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Pharisees on the Potomac
Like cats that have lost their whiskers, the Republicans seem off balance now that they have lost their talent for hypocrisy.
They are still practicing the ancient political art of Tartuffery, of course, just without their former aplomb.
Who can forget the glory years, when the Gipper invoked God but never went to church? When Arlen Specter accused Anita Hill of perjury to distract from Clarence Thomas’s false witness? When Newt Gingrich and other conservatives indulged in affairs with young Washington peaches as they pushed to impeach Bill Clinton?
No one had more flair than W. and Cheney, crowing about making us safe as they made the world more dangerous, and bragging about fiscal restraint while they spent us into oblivion.
Now when Republicans get caught flouting the principles they dictate, they are not able to practice hypocrisy with such impunity.
Loverboy Mark Sanford’s career continued to go south last week as news organizations exposed his two-faced tactics on travel expenses. When he ran for South Carolina governor in 2002, he attacked the Democratic incumbent for “lavish spending” on hotels and planes. Once elected, he asked state employees to bunk together in hotel rooms when they traveled and chastised staffers who spent more than the $208 federal rate.
But, as Politico reports: “He routinely billed taxpayers for high-end airline seats, racking up more than $44,000 on business and first-class tickets. He often stayed in pricey hotels that far exceeded the rates he imposed on other state employees.” On a trade mission to China, Sanford spent $12,000 on business-class tickets, leaving aides in economy for about $1,900.
The religious boardinghouse in Washington where Sanford sought succor from fellow conservatives, where he agonized to pals about his tango with the enticing María, is also back in the news. Affiliated with a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship — which also sponsored Bible study and prayer circles attended by Hillary Clinton when she was a senator — the pious dwelling is becoming a tourist attraction, a monument to Republican hypocrisy.
The C Street house, as the flag-flying brick rowhouse near the Capitol is known, serves as a residence and Bible study retreat for many Christian conservative lawmakers. But it looks as if what these guys were praying for was a chance to get lucky.
John Ensign, the Promise Keeper who broke all his promises, resides there. As The Washington Post reported, Senator Tom Coburn, who lives there, had an emotional meeting about forgiveness at the house with Doug Hampton, the husband of Ensign’s mistress. (Forgiveness plus bribery can often do the trick.) Coburn says he would not talk to a court or the Senate ethics committee about the episode because he was counseling Ensign partly as a doctor. (Coburn is an ob-gyn.)
Last week, The Associated Press revealed that the estranged wife of a former Republican congressman, Chip Pickering of Mississippi, had filed an alienation of affection lawsuit seeking damages against her husband’s gal pal, a wealthy former college sweetheart named Elizabeth Creekmore Byrd.
The suit charges that as a lawmaker, Chip used C Street as a divine love nest. “Ultimately,” it says, “Creekmore Byrd gave Pickering the option to remain a public servant or become a private citizen and continue relations with her.”
Republican hypocrisy fell flat at the Sotomayor hearings. After railing all week against the “empathy standard,” as Senator Jeff Sessions called it, the Republicans tried to play the empathy card by calling in two New Haven firefighters, one white and one Hispanic, who were on the losing end of Sonia Sotomayor’s ruling. Wearing their dress uniforms, the pair told their heart-tugging tales of studying for an exam that got thrown out after they scored high. Frank Ricci, who studied hard to overcome his dyslexia, used his finger to trace under the words as he read his testimony.
But the Republican complaint against Sotomayor in that case boiled down to wanting her to be more activist. They were upset that she sided with elected officials and precedent rather than intervening to strike down a result that many people, including me, found unfair.
Sotomayor’s syntax was unfathomable, but the Republicans’ language sounded positively archaic: dire warnings against activist judges, when the conservative majority on this Supreme Court has ignored or upended precedent in a slew of cases.
Judge Sotomayor kept her feelings in check, while her white male Republican interrogators dissolved into whining about wanting to keep their guns and nunchakus and wishing they could get back some sway over what women do with their bodies.
If they are so interested in women’s bodies, maybe they should just move to C Street.
16 Comments so far
Show AllNo one had more flair than W. and Cheney, crowing about making us safe as they made the world more dangerous, and bragging about fiscal restraint while they spent us into oblivion.
In Dashiell Hammett's great (detective) novel, "The Maltese Falcon", there is a famous part called The Flitcraft Parable. Flitcraft is a man, totally average and unexceptional, who goes out one morning and never comes back. He seems to disappear from the face of the earth. So Mrs. Flitcraft looks up Sam Spade and asks him to check into her husband's disappearance. It takes Spade a while but he finally locates him. He and Flitcraft sit down and Spade asks him why he did what he did - simply up and disappear.
Flitcraft tells him this story: He went out one morning to get a newspaper or something. On the way he passed a construction site. An enormously heavy steel beams falls accidentally and misses killing him literally by inches. Flitcraft has an overwhelming epiphany. This incident took the lid off life and showed him how the world really works. All is merely whim and caprice. So he decides to "go with the flow" and simply disappears to begin life anew somewhere else, expecting things to go differently. But he eventually marries a woman just like his first wife and gets a job like the one he had before, etc. etc. The more time passes, the farther away from the falling beam he gets, the more he gradually repeats the life he had been leading all those years.
The Republicans aren't finished, far from it. All this talk that they're done is nonsense. The average gullible, uninformed and, in many cases, stupid American, will forget who destroyed this country. By 2012 or 2016, the "falling beam" of economic disaster in 2008 will have been forgotten by a majority of Americans. Obimbo's calculated policies of cowardice, quarter measures (not even half measures), lying, military adventurism and imperialism, secrecy, primacy of the national security state, etc. etc., will blow up in his face. Who will Americans turn to in their disappointment? Why, Republicans, of course. Who else? Americans will become Flitcraft, falling back into the same political horse shit they have been wallowing in for the past 30 + years.
Mordechai
I loved the movie.
In our case it is a perpetual continuity of the same principle of sameness. People tend to repeat the same 'mistakes' because their mind does not provide for enough 'Constant Access Memory'. Everything is forgotten immediately in order to not to jeopardize the fragile state of the egoistic-ignorant mind.
Hypocrisy is the best indicator for the unreliability of the average human mind. The more Hypocrisy, the farther from the reality behind the 'reality' people tend to be.
Yet, Hypocrisy is in its last throws. As there is no space for it in a sustainable human appearance on the planet, called interdependence, hypocritic people will disappear with it.
Don't ask me how. I only know that it will happen.
Aloha
Believe That You Can Change Your Beliefs.
Mordechai, I know you and I don't, "talk," much or at all. I got it. I leave you be with your ever salient, sarcastic, caustic and carefully crafted posts. I just read and enjoy every one I see.
But I MUST articulate this; the artist in you is alive as hell today, well and fine as our best bud, that was a sweet metaphor gracefully elucidated while hitting avec velocity.
Suite. Judy Blue Eyes. Sweet, MS.
Here is one for you to process, by recoiling I do fear; sit down. I see you and I alone MS in the CD family as having very very similiar styles, voices. Yes. MS, and have noticed this for ages. Being as I know I am anethemic, repellant, I know this will disgust you. But it is real. I take it as good.
Of course, relative to my normal prattle, your esoteric neo-poetic ethereal walks down the halls of time and truth are FAR sublime, touching on invisible threads holding us together......did you do a lot of LSD. Not me. straight is great. vote. believe. be proud of America.
Have enjoyed your wit and intelligence for a while, thank you for sharing MS soul with us, you are kinda like Sioux Rose in that you both contribute much to the foundation of our collective consiousness on CD. My respect, but know this, I neither expect nor seek yours in return. I did one time w/o success. I took the hit, I'm freaky deaky, thank god-nice post.
Didn't you mean to write 'elicited' at the end of the second paragraph, instead of 'elucidated'?
There are stories like this in real life a thousand times a day. The greatest illusion of all is free will. It is a compelling illusion but every bit as inescapable as it seems to be obvious.
Of course you make up your own mind, but anybody who knew enough about your body chemistry, your childhood influences, your patterns of behavior, could predict the choice you will make every time.
The only real changes I have ever heard of anybody making resulted from profound shocks. Some people have become unrecognizable after a severe electrical shock. Their whole value system changes. Long held adamant opinions are reversed.
It can be the shock of having gone through a war or other severe trauma, but these instances are rare. Most of us continue doing the things we have always done under similar circumstances.
People who know us need not be seers or even skilled observers to know what we will do next.
Hey itsjustkarma, don't hold your breath waiting for hypocrisy to dissappear. Magical thinking regarding Homo Sustainabus won't save the planet either.
New age leftists love to flaunt the superiority of their consciousness and babble about such things as "the unreliablity of the average human mind." This is elitism pure and simple.
The lack of egalitarianism among the "Conscious Left" is one of the reasons that the movement has so little appeal to the average worker.
Who can stomach this kind of conceited nonsense?
Less arrogant navel gazing, more agitating and organizing please.
@dreamjoehill July 19th, 2009 3:00 pm: You wrote: "New age leftists love to flaunt the superiority of their consciousness and babble about such things as "the unreliablity of the average human mind." This is elitism pure and simple."
True elitism belongs to those who think they know the mind of God, or even if there is one. It belongs to those, like Sanford and Ensign, who believe themselves above the law and that they shouldn't resign after misusing their office. It belongs to the C Street Fellowship Christopublicans who were founded by a minister named Abraham Vereides in 1935 after he had a 'vision' of God appearing to him as the president of the U.S. Steel Corporation and telling him Jesus was wrong -- God favored the powerful and wealthy, and conservative politicians such as Sanford and Ensign were 'chosen' by God to protect their interests. Not surprisingly, before Vereides' epiphany, he had been an FDR/New Deal-hating crank. (Isn't it nice when God just happens to like all the same things you do?) Not to mention the corporate royalty who reward themselves with hefty bonuses for bad performance -- French aristocrats of the court of King Louis XVI would be jealous. These are the true elites in America, usually not covered as such by our Big Media since it is owned and operated by the same sort of elitists.
You wrote: "The lack of egalitarianism among the "Conscious Left" is one of the reasons that the movement has so little appeal to the average worker.'
The 'movement' to the left is gaining in appeal as the average workers watch the conservatives ship their jobs overseas and repeatedly side with their elitist bosses; as they witness their children poisoned by cheap junk from China; as they see their standard of living swirl down the drain. I have known many people in the 'conscious left' and found none of them to be elitists on purpose and very few to be elitists by accident, so I really don't know who you're referring to here. If the polls are correct, a good majority of the American people want a progressive agenda enacted -- it's the elite politicians and corporations that are standing in the way.
Yeah RSJ! What you said!
Maureen Dowd??? On CD? WTF. Slow news day?
no kidding. oh well, it's not like she's a regular. win some, lose some.
The comment about the New Haven firefighters seems incongruous. After all that's been said, I, a white male who had all the advantages the USA has provided in its role as the great affirmative action (for whites) program that it was since the beginning, found the fawning over the "aggrieved" men mildly disgusting. Surely one of two of them could make way for blacks, who no doubt failed the tests because they grew up under a system that discouraged them from valuing study. This was nothing like real discrimination, which prevented all minorities from achieving roles in police and fire departments for so many years. All New Haven wanted was some balance, and I find that anything but unfair.
This is a sassy, bitchy, trash-talking piece of writing. Personally, I am enjoying seeing Jeff Sessions get in touch with his inner bigot and all those Republican whiners being exposed for what they are--whiners.
If we just let them alone they will, on their own, supply enough verbal rope with which to politically hang themselves.
Poet
Ah say, ah say, that's Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, boy! And you just know he wasn't named after Thomas Jefferson.
Cap conservative's wealth to remove Mammon's power.
Just like they used to do before Reagan. I heard somewhere that David Sarnoff, head of RCA and founder of NBC, was taxed in the 90 percent range in the 1950s. Of course, that's a little misleading -- even back then the rich had all kinds of legal tax dodges, so 'General' Sarnoff was probably paying much less than the top rate. The only wealthy person in American history that definitely paid his full share in taxes was Elvis Presley, and that's because he had the IRS fill out his tax forms.
Changing beliefs..........oh really?
How many of you can create a functioning planet that no longer uses money.
I am aware of the fellowship meetings of which you speak.
A common belief among these obscenely wealthy conservative republician christians, is that they are the chosen, by god, to be the custodians of this wealth. They also believe that wealth is the reward jesus bestows to true christians.
They also believe in the literal interpretation of the bible as being words divinely inspired by god.
TALK ABOUT HYPOCRISY!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Is it not written in the bible that MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL!!!!
Didn't jesus say IT WILL BE EASIER FOR A CAMEL TO FIT THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE,THAN FOR A RICH MAN TO ENTER THE KINDOM OF HEAVEN!!!!!!!!!!
If we build "CITIZEN CENTRAL" we can end this hypocrisy.