one from his leadership team enjoys any more support or presumably wants the position, and no one on the conservative flank of the GOP can win widespread support in the caucus.

But if conservative GOP anger is great enough, could another path emerge? Could an ends-against-the-middle coalition form to declare the Speaker’s chair vacant? Would conservative Republicans join with Democrats on someone – anyone – other than Boehner? Stay tuned.

I don't know if it's the triumph of irony or of something still nuttier, but where Professor Jenkins sees th unmaking of Sunny John's speakership in his failure to uphold the "Hastert rule," to a lot us it has seemed that the defining characteristic of Sunny John's disastrous run as House speaker has been precisely his near-inviolate adherence to that "rule." (Which we have to continue to put in quotes because the "Hastert rule" was never actually a rule. And for cripes' sake, doesn't anyone tremble -- either that or laugh hysterically -- at the irony, or the whatever, of engraving in political stone any teaching from that sleazy crook "Planet Denny" Hastert?)

IRONICALLY (OR SOMETHING), TODAY SUNNY JOHN
ALLOWED PASSAGE OF FULL-YEAR DHS FUNDING

It's a clean bill, no mention of President Obama's executive orders on immigration, something members of his caucus had been swearing they'd never accept. And they didn't. Sunny John accomplished this legislative feat by totally disgregarding the "Hastert rule." In fact, he brought only 75 GOP ayes to the 257-167 vote.

D.C. pols appear stunned. Howie will have more to say about this tomorrow.

In case it isn't clear, given the realities of what the House Republican caucus has degenerated too, it's not at all obvious that anyone could have managed that pack of lamebrains and thugs more successfully than Sunny John has. Then again, it's not at all obvious that anyone could have done a worse job of it.

Which has me thinking about that scenario sketched for us by Professor Jenkins, of "an ends-against-the-middle coalition" coalescing "to declare the Speaker's chair vacant." Of course he's thinking of this as a step toward some coalition of R's and D's electing some mutually acceptable replacement. Whereas I'm just thinking of having the speaker's chair vacant. The way it is, more or less, at present.

I know we really should have a speaker of the House. The Constitution says so. But do we really need one? After all, it's not as if the current House majority has any stake in, you know, getting stuff done. And if they don't care, why should we?

Maybe the House R's could persuade one of their number to reinvent himself (or herself, in the event that there actually are any female House R's) as Sippy the Clown and install him in the chair. Would anyone know the difference?


ANOTHER VIEW OF BIBI'S VIEW OF IRAN,
AND AN ALTERNATE VISION OF BIBI'S VIEW

This morning, in anticipation of Bibi's campaign speech to Congress, Bernard Avishai, an adjunct professor of business at the Hebrew University who's now a visiting professor of government at Dartmouth College, engaged in some informated speculation on newyorker.com ("Netanyahu's Speech") as to what the Beebster would have to say. I've highlighted a paragraph I find especially useful on the subject of Iran -- in the unlikely event that anyone is interested in having a serious, as opposed to kneejerkish, discussion of the subject. I need hardly add that this view is not that of Bibi, or of Ron Dermer, or of Sunny John (if he actually has a view on Iran), or of AIPAC or "Holy Joe" Lieberman or "Chucky the Hammer" Krauthammer.

[B]ecause both American political parties are so deeply concerned about the security of [Israel], Netanyahu has a permanent incentive—as does AIPAC, for that matter—to present Israel’s policies as necessary to fend off urgent existential threats. Netanyahu will claim that any Iranian nuclear capacity is proof of genocidal intentions toward Israel—we have heard the same argument about the Palestinian claim to “a right of return”—so why would supporters of Israel accept the reciprocal approach that may emerge from negotiations? This gambit should not work this time. Clearly, Netanyahu is representing one side of a policy debate, with supporters and detractors in both the United States and Israel, where American lives and regional interests are also at stake, and where the Obama Administration has taken a very different position.

The big threat that Netanyahu will raise is that of Islamist extremism. The Middle East is rife with armed insurgent groups that have proven themselves capable of horrific acts of violence. Sunni groups have been backed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States allied with the U.S.; Shiite groups have been backed by Iran, and tacitly by Russia, the chief military sponsor of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. These extremists are united in their hatred for Israel and the West, not necessarily in that order. More immediately, however, they are waging war against each another, more or less along sectarian lines. These rifts may create openings for American diplomacy; it is hard to see, for example, how the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) could ever be defeated without Iran’s coöperation. Netanyahu, unlike Obama, refuses to admit this, presenting these groups as a single military front that the West must beat back.

For Netanyahu, in other words, Iran should be seen as the most powerful example of this extremism. He speaks, reasonably enough, of Iran’s past sponsorship of terrorist acts, its bloody suppression of the popular uprising that followed the election of 2009, and former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s call to “wipe Israel off the map.” But Netanyahu also wants his audiences to understand a point that his own former chief of staff denies: that Iran’s ruling clerics are fundamentally irrational and share a self-sacrificial mindset with terrorists.

It is more reasonable to see Iran’s clerics, like the Saudis, as a brutal, pragmatic, authoritarian theocracy with a tenuous hold on power. The regime is likely to go through serious upheavals in the coming years. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is seventy-six years old. The Guardian Council, which elected him, is filled with both reformers and reactionaries. The powerful and rich Revolutionary Guard could conceivably carry out a coup. A rising generation, which was shaped by the protests and repressions after the elections of 2009, could once again take to the streets. Iran, in other words, is less a terrorist state than a turbulent one, and its continued isolation poses far greater dangers to the international community than a process that draws it closer to the rest of the world—with monitors on the ground, regular diplomatic exchanges, and greater economic integration.

Most vexing in this context is Netanyahu’s conception of how economic pressures might influence the regime. In his view, stiffening sanctions would put stress on the Iranian middle and educated classes; notionally, these groups would, in turn, force embattled and xenophobic clerics to change their priorities. Yet Netanyahu derides this logic—that economic forces matter—when it is used to envision the moderating influence of a deal. Obama has reason to believe, but cannot say, that relaxing sanctions will bring the middle class into the global economy—exposing élites to foreign travel, and to scientifically trained entrepreneurs and scholars. This opening to the international community might well create new national interests for the regime to protect, and perhaps ultimately transform it.

The countries currently engaged in negotiations with Iran—not only the U.S. but also China, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, even Russia—are a formidable diplomatic bloc, which has reason to deny Iran the capacity to make nuclear weapons, if only to prevent a regional nuclear-arms race. This group has proven its ability to maintain Iran’s economic isolation and force its comparative impoverishment. Netanyahu has been speaking about the negotiations as if they were being conducted by people who, lacking the Jewish people’s sense of dread, engage in wishful thinking—and who are entertaining the relaxation of sanctions before Iran’s nuclear capacity is taken down more or less completely.

Netanyahu is appalled, he says, that Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are willing to formally approve Iran as a threshold state, with the scientific and infrastructural capacity to assemble a nuclear weapon. In fact, Iran has been a threshold state for some time, and when Netanyahu focusses on this issue he elides the achievement that appears likely to come out of the ongoing negotiations; reportedly, to increase to at least a year the time that Iran would need to assemble a bomb. A year, as President Obama told Reuters last night, would be enough time for the U.S. and its allies to react, first by imposing economic sanctions and finally by taking military action.

This, for Netanyahu, amounts to appeasement. To be clear, what he really seems to want is war. Netanyahu speaks of “dismantling” Iran’s nuclear infrastructure: demolishing all its nuclear installations and disbanding its scientific groups and programs. He has come to Congress to ask that it increase sanctions until, presumably, Iran accedes to this. But he cannot really think that Iran would completely abandon its nuclear program. Instead, sanctions would not only preëmpt continued negotiations with the great powers, and the humiliation of Iranian reformers, but guarantee a “break-out,” with Iran going for a bomb.

If this happened, the international community (read, the U.S.) presumably would abandon diplomatic efforts and attack Iran, with the very high risk that this would entrench the regime and create an escalating war with Iran and its proxies in the Persian Gulf. American and perhaps NATO forces would almost certainly be drawn into the conflict. The great powers are entertaining military action as a last resort, and, unlike Israel, they have the military means to intervene at the eleventh hour. Why would they even consider making the last resort the first?

Ultimately, Netanyahu wants Americans to believe that Iranian leaders are so fanatical in their hatred for Israel that, once armed with a nuclear weapon, they would use it unexpectedly against Tel Aviv. Even if the threat is merely hypothetical—incinerating Tel Aviv would, after all, irradiate the Palestinians for whose sake a bomb would be dropped—no Israeli government can ignore it. That’s why the Israelis have been working for years on a “second-strike capacity,” with the means to retaliate against all Iranian cities. It is an open secret that Israel is in possession of at least a hundred nuclear warheads of its own, and has deployed submarines (acquired from Germany), bombers, and missiles. To believe Netanyahu, you must believe that Iranian leaders are out to secure a nuclear-suicide vest. It is easier to believe that they are trying to secure what Israel has, a hedge against invasion.

Note that The New Yorker's own John Cassidy yesterday offered, in a post called "What Netanyahu Won't Say to Congress," what John explains in a later-added explanatory introduction is "my own version of a speech [Bibi] could theoretically deliver, but most certainly won't," which he suggests "would be a more effective, and, ultimately, a more productive, address than the one Netanyahu is expected to deliver." Of course it includes wacko stuff like:

The government of Israel wants to live in peace with its neighbors. It recognizes the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians living in territories occupied by our military forces to have a land of their own, and it is eager to reach a permanent settlement on the basis of the 1967 borders, but taking into account the enormous demographic and physical changes that Israel has experienced in the past fifty years.

And:

To prevent the emergence of a nuclear-armed Middle East, bold initiatives are needed, so let me suggest one. If other countries in the region agree to give up their nuclear ambitions in a manner that is complete, persuasive, and verifiable; if, in addition, they publicly accept Israel’s right to exist and denounce their prior ambitions to destroy it; then Israel, which is currently one of just four U.N. member countries that has never signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, will be prepared to do its part.

Sure, John, sure! You didn't by chance write this in Washington, did you? You know, where pot is legal now?


ALSO WORTH A LOOK: BIBI AND HILLARY

The Washington Post's Anne Gearan has account, in "For Hillary and Bibi, a long and sometimes fraught relationship," of a 45-minute phone conversation between the two, in which Bib Hillary [UPDATE: thanks, John P!] is said (by whom? it's hard to see how the inside information could have come from anywhere except Hillary's camp) to have talked for 43 of those minutes, leaving Bibi in the highly unfamiliar and highly unpleasant position of listening. She didn't go into the protocol of The Speech, but apparently somebody wants us to know that she delivered tough love unto him.

#