House Rep. Dr. Adultery McAbortion (R-TN)
The story of Republican Rep. Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee continues to be a pitch-perfect demonstration of "conservative values" in practice. To wit, the only thing that matters to the conservative base is what you say,
not what you do.
A self-proclaimed social conservative, DesJarlais has been in political trouble since news reports revealed he pressured a former patient of his to get an abortion after they had an affair, details that emerged during divorce proceedings. Later, after he won reelection, reports showed he and his wife had agreed to have two abortions before their divorce.
But unlike some other scandal-wracked politicians like Anthony Weiner, Eric Massa, or Eliot Spitzer, DesJarlais hasn’t become an outcast at all. Republican leaders haven’t punished him. He still holds positions on the Agriculture and, yes, the Oversight and Government Reform committees. Even more glaring: He’s getting fundraising assistance on Tuesday from six influential colleagues, including three committee chairmen (GOP Reps. Darrell Issa of California, John Kline of Minnesota, and Frank Lucas of Oklahoma) and two potential Senate candidates (Kline and Rep. Tom Price of Georgia).
DesJarlais was propped up during his election purely as a tactical thing; if he dropped out, the odds the GOP could have kept the seat would have plummeted. So it doesn't matter if he had multiple affairs, pressured mistresses into abortions, smoked pot or had been proven to be a smarmy, rotten bastard: He was
their smarmy, rotten bastard, and that was enough for (1) the base to ignore his sins and (2) the party to stick by him, rather than condemn him. Now that he's elected, it doesn't look like all that past
stuff is going to affect his position among his colleagues one bit. They may preach morality, but even among the base it's mostly a sham—a stated justification for their own perceived natural authority over others.
One of the more remarkable things to hear during CPAC was the near-comical ability of some of the speakers to separate the "conservative solution" to things from even the most obvious implications of those "solutions." I was hoping to hear solid defenses of conservative ideas, right from the most influential minds (cough) of the movement; instead, many of the speakers spent their time on the decidedly less brain-intensive notion of conservative good, liberal bad. Anything they liked was labeled the "conservative" position, and anything they didn't like was the "liberal" position. Anything that was the "conservative" position would of course work, past history be damned; anything that was the "liberal" position was obviously dumb and stupid and probably the first step towards totalitarianism. And those were the big applause lines. The value of most ideas could be measured entirely by how much they thought liberals would be pissed off by them, not by whether they were important, logical or even grounded in reality.
The DesJariais thing is like that. He can't be a rotten bastard because he says he's conservative, and he says the right things. Whether he does the exact opposite in his own life is beside the point, and everybody around him knows it.
