Denny Hastert, the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House in history, second in the line to the presidency for eight years, was a serial pedophile who preyed on adolescent boys in his charge when he was a high school wrestling coach before entering electoral politics. What is worth remembering is that Hastert's improbable rise to the pinnacle of political power in Washington was a direct consequence of Republican party efforts to exploit and eventually criminalize Bill Clinton's extramarital sex life in order to overturn the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. The chain of events is clear and straightforward. ...
Clinton's mind-bogglingly reckless and impulsive relationship with Lewinsky did come to light in early 1998. And after it became clear that the mere revelation was not enough to drive Clinton from office, congressional Republicans grew increasingly determined to find a way to fashion it into a crime which would justify Clinton's impeachment. (It is worth remembering that Clinton's vaunted second term approval ratings only truly hit their highs after the Lewinsky scandal broke.) And that they did. ...
What we would learn only later was that while driving the country toward impeachment Gingrich was himself carrying on an affair with a twenty-something congressional aide named Callista Bisek. Gingrich would later divorce his wife Marianne and marry Bisek - they remain married - just as he had years before married Marianne after carrying on an affair with her while married to his first wife. ...
Meanwhile, the Republican conference quickly settled on Rep. Bob Livingston as Speaker Designate for the next Congress and de facto leader as the House moved toward impeaching the president. But then news broke that Hustler's Larry Flynt (yes, it was all really weird) was preparing an article on affairs conducted by Livingston and other members of Congress. This pushed Livingston to admit his own history of adultery and then - the very day the House passed articles of impeachment - in effect resign the Speakership even though he had not actually become Speaker.
Livingston resigned from the House and was succeeded by David Vitter, who would continuing paying for sex with prostitutes after moving to Washington to take his seat in the House and later in the Senate. In 2007, Vitter's phone number emerged from a published list of the phone records of "DC Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey. Vitter nonetheless survived the prostitution scandal and was releected to the Senate in 2010. He failed in his bid to become Governor of Louisiana in 2015. Palfrey later committed suicide, aged 52, shortly after being convicted of money laundering tied to running the prostitution ring. ...
Various names were at first mooted to succeed Livingston. But consensus quickly formed around a man little known even in Washington, let alone in the nation at large: Dennis J. Hastert.
Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, David Vitter, Denny Hastert - all Republican 'family values' hypocrites who pushed to impeach Bill Clinton for sexual infidelity. (And they are far from the only ones, too. Remember Larry Craig? Mark Foley? Mark Souder? The list goes on and on.)
Republicans aren't the only people to cheat on their spouses. (For the record, what Hastert did was far, far worse than that. I certainly don't mean to trivialize pedophilia.) But they take the world record for being hypocrites about it, don't you think?
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