Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (24 page)

Shortly after that infamous encounter, Gingrich refused to pay his alimony and child-support payments. The First Baptist Church in his hometown had to take up a collection to support the family Gingrich had deserted.

Six months after divorcing his first wife, Gingrich married his second, one of several women with whom he had been cheating during his first marriage. And in short order, Gingrich began again searching for and having sex with other women, eventually finding the new woman whom he wanted to be his third wife. In 1999, in the midst of the GOP inquisition into Clinton’s sexual improprieties, Gingrich—who was fifty-six years old at the time—was having adulterous sex with his own congressional aide Callista Bisek, who was twenty-four years younger. In 2000, Gingrich dumped his second wife and married the young, pretty Bisek.

Gingrich firmly believes that the law must preserve the sanctity of marriage. As CNN reported in 2007, when Gingrich was considering running for president,

Former House speaker and potential presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has confessed, telling conservative Christian leader James Dobson that he was cheating on his wife at around the same time the House was impeaching President Bill Clinton over his White House affair with Monica Lewinsky.

In this same hypocritical regard, GOP representative Bob Barr is a virtual clone of Gingrich. Barr was the House manager for Clinton’s impeachment and was also lead sponsor of the “Defense of Marriage Act,” a law that prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex unions. That law has the effect, among other things, of rendering the United States one of the very few countries in the Western world not to grant immigration rights to the same-sex partners of its own citizens, thus forcing gay Americans who have a foreign spouse to make the hideous choice between residing outside of their own country or being separated from the person with whom they want to spend their lives. To justify this law, Barr roared,

The flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centered morality are licking at the very foundation of our society, the family unit.

This righteous defender of “the family unit” and crusading enemy of hedonism has—like Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani—had three wives. The second wife of the pro-life Barr filed an affidavit during their divorce proceeding attesting that she had had an abortion with his approval, because he believed she had cheated on him. Barr’s former wives have twice had to take him to court to complain about his failure to pay child support. And a 1999 article in
American Journalism Review
reported, Barr “invoked a legal privilege during his 1985 divorce proceeding so he could refuse to answer questions on whether he’d cheated on his second wife with the woman who is now his third.”

Powerful GOP congressman Dan Burton, a staunch social conservative, supported Clinton’s impeachment, used his position as chairman of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee to investigate Clinton’s personal life relentlessly, and publicly called the President a “scumbag.” Burton was one of the first of the righteous GOP congressmen to insist that Bill Clinton’s sex life was a matter of grave public concern, rising on the floor of the House as early as 1995 to compare Clinton to Bob Packwood as he thundered,

But why, I ask, are we excusing or ignoring similar behavior?
No one, regardless of what party they serve, no one, regardless of what branch of government they serve, should be allowed to get away with these alleged sexual improprieties,
and yet it is obvious to me…that a double standard does exist.

In 1998, Burton learned that
Vanity Fair
was preparing a lengthy article on his sleazy and adulterous behavior. To preempt the article, Burton—according to a 1999
Salon
article—“startled the country by suddenly admitting that he had fathered a child out of wedlock.” While he made payments to the woman who had stayed silent all those years, he never had any involvement in his son’s life. In a tone so impersonal that Burton might as well have been talking about a piece of furniture, rather than his own son, he coolly stated during an interview: “The boy and the mother and my wife and my family and I have all reached an agreement about this a long time ago.”

During the Clinton impeachment proceedings, Matthew Glavin was the president of the socially conservative Southeastern Legal Foundation, which ultimately led the efforts to have Clinton disbarred. According to
Time
in 2000, Glavin was “charged with public indecency for allegedly fondling himself and an undercover park ranger in May in Georgia’s Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area.”

When GOP Louisiana congressman (and impeachment supporter) Bob Livingston was named Speaker of the House in 1998 to succeed the adulterous Gingrich, he quickly resigned before being inaugurated when it was revealed that
Hustler
magazine was about to publish documented reports of his own lengthy and numerous adulterous affairs. Livingston was succeeded in Congress by the prostitute patron, adulterer, and staunch social conservative David Vitter.

During the Clinton impeachment, the GOP chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (also a House impeachment manager) was Henry Hyde. This social conservative was exposed by
Salon
’s David Talbot as having engaged in behavior for years that—even for this Values Voters crowd—was quite astonishing:

Fred Snodgrass, a 76-year-old Florida retiree, says he gets so upset when he watches Rep. Henry Hyde on TV that “I nearly jump out of my chair”…“These politicians were going on about how he should have been on the Supreme Court, what a great man he is, how we’re lucky to have him in Congress in charge of the impeachment case. And all I can think of is here is this man, this hypocrite who broke up my family.”

Snodgrass says Hyde carried on a five-year sexual relationship with his then-wife, Cherie, that shattered his family. Hyde admitted to
Salon
Wednesday that he had been involved with Cherie Snodgrass, and that the relationship ended after Hyde’s wife found out about it. At the time of the affair, which lasted from 1965 to 1969, Fred Snodgrass was a furniture salesman in Chicago, and his wife was a beauty stylist. They had three small children, two girls and a boy. Hyde, then 41 years old, was a lawyer and rising star in Republican state politics. In 1966, he was elected for the first time to the Illinois House. Hyde was married and the father of four sons. (His wife, Jeanne Hyde, died of breast cancer in 1992, after a 45-year marriage.)

“Cherie was young and naive at the time,” said a Snodgrass family intimate. “She was a glamour queen with three young kids, stuck at home. Then this Prince Charming guy, Hyde, comes along. She was very impressed with him. He was 12 years older, he was a hotshot, he knew everyone downtown. She had nothing, and he comes along, shows her off, she was young and beautiful.”

Hyde was forty-one years old at the time, but he dismissed the accusations as mere “youthful indiscretions,” and the Family Values congressman vowed,

The statute of limitations has long since passed on my youthful indiscretions…. The only purpose for this being dredged up now is an obvious attempt to intimidate me and it won’t work. I intend to fulfill my constitutional duty and deal judiciously with the serious felony allegations presented to Congress in the Starr report.

In the world of GOP hypocrisy, there was no reason at all to allow the House Manager’s serial adultery with a married woman and mother of young children to interfere with the important work of impeaching a popular president over the sexual improprieties detailed in the Starr Report.

Louis Beres, the chairman of the Christian Coalition of Oregon during the Clinton impeachment proceedings, was accused by three female family members of molesting them repeatedly during their preteen years. Beres first lied and denied the accusations, only to confess once the police investigation intensified, blaming it—according to police reports obtained by the
Portland Mercury—
on the fact that he was “experiencing a great deal of stress at the time…he was millions of dollars in debt and facing bankruptcy.” No charges could be filed because the statute of limitations had elapsed.

And on and on and on. The individuals who never tire of making public displays of how concerned they are with our national moral fabric—the crusading right-wing moralists who found Bill Clinton’s sex life cause for condemnation—are well aware that their party is filled to the brim with sleazy, corrupt hedonists.

But as long as they help keep the party in power, they are not just tolerated but embraced. That dynamic is a core operating principle of the Bush-led Republican Party, and it is why Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, David Vitter, and so many others were able to rise within it despite the fact that their dalliances were an “open secret” in Washington GOP power circles. For our country’s Great American Hypocrites, reality is irrelevant. Those who can maintain deceitful appearances are revered.

Paging Republican Scandal

As hypocritical as that wholesome 1990s bunch was, they are no match for the Great American Hypocrites who now dominate the “Values Voters” faction of the Republican Party. The sexual-morality crusaders of today evince such a huge gap between their rhetoric and their actions that the term “hypocrisy” is inadequate to describe them. It is some form of hypocrisy cubed. The same people who endlessly snow the American people into voting for them by exploiting wedge themes of sexual morality and staking claim to sexual normalcy now stand revealed (using their standards) as some of the most sexually depraved people in the country.

In September 2006, GOP House Speaker Denny Hastert was smack in the middle of one of the tawdriest sex scandals in American political history. News had just erupted that a GOP senior congressman and a leader of its anti-online-pornography campaigns, Representative Mark Foley, had for years been engaging in lewd and highly inappropriate behavior with underage congressional pages. Far worse, compelling evidence emerged that the entire top level of the GOP House leadership—including Speaker Hastert—were long aware of these improprieties and did nothing, thus allowing Foley unfettered access to the pages.

As a result, Hastert became the target of intense criticism and was desperately battling to keep his job. In need of absolution and support from a moral authority among his upstanding Republican base, to whom did Hastert turn? A priest or respected reverend? An older, wise political statesman with a reputation for integrity and dignity? No, there was only one person with sufficient credibility among the pious Republican base to give Hastert the blessing he needed: Rush Limbaugh. And so that is where Hastert went hat in hand in order to obtain the Decree That He Had Done Nothing Wrong. In September 2006, Hastert was a guest on Limbaugh’s radio show, where the two men agreed that Hastert had done nothing immoral. To show his support, Limbaugh posted a photograph of himself and Hastert on his website.

As much as one tries, it is exceedingly difficult to expunge that photograph of Limbaugh and Hastert from one’s mind because, in all its visceral hideousness, it really illustrates the principal reason why the Mark Foley scandal resonated so strongly.
That
is the real face of the ruling Republican Party, and it had been unmasked—violently—by the exposure of the gay underage-page predator Representative Mark Foley and his social conservative allies who long protected and harbored him.

After all, if the phrase “moral degenerate” can be fairly applied to anyone, there are few people who merit it more than Rush Limbaugh. He is the living and breathing embodiment of moral turpitude, with his countless overlapping sexual affairs; his series of shattered, dissolved, childless marriages; his hedonistic and illegal drug abuse; his jaunts—with fistfuls of unprescribed Viagra (but no wife)—to the Dominican Republic. By contrast, Rush Limbaugh makes the serial adulterer and thrice-married John Wayne look like the Paragon of Family Virtue.

Yet Limbaugh is whom Hastert chose as the High Priest of the Values Voters, to whom he made his pilgrimage, and from whom he received his benediction. The difference between Rush Limbaugh and Mark Foley, to the extent there is one, was one of hedonistic tastes, not rectitude. Yet Rush is inarguably the leader of the conservative movement’s most righteous wing.

Over the course of the next year, a seemingly endless stream of Mark Foleys emerged from under the rocks of the Values Voters leadership. Larry Craig, longtime conservative Idaho senator and co-chairman of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, took his 100 percent Christian Coalition voting record with him into a Minneapolis airport men’s room searching for anonymous gay sex, and thereafter pled guilty to disorderly conduct charges.

Social conservative senator David Vitter of Louisiana was revealed to be a regular customer of a Washington, D.C., whore-house, while his wife was at home raising their small children. Indeed, this mid-2007 scandal involving Vitter’s appetite for high-priced hookers, followed closely by the Larry Craig bathroom sex-solicitation episode, brought the ugly soul of the GOP’s social conservative pretense into full, unadorned view.

The Louisiana senator was one of the chief sponsors of the GOP’s 2006 proposed constitutional amendment to protect the sanctity of traditional marriage by banning same-sex marriages. This is what he said during the debate over that amendment: “I don’t believe there’s any issue that’s more important than this one.”