As we move into the electoral end game in the 14th District, the GOP in the spirit of choice has decided to offer two selections of spin for those constituents who still feel the need to salve their consciences on the Foley scandal before putting the X in the box for Dennis Hastert.
For those who worship Hastert, the kind of people who follow him through the woods when he walks his dogs, hoping to pick up some droppings that they can then encase in Lucite cubes to give to their friends as paperweights for Christmas, there is the stark and strange statement that it was the Democrats, not the Republicans, who knew about the Foley scandal and kept it a secret in order to embarrass Hastert. We can pass these people by, perhaps only wondering why people so blindly loyal would even need to be told a story at all.
But there is a second spin job being rolled out...
...for those Republicans who have both brains and a heart and who have voted Republican in the past because they believed in some of its original ideals. These are the people who still can't accept what they are seeing with their party and are still hoping against hope that the picture isn't as bad as it is shaping up to be. We are going to see the second spin job rolled out in the next two weeks, not only by the Hastert posse, but by every DINO, fellow traveler, wannabe player, and disgruntled loser trying to carve out some sort of moral middle ground where they elephants can romp and play and trample the rest of us one more time.
The title of the second spin is The Man Who Wasn't There.
One of the ways that we can tell that the Republicans are now just in it for the power and the money is that none of them, and I mean none of them, are willing to take a personal hit for the benefit of the Party as a whole until the marshal has them down on the ground with the boot on the back of the neck. Hastert himself has conflated himself with the entire Republican Congress, which is being called upon to cover his massive ass for him. A defeat for Hastert is being called a defeat for the Party. But far more importantly for Hastert, a defeat for Hastert would be a defeat for Hastert. And so now we are seeing people, taking the guise of concern trolls, saying "We are concerned about the Foley scandal too. But shouldn't Hastert be considered innocent until proven guilty?" as though Hastert was caught behind the wheel after a bank robbery.
The sleight of hand here is that Hastert has not been accused of a crime. He is being accused of corrupt leadership. And the evidence of corrupt leadership isn't in what he did or didn't do but in what his people did or didn't do.
We know for a fact that a number of high ranking Republican Congressmen knew about Foley and sat on it because they themselves have told us. The Keystone Cops antics surrounding the finger pointing and the floating and changing of stories, including the antics of Hastert himself, show that when Foley was unmasked the organization knew collectively that a cat had indeed been let out of the bag.
But now some Republicans and their operatives are engaged in a cynical appeal to the American sense of fairness and are asking the voters to give Hastert a pass "until the facts are in;" as though a leader has the right to stand aloof from the actions of the group he commands. Hastert is being cast as The Man Who Wasn't There.
This form of escaping accountability has been a theme in the Republican Party for some years, as we have heard the "they didn't know" story with Bush and Rumsfeld and their cadre with Iraq. All these self touted strong leaders bang their chests until their corruption and incompetence reveals itself in the actions of the people they are leading. Then they ask to be allowed to revert to the position of innocent bystander.
The real moral choice with Dennis Hastert is this. Either he was a leader in control of the cover up, or he was a leader out of control of the cover up going on beneath him. The choices are "corrupt or incompetent" not "innocent or guilty". Corrupt of incompetent lead to only one political choice. Hastert must be removed from office. And since Hastert didn't do the honorable thing for his party and resign and leave the way clear for a less besmirched Republican (if one can be found in Illinois) we are going to have to vote Laesch in and Hastert out. This election has now become a plebiscite about Republican rule. There is no middle ground any more.
(Cross posted on Fireside14.com)