What we now know about the men who led the impeachment of Clinton https://t.co/GienktR5zB pic.twitter.com/Ew1I5mgGvb
— ThinkProgress (@thinkprogress) April 27, 2016
On December 19, 1998, the House of Representatives impeached Bill Clinton on two charges related to his extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky. (The charges were for perjury and obstruction of justice.) The historic vote, and subsequent trial in the Senate, involved the work of three men who were elected Speaker of the House Of Representatives by the Republican majority, Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston and Dennis Hastert. Almost 17 years later, with the federal indictment of Hastert for illegally concealing up to $3.5 million in hush-money, we finally have a more complete understanding of the men who led this effort.
Once upon a time, in a land not so very far away, three very powerful men, who also happened to be very Conservative Republicans, impeached a President for the “high crime and misdemeanor” of having an affair with an intern. While all three claimed the mantle of righteous moral outrage (How DARE the President sully his office by putting his johnson into an intern’s mouth??), it didn’t take long before two of three revealed their own “zipper issues.” The third would take a fair bit longer, but his indiscretions would turn out to be actual crimes- you know, the kind you go to prison for. All three hated William Jefferson Clinton Just. That. Much. Like many other Conservative moralists on Capitol Hill in those days, they were willing to do literally anything to embarrass and shame him and drive him from office.
The hypocrisy, the double standards, the two-faced moralizing, and the dishonesty behind the effort to impeach President Clinton was in their minds a case of the ends justifying the means- if they reflected upon it at all. They hated the President and considered him an embarrassment- and besides, they weren’t the ones whose semen was found on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress.
Yesterday, the last legal domino fell, and we were reminded all over again that the real moral reprobates were in Congress, not the White House.
Newt Gingrich
Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) led the push for Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Following a disappointing election in November 1998, he announced he was stepping down as Speaker and resigning from Congress.
Gingrich later admitted that, while he was pushing for Clinton’s impeachment, he was engaged in an affair with a Congressional aide. “There were times when I was praying and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong. But I was still doing them,” Gingrich said in 2007. He later said the situation was “complex and, obviously, I wasn’t doing things to be proud of.”
Calling his situation “complex” is Gingrich’s smarmy and evasive way of attempting to escape responsibility for his moral failings. The truth is, having an affair with a Congressional aide shouldn’t be a cause celebre; it involved two consenting adults. It should be a matter between himself and his wife and family, but it became far more than that because Gingrich had engaged in the very same sort of behavior he demanded President Clinton be impeached for.
Oh, right; Clinton is a Democrat, so he deserved to be roasted and destroyed for his dalliance. Gingrich is a Republican, so he can apologize profusely and expect to be given a second chance. As we’ll discuss later, this is the typical modus operandi for Conservatives.
Bob Livingston
After Gingrich announced his resignation, Republicans unanimously selected Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA) to succeed him. Livingston represented the party as Speaker-elect in the led up to the impeachment vote.
On the day of the impeachment vote, Livingston announced he was resigning following revelations that he had engaged in an extramarital affair. According to Hustler Magazine Publisher Larry Flint, who offered a reward for information about the sex lives of members of Congress, he “found four women who said they had been involved with Mr. Livingston over the last 10 years.”
Livingston’s hypocrisy is arguably more egregious and hypocritical than Gingrich’s (if that’s even possible). As he was maneuvering to impeach the President for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, HE WAS ENGAGED IN THE VERY SAME SORT OF BEHAVIOR. Livingston was schtupping a woman other than his wife as he was leading the charge to embarrass and shame a President for engaging in consensual (though arguably morally indefensible) sexual behavior.
I could wax indignant at some considerable length about Livingston’s rank hypocrisy, but I think the above paragraphs make my case without additional assistance.
Dennis Hastert
Following Livingston’s resignation, which occurred on the same day the House voted on impeachment, Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) quickly gained support of the Republican leadership to succeed him as Speaker-designate. He began formally serving as speaker in January 1999, and held that role while the Senate conducted their trial on the articles of impeachment….
Hastert was indicted on charges that he illegally structured $1.7 million in payments to an individual in an attempt to cover up prior misconduct. According to reports, the payments were allegedly intended to “conceal sexual abuse against a former male student he knew during his days as a teacher in Yorkville, Ill.” The LA Times also reported that “investigators also spoke with a second man who raised similar allegations that corroborated what the former student said.”
Dennis Hastert is a child sexual predator, and the behaviors he engaged in- and conspired to cover up- were actual crimes, honest-to-God felonies he should long ago have been doing prison time for. Yesterday, Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in prison for being in the judge’s words a “serial child molester.”
Hastert’s sentence is a joke, but he’s in poor health, and the judge may have decided to show what forbearance he could to a pathetic, dishonest, hypocritical, and desperately ill old man. He may well die in prison…not that I’m inclined to feel sympathy for someone who admitted to sexually molesting underage boys who’d been under his care as a high school wrestling coach.
The worst and possibly most thoroughly offensive aspect of Hastert’s conviction and sentencing were the number of Conservative stalwarts who rushed to vouch for Hastert’s “character.” That they were attesting to the upstanding morality of a convicted child sexual predator seemed to matter not at all.
As you will recall, professional Christian scold, Mike Huckabee, asked the public to look the other way when it turned out that one of the Kardashians of Christ — Josh Duggar — is a child molester. Now, Tom DeLay has asked a judge to do likewise for Dennis Hastert. Tom and Mike have just announced that they are forming a new lobbying group to be called “Politicians Exonerating Deviants Of Sin” [D/B/A “PEDOS”]. PEDOS will help stanch the persecution of adults who touch children inappropriately, but only if those adults own Bibles, with the slogan: “Christians are nicer molesters!”
Former Congressman Tom DeLay wrote a letter (as did more than 40 others) to the court stating, among other things, “We all have our flaws, but Dennis Hastert has very few.” As if that wasn’t enough to turn your stomach, there’s more: “He is a good man that loves the Lord. He gets his integrity and values from Him.”
Right; he’s a sexual predator because Jesus loves him. Who says religion isn’t the last refuge of a scoundrel?
Then there’s the coup de grace, the sentence that reveals how thoroughly Conservatives- especially uber-Jesus-y ones- look out for one another: “He doesn’t deserve what he is going through. I ask that you consider the man that is before you and give him leniency where you can.”
He “doesn’t deserve what he is going through?” What about his victims? Where’s DeLay’s concern for them? Surely they don’t deserve what they’re going through? Never mind that Hastert’s a convicted child molester who did real damage that those boys- now men- continue dealing with to this day. No, HASTERT is the real victim, who should be granted leniency because he’s a good, God-fearing, Bible-believing Christian who gets his values and integrity from the Lord.
Am I the only here who feels like they need a shower?
Earlier in court, Cross, 53, a married father of two, told a judge how Hastert, who also is married and has two children, had abused him during his senior year of high school. Cross, who wrestled on a team Hastert coached, said he ended up alone in a locker room with Hastert when he stayed late to try to shed weight, and Hastert offered to help with a massage.
Cross said that while he was lying on a training table, Hastert pulled down his shorts and touched him in a sexual way.
“I was stunned by what he was doing,” Cross said.
Cross said he “did not say anything to anyone.”
“As a 17-year-old boy, I was devastated,” he said. “I tried to figure out why Coach Hastert had singled me out.”
Cross, whose brother is a former Illinois legislator and who himself works in financial services, said that he felt “pain, shame and guilt” for years and that he confided in his brother and wife about what happened only after the criminal case against Hastert emerged.
He said he had trouble sleeping and working, but came forward because he wanted the judge to know what happened, and he wanted his children to know that “there’s an alternative to staying silent.”
“I wanted you to know the pain and suffering he caused me then, and still causes me today,” Cross said.
DeLay and other Conservatives were sufficiently moved to write letters of support and vouch for the depth of Hastert’s character. Of course, if Hastert was a Democrat, these same shining examples of morality would’ve been competing for the honor of depositing a bullet in the back of his skull. They would have condemned him as the worst sort of human scum, a reprobrate who stole the innocence of children to gratify his sick and perverted sexual appetite.
If this isn’t enough to convince someone of the hypocrisy, self-interest, lust for power, and lack of concern for anything that doesn’t benefit Conservatives directly, I don’t know what would.
And if all of this wasn’t already disgusting enough, here’s something that underscores what a truly repulsive excuse for a human being Dennis Hastert is:
[Haster] supported the Child Abuse Prevention and Enforcement Act of 2000 and called for stiffer penalties for sex offenders before his own pattern of abuse was revealed, reported the Chicago Tribune.
“It is important to have a national notification system to help safely recover children kidnapped by child predators,” Hastert said in 2003, after Utah teenager Elizabeth Smart was recovered after a nine-month ordeal of kidnapping and abuse.
“But it is equally important to stop those predators before they strike, to put repeat child molesters into jail for the rest of their lives and to help law enforcement with the tools they need to get the job done,” Hastert said at the time.
The former GOP lawmaker also spoke out against President Bill Clinton’s private conduct during the impeachment proceedings, saying he had abused and violated the public trust.
Going on twenty years later, we know that three of the biggest names behind the impeachment of President Clinton were abject hypocrites with their own dark secrets. The truths they were hiding didn’t hinder or even provide them a reason to think twice about working to personally and utterly destroy a President they loathed.
I’m a big believer in karma, and this sorry saga is what that can look like. While I try to avoid trafficking in schadenfreude, it’s difficult not to take a least a little bit of enjoyment out of seeing prominent Conservatives revealing their true colors…or having it revealed for them.
Two serial adulterers and a serial child molester. Way to go, eh? Mama would be SO proud.
I can only hope there are reserved parking spaces waiting in the Hell I don’t believe in for these good, upstanding, God-fearing, shining examples of Christian morality. They deserve nothing less.
