Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (26 page)

Beyond this impressive pile of recent GOP social conservative sex scandals was one of the most revealing: the Mark Foley scandal of 2006. When that story broke, it had been mentioned that Foley was involved in enacting some of the recent Republican-sponsored laws aimed at pornography and the Internet. But it really went far beyond that.

As he spent his spare time sending overtly sexual IM messages and e-mails to underage male pages, Representative Foley was at the center of promoting virtually every law and program of the last ten years ostensibly designed to battle the evils of Internet sex and minors. It is not an exaggeration to say that Foley devoted his whole congressional career to adding decades of imprisonment to the mandatory punishments for those who use the Internet to talk about sex with minors. He did not merely condemn that which he was doing—he made the crusade against it his life’s work. That’s why, all over the Internet, one finds things such as this:

STATEMENT OF ATTORNEY GENERAL JOHN ASHCROFT ON THE PASSAGE OF THE SMITH-POMEROY-FOLEY CHILD OBSCENITY AND PORNOGRAPHY PREVENTION ACT

I am pleased that the House of Representatives passed the Child Obscenity and Pornography Prevention Act, a bill that will strengthen the ability of law enforcement to protect children from abuse and exploitation. I urge the Senate to bring this important legislation to the floor as soon as possible.

I want to thank Chairman Sensenbrenner for guiding this important legislation through the Judiciary Commitee [
sic
],
and Congressmen Lamar Smith, Mark Foley, and Earl Pomeroy for their leadership on this bill.
They have worked tirelessly to protect the health and safety of children.

The Department of Justice remains solid in its commitment to identify, investigate, and prosecute those who sexually exploit children. I look forward to working with Congress to see to it that this legislation becomes law, so that we may continue in our efforts to eliminate child pornography and prosecute offenders.

And Foley is not an isolated case of shocking hypocrisy. The hordes of those—the David Vitters and Rush Limbaughs and Newt Gingrichs and Jim Bakkers and Mark Foleys of the world—who have publicly crusaded against other people’s moral behavior, and who seek to use the power of the government to enforce their obsessions, are in many cases fighting their own demons. They have no other way to cleanse themselves.

We have been barraged with laws, programs, and sermons from a political movement whose most powerful pundit is a multiple-times-divorced drug addict who flamboyantly cavorts around with a new girlfriend every few months in between Viagra-fueled jaunts to the Dominican Republic. It is a political movement whose legacy will be torture, waterboarding, and naked, sadomasochistic games in Iraqi dungeons (or, to Limbaugh, “blowing off steam”), propped up by a facade of moralism and dependent on the support of those who have been propagandized into believing that they are voting for the Party of Values and Morals.

Cheap Lip Service

Even in the face of this unrelenting record of rank hypocrisy, chronic adultery, and sexual sleaze, the GOP continues to deceive Americans into believing that it is the party of Sexual Virtue and Traditional Marriage, and that its leaders are the wholesome Family Men that America urgently requires to reset its moral compass. And our establishment media continues to ingest and disseminate these ludicrous themes.

As recently as October 2006, right before the midterm elections, the thrice-married serial adulterer Newt Gingrich insisted that the GOP’s political salvation rests on its continuing exploitation of these sexual and cultural themes. Writing in
Human Events,
Gingrich contended that Republicans should remind the electorate that “Republicans are right to favor traditional American conservative social values, and the left is completely wrong to put San Francisco left-wing values third in line to be President by electing Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) to speaker of the House.”

Indeed. Compare the dirty San Francisco values of Pelosi (from her official biography) to the Christian Traditional Marriage Values embraced by Gingrich:

Nancy Pelosi’s “San Francisco left-wing values”

Upon graduation in 1962, she married Georgetown University graduate Paul Pelosi. Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, a native of San Francisco, have five children: Nancy Corinne, Christine, Jacqueline, Paul and Alexandra, and five grandchildren.

Newt Gingrich’s
“traditional American conservative social values”

In 1981, Newt dumped his first wife, Jackie Battley, for Marianne, wife number 2, while Jackie was in the hospital undergoing cancer treatment. He famously visited Jackie in the hospital where she was recovering from surgery for uterine cancer to discuss details of the divorce. He later resisted paying alimony and child support for his two daughters, causing a church to take up a collection. For all of his talk of religious faith and the importance of God, Gingrich left his congregation over the pastor’s criticism of his divorce.

Marianne and Newt divorced in December 1999 after Marianne found out about Newt’s long-running affair with Callista Bisek, his one-time congressional aide. According to
The New York Post,
Gingrich asked Marianne for the divorce by phoning her on Mother’s Day 1999. Newt (57) and Callista (34) were married in a private ceremony in a hotel courtyard in Alexandria, Va., in August 2000….

So those who repeatedly dump their wives for new and better versions are stalwart defenders of traditional American and Christian values. Those who stay married to their original spouse for their entire lives and raise a family together are godless, radical heathens who seek to undermine the country’s moral fiber and Christian traditions.

The extreme contrast between GOP “values” rhetoric and reality goes far beyond Pelosi and Gingrich. The leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination throughout 2007—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards—remain married to their first spouses, thereby shielding their children from the trauma of divorce and remarriage. But with the exception of Mitt Romney, the leading GOP contenders—Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Fred Thompson—behaved like Gingrich, dumping their spouses and bringing new women, step-mothers, into the lives of their children.

One of the very few GOP social conservatives to speak honestly about the transparent deceit characterizing the Republicans’ exploitation of Values Voters issues is Governor Mike Huckabee. As he put it in 2007, in warning against the unbridled hatred directed by many Republicans at the Clintons:

The second thing, and this’ll really wrangle, again, some of my Republican colleagues. Bill Clinton and Hillary went through some horrible experiences in their marriage, because of some of the reckless behavior that he has admitted he had. I’m not defending him on that—it’s indefensible. But they kept their marriage together.
And a lot of the Republicans who have condemned them, and who talk about their platform of family values, interestingly didn’t keep their own families together.

It was the Values Voters of the morally upstanding Republican Party that gave America its first divorced president, as Ronald Reagan moved into the White House with his second wife, Nancy. Reagan’s highly dysfunctional and quite untraditional family was composed of children with different mothers who were often not even on speaking terms with their Moral Majority dad.

During the MSNBC discussion about Fred Thompson between Chris Matthews and
Newsweek
’s Howard Fineman, detailed in the prior chapter, they classified Thompson not merely as an exemplar of masculine virtues but also as a true “cultural conservative.” Fineman assured the audience that Thompson has “a strong record on cultural issues
as a cultural conservative from the South.
” But in what conceivable way could Thompson be said to be a “cultural conservative”?

Unlike the leading Democratic contenders of 2007—all of whom are still married to their first spouse—Thompson divorced his wife (and the mother of his two children) after twenty-five years of marriage and proceeded, at the age of fifty-nine, to marry a woman twenty-five years younger than he. In 2002, the
Washington Post
’s Lloyd Grove wrote:

Fred Thompson and Jeri Kehn met six years ago on the Fourth of July in Nashville….

“Hollywood Fred”—as the divorced Thompson was nicknamed because of his successful movie career—has been linked to a variety of women, including country singer Lorrie Morgan, pundit-pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick,
Time
magazine writer Margaret Carlson, Nathans restaurant owner Carol Joynt and Washington PR executive Sydney Ferguson.

Revealingly, in the very same show where Thompson was hailed as a “cultural conservative,” Chris Matthews again held forth obsessively on the Clintons’ marriage, and one of his guests referred to “the incredible fascination that the American public has…on the private lives of the Clintons.” Matthews dredged it all up again: Gennifer Flowers; Kathleen Willey; the
Weekly Standard
cover story from that week that “calls the Clintons ‘a riveting saga of lust and ambition’” “the women who want us to know about the relationships with Bill” and—as Matthews put it—the “pair of new books [that] exquisitely expose Bill and Hillary Clinton as a couple of soap opera characters.”

But Fred Thompson? Fineman: “He’s got a strong record on cultural issues as a cultural conservative from the South.” Matthews: “He fits the need for a Bible Belt candidate.” And the week before, Matthews provoked this exchange with social conservative leader Ken Blackwell, the failed GOP gubernatorial candidate from Ohio:

MATTHEWS:
Let me ask you about your party and the cultural right. I noticed that there is no cultural conservative southern Baptist type running this time. The President isn’t quite in that category, but people are very comfortable with this president, in terms of his beliefs, his Christian beliefs, his cultural values. Is there a candidate out there now
that shares the President’s cultural values?

KEN BLACKWELL, FORMER OHIO SECRETARY OF STATE:
It seems as if Fred Thompson, who has yet to declare, is starting to build a momentum among social conservatives. But I will tell you—

MATTHEWS:
Well, he’s from Tennessee. He’s from the buckle of the Bible Belt. I believe he is Baptist. He fits. He is pro-life. He has been for many years. He fits all of the categories. There’s nobody else like him.

Social-Christian conservative Fred Thompson, who proclaims to be “pro–traditional marriage,” has a current wife (his second) who is not only twenty-five years younger than he, but, as mentioned earlier, is
four years younger than his own daughter
(from his first marriage).

When explaining his profound and solemn opposition to same-sex marriages (Thompson voted for laws prohibiting same-sex marriages and against laws banning discrimination against gays), he said: “Marriage is between a man and a woman, and judges shouldn’t be allowed to change that.” But according to
The Politico
’s Mike Allen, this is how Thompson jocularly describes his own romantic life:

During a question-and-answer session with House members on April 18, Thompson was asked about his colorful dating history from 1985 to 2002, while he was divorced.

“I was single for a long time, and, yep, I chased a lot of women,” Thompson replied, chuckling, according to an attendee who took notes. “And a lot of women chased me. And those that chased me tended to catch me.”

The remark drew laughter from men and grins from women, according to witnesses.

Mystifying indeed, is that people who are on their second or third marriages, with children from each union, can with a straight face proclaim themselves believers in traditional marriage. And—more curiously still—insist that the laws be structured so as to recognize their own highly untraditional and un-Christian sexual exploits and serial marriages, while so avidly concerning themselves with prohibiting or denouncing the sexual behaviors and unions of certain other citizens. And it’s even more of a mystery that such hypocritical moralizers are taken seriously.

But Beltway pundits are eager to be so easily fooled. Their thought processes and emotional reactions are dominated by these shallow and inauthentic symbols of masculinity and piety, notwithstanding the wholesale departure from reality by the GOP leaders who purvey these illusions. The pundits find two-dimensional, cartoon images that are just clichéd archetypes—really, caricatures—deeply satisfying.

The issue is not that these Traditional Marriage proponents sometimes stray from their own standards. People are imperfect. Many people will inevitably falter. The point is that they apply these supposed principles because it is expedient to do so, in ways that are politically comfortable, thus revealing the complete inauthenticity of their alleged convictions. And nothing illustrates this inauthenticity more starkly than the GOP’s endless though patently insincere exploitation of the so-called sanctity of marriage and anti-gay laws for their own political gain.