By all accounts, this surprised almost everyone EXCEPT the boys he raped.
The news reports implied heavily that he was into performing oral sex on straight teenage boys. (vomit smiley)
Not necessarily. I think that’s true if considering a particular case in isolation. But if there’s a systematic pattern of a particular party having more than its share of immoral reprobates, and furthermore if that happens to be the party that bills itself as the champion of morality and family values, then one might get the impression that there is something about that party that attracts cynical, unprincipled opportunists. Which is actually quite a satisfying theory for those trying to figure out what the hell is happening in this election cycle!
And yet for the same thing Oscar got a posthumous sainthood and consecration as Gay Hero for the Ages.
Emphasis mine.
Dennis Hastert was heavily involved in the Bill Clinton impeachment. See here -
And here -
At the time that Hastert was molesting these boys, he insisted that the President be impeached for lying under oath. He announced that he would be be moving forward with the impeachment because the President was not above the law and because Clinton’s misconduct was too important to sweep under the rug.
Hastert was also involved in covering up for Mark Foley, the Republican congressman who was the head of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and who was later drummed out for sexually harrassing and propositioning the male House pages.
Hastert claims that he wasn’t told about the scandal until September, 2006. However John Boehner and RNC Member Tom Reynold are sure that they’d discussed it months earlier, in 2005. Reynold’s chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, has claimed that he told Hastert’s office back in 2003.
There are dozens of links about this at Wiki, here’s a few more:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-12-08-foley_x.htm
An interview with one of the pages involved:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/the-page-who-took-down-the-gop-mark-foley-dennis-hastert-213378
Hastert is absolutely the latest in a long line of Republican family values candidates who turn out to be indulging dark vices. If you think an anti-gay crusader gettering caught enjoying gay sex is noteworthy, then a congressional child molester caught covering up for another congressional predator is absolutely headline news.
Hastert, by the by, denied any wrong doing in the Foley scandal and refused to resign. The Republicans, while censuring him in their report on the mess, never called for his impeachment.
Your complaint would make more sense if it weren’t for the fact that Hastert did indeed actively push anti-Gay legislation as a Congressman.
And if felony rape and molestation — albeit with the statute of limitations now expired — doesn’t go beyond your “random moral failing”, then what would? Murder? Treason?
This one of the guys who impeached Bill Clinton for sexual misconduct. Let’s see… Clinton got his weenie sucked by an adult woman old enough to consent to sexual contact. It was skeevy, but not illegal.
Meanwhile, Hastert was molesting underage boys. Something not only skeevy (to put it mildly) but also illegal. Under current laws that makes Hastert a sexual predator as well as a hypocrite.
Let Hastert rot in jail, where he belongs. Screw him and his “I’m old I’m feeble” bullshit. The man is scum.
Well the OP sure could’ve made a better case for it. The title of this thread is a tribalistic shitpost (it doesn’t even say Hastert, it just says a republican) and no context was provided by the OP. We rate the quality of pittings, right? I’m sure you could make a good pitting out of this, but this OP did not do so at all.
The ironic part is that Hastert became Speaker almost directly due to the GOP’s impeachment of Clinton over his (consensual, adult) liaison with Monica Lewinsky. Once they committed to impeaching Clinton, the adulterous affairs of Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston (the initial candidate to be Newt’s successor as Speaker) were a problem, so they got ditched, and they brought in Hastert to be Tom DeLay’s figurehead as Speaker. And then a few years later, as noted by Merneith, Hastert tried to keep the lid on GOP Congresscritter Mark Foley’s sexual harassment of House pages.
And as a side effect, when Bob Livingston’s resigned from the House, the man we now know as ‘Diaper Dave’ Vitter was elected to his House seat, and later to the Senate.
Is either party worse than the other with respect to stuff like this? I have no idea. But (a) only one party holds itself up as the ‘family values’ party (and sexual morality is what that label is all about), and (b) that was a hell of a lot of rather un-family-values shit going on in a small space.
Ford? Or Carter? 
Hastert needs to go to jail, for a long, long time. It’s too bad that his crimes when he was a wrestling coach cannot be prosecuted. I agree that his actions as a politician show hypocrisy of the highest order.
Yes, in the rape sense of blowing. But he’s sorry for his “transgressions,” says his lawyer.
The first three are questionable enough in predictability that I agree with John that we shouldn’t strawman them. But the last one is quite predictable and is fair game IMO.
Ugh, not this again. No one impeached Clinton “for sexual misconduct”. You need to let that meme go.
You could be right, but is once you put it out there like that, you can’t claim to have predicted it if someone does come in with that comment. You invited it in.
Who’s Oscar?
Wilde.
And it’s true that I don’t think people feel the same need to put a “Eww, that’s gross, everyone notice I think that’s TOTALLY DISGUSTING” disclaimer in front of accounts that someone was having coercive sex with teenage girls, and that vaguely bugs me.
Jared Fogle was a liberal who met Obama & Michelle at the White House!!
All Democrats are Pedophiles!!!
My team wins!!
Jared Fogle was the esteemed Congressman from where, again? :rolleyes:
Does your team know you escaped from the basement without permission again?
I mean… I was criticizing that the OP was dumb, and here you come making an even dumber post than the OP strawmanned.
None of them are home on Sunday mornings, because Jeebus.
I prefer to think of them as predictions of future behavior… Based on past performance on this very message board.
Along the lines of “don’t try this shit, because we’ve seen it before”
Of course,that did not stop someone from trying that exact shit anyway. (waves at Stringbean)
So think of this as a multi-purpose pitting; Hastert for being a judgemental hypocritical child-abusing asshole, while at the same time pretending to be a family values politician,
And
Those posters here who use the aforementioned tactics to “defend” judgemental hypocritical child-abusing assholes.
I guess I’ll add another type of poster to the list; Those who try to ignore the issue with the judgemental hypocritical child-abusing assholes, while trying to focus instead on the failings of the original pit-post in the first place. Sorry to have missed that one.
You need to let go of your insistence. Just like you need to let go of your incessant, and useless and boring and wrong, both-sides-ism.