If Dennis Hastert was being treated like a convicted serial pedophile, he’d never see the light of day, you’d think. Instead the judge was asked to take into account his years of public service. Which is almost not missing the point of the whole scandal. Dennis Hastert being a pedophile pales next to the number of victims of his white collar crime. Paying hush money to the former victims of his predatory sexual abuse was the petty crime for which he was sentenced to 15-months in prison. Hastert’s biggest crime was his corruption as the longest serving Speaker Of The House. Dennis Hastert was a high school wrestling coach before running for office and becoming a multimillionare land speculator. Could Hastert’s record stint in Congress mean he didn’t break records for stealing from his constituents and their interests? It’s obvious where Hastert got the millions in cash with which to pay off his many underage victims. THAT’S the crime for which Dennis Hastert isn’t serving enough time. BY ALL MEANS, DO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT HIS PUBLIC SERVICE. Award his millions to his abused victims, put Dennis Hastert in jail forever, then, for betraying the public trust, hang him.
I have to ask: if Dennis Hastert was a perv as a wrestling coach, what predilections do you suppose he indulged as America’s second most powerful office-holder and corrupt multimillionaire? Are we to imagine Speaker Hastert kicked his pedophilia habit for graft? Those are two distinct abberations. One’s a mental disorder, the other is calculated greed.
At today’s sentencing the judge called Dennis Hastert a “serial pedophile” and expressed it was shocking to say serial pedophile and House Speaker in the same sentence. I doubt that. Mostly because we only learn these things after the fact. I think it would be more accurate in the future to wonder which if any of our speakers are not pedophiles.
If fellow congressmen and staffers knew anything of Hastert activities –and how couldn’t they not?– they should face prosecution as well.
Eric,
Excellent point.
We got off to a really good start. Washington and Jefferson were slaveholders, and Jefferson used one (known) human-in-bondage
to sire the bulk of his descendants. And emancipated exactly none of them. These would be the auspices of a really Great Society (Lyndon Johnson can sue me about using that. Oh, wait, not really… public policy can’t be copyrighted Ha Ha!) built supposedly on the words of the serial rapist about All Men are created equal except slaves.
So much (once again) for the Original Intent of The Approximately 1% of 1% of Total Population Who Are Arbitrarily Designated Founding Fathers and of whom most Americans especially the Original Intent proponents such as the subject of this article can’t name a red hot 40 of them.
How’s that for a good morning?
I wake up making concatenated sentences.
101st Congress (1989–1991) – Government Operations; Public Works and Transportation; Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families[47]
108th Congress (2003–2005) – The Speaker; Intelligence (ex officio)[54]
I’m oft requested to show my sources. These are from wikipedia concerning his appointments to committees not including subcommittees.
The first one is irony in purest form.
The second answers the question of where he stole the bread. And yeah I assume that he didn’t get it legitimately at least by my standards.
Intelligence groups use the advance knowledge gained by their roles, such as being on a congressional committee, to hedge their bets at the Stock Market crapshoot/roulette wheel.
During the Reagan Regime the CIA was jokingly referred to as the acronym for “Casey, Investing Again”.
I almost barfed when I read the description of that as a “joke” but then my sense of humor doesn’t stretch to things like mass murder.
The hopes of him being shanked down in prison founder on the idea that the “white collar” Club Fed internees aren’t likely to know how to wield a knife anyway.
the slaves should have been deported
quote ===the slaves should have been deported===
We tried to keep the English etc from sending their slaves over here.
You know, the “pioneers” which is a military term. Send a bunch of troublemaking religious fanatics who were too cranky and radical to coexist with the Other religious troublemakers, like the Episcopal King of England sending a bunch of rowdy ass Catholics, Presbyterians, Puritans, Pilgrims and so on… sell them the ship tickets, sell them enough food to last a couple of months, sell them the unconquered Indian land in the target areas like Virginia… sell them enough guns so they could piss off the Indians enough to spark retaliation and then call in British soldiers to put down the “hostile” natives…
If I was of the deportation mindset, they’d be pretty near the top of the list. God-damn Europe sending us all them thar religious terrorists….
I would be laughing if it were a joke.
Human rights for even Anders Breivik is a link at the top of this page. For those not familiar, he’s one of the modern Religious or maybe anti-Religious Mass Murderers who sponsor terrorism in the name of Christ. 70+ people. That’s the fatality count. almost as much as that same old lame old Mass Shooting in Aurora at the Batman movie. Young Mr Breivik wanted Europeans to hate Muslims as much as he did. So he went and shot up a Youth Camp.
Kind of like a Boy Scout camp without the militant Child Soldier aspect.
How long do you reckon it will be until somebody shoots up a mosq… ooops already been done or a synago… ooops, that’s already been done or a rival christian church based on the ancestry of the shooter and or the ancestry of the victims… oh, wait, that’s been done too.. over and over and over and over and then takes and starts on again and again and again ….
Most of that were White Christians doing the shooting, and they gosh darn it got into the habit lately of always writing out a Shooters Manifesto.