Ok, I don’t really care much about Ryan trying to bed his wife at a stip club - whatever arguments a husband & wife about their sex life is their business. However, Ryan has handled this episode in ridiculous manner.
First of all, you lied to your own party. For months you insisted that there was nothing in your divorce files that would embarass the party. Two prominent Illinois Republicans, Topinka and Edgar, are on the record stating that you weren’t exactly truthful in your disclosure. If you can’t be trusted to tell the truth to your own party - why should anyone else believe you.
Second, you said the reason the files were closed was because you didn’t want to embarass your son. However, you implied that the records were about your son’s condition when in fact they had nothing to do with it. You hid behind your son’s illness to satiate your own political ambitions.
Third, you come up with another lie in a talking points memo in an attempt to create a diversion from the story:
So, you just lie lie lie whenever you can to suit your needs. Well, even though I’m not a republican, I think you’re an asshole and need to drop out of this race. The only things keeping you in are pride and ego, and that’s really not a good reason to stay in. You’re a fucking liar and the GOP would do well to kick you off the ballot.
Here’s an honest question that I meant to ask in the other thread, but why were these records made public anyway? Is it standard procedure to do so? I’m not a fan of civil cases as personal as divorce being made public.
In any case, this guy has just lost my sympathy. What a punk.
It is standard procedure for divorce records to be public information. They are, after all, the records of a court. One has to request that they be sealed, and the judge has to agree to it. Apparently, this judge changed his mind. Oh well for Ryan.
This is the same guy who sent an intern to hover around his opponent with a video camera 24 hours day and shout harrassing remarks at him whenever he gave an interview, right?
And the Chicago Tribune and a Chicago television station requested that they be opened up. Apparently it’s extremely, extremely rare for the Illinois courts to seal records like that, and the media asked about it as a question of what sort of character he has, or something like that. Seems that his character shone through in everything besides those records anyway…
I figured that once they exposed Hull’s papers, the reporters (and political opponents) were happy that they found a new source of dirt and started looking into it whenever possible. Plus, even if they can’t get the records unsealed, they can ask, “what have you got to hide, hmmm…”
If the last opinion poll i saw (a few weeks ago) is any indication, there’s no way Ryan could have won the election anyway, even if his divorce records contained not a single piece of problematic information.
As others have pointed out, he sent a guy with a camera to tail his democratic opponent.
And the opinion polls suggest that the Democrat, Barack Obama, would have to keel over dead to give Ryan any chance of winning.
I bet Tom Clancy’s pissed that his main hero’s namesake is such a tool. The photo’s I’ve seen of him make him look like a fake, shallow sonofabitch, but then again he’s a politician so that should be expected*.
*Except John McCain. That man has my utmost respect.
I’ve heard theories his name was one of the reasons he was first approached to run for office. It was felt he would have strong name recognition and good initial reactions because of the fictional character.
It also doesn’t hurt that our previous governor and attorney general both had the surname of Ryan too. (No relation, for any of them, IIRC.)
Well, maybe it would hurt - that governor ended his term under scandal* and controversy**, and that attorney general lost his bid for governor, probably mostly due to his association with the previous administration.
For the non-Chicagoans/Illinoisians, background on Blair Hull: He was the Democratic front-runner in the primaries for this race (IMO, mostly because he had the cash to afford to plaster slick campaign ads all over TV), until it was discovered that he had (IIRC) sealed divorce records as well. It turns out that his ex-wife had filed for a restraining order against him, claiming he’d hit her. He mishandled the situation badly as well, and his approval rating plummeted. If he’d won, we could have had the “wife beater” versus the “pervert” in the upcoming election - and here I thought that the phrase “choosing the lesser evil” was just a metaphor.
*There was a scheme among some employees in the Secretary of State office (they handle DMV functions) to take bribes paid by truck drivers who didn’t want to/couldn’t pass the driving tests. One of those drivers had a poorly-maintained truck, he ignored or didn’t understand CB warnings from other truckers, and a piece fell off into the road, causing an accident that killed a minister’s children. Ensuing investigations turned up this scheme, the discovery that some of the bribes ended up in the governor’s campaign fund in previous years, and questions about how far up the political ladder people knew about the scheme.
**Due to a demonstrated history of wrongful convictions on cases where inmates were on Death Row - most of them shown by a Northwestern U professor and his students - the governor had said he would look into the convictions of those on Death Row and see what needed to be done. Instead of the case-by-case decisions that most people expected, he instead commuted all of their sentences to life in prison, right before he left office. This managed to piss off many people on both sides of the death penalty issue, who assumed he hadn’t put much effort into studying the cases and that he wanted something to distract people from the license-for-bribes scandal.
Oh, if you’re going to pit Jack Ryan pit him for a better reason (his use of the camera-wielding shouting intern sounds like a valid, if perfectly dull, reason).
Personally, I’m O.K. with lying if it is in answer to questions that no one has any right to ask in the first place. It was O.K. for Clinton to lie about Oval Office hanky panky and it’s O.K. for Jack Ryan to lie about his reasons for wanting his divorce records sealed.
Now, whether or not lying is a smart move is another question. As both the above referenced incidents proved, if the truth is eventually going to come out and bite you in the ass it’s pretty stupid to commit to the lie in the first place. But still, if the facts are no one else’s business go ahead and lie lie lie. It’s O.K. with me.
Well, I never liked the guy to begin with, but sorry…there’s no fucking way his kinky sexual proclivities are any of our business. He had every right to lie about it as far as I’m concerned. It has nothing to do with the job.
As a democrat, I say WAHOO. One less asshole to spoil the soup. But to bring him down about this as opposed to his general assholey demeanor in politics is WRONG.
The big problem is that he lied to top members of the Illinois Republican party immediately before the records were released, reassuring them that there was nothing embarrassing in the records, or outlining what they could expect but skipping over the “tried to push my wife into having sex with me in front of others in sex clubs” bit. So a former governor made a public statement that he thought Ryan’s career and campaign wouldn’t be impacted, then hears about that little tidbit and feels completely misled and betrayed. The State Treasurer/head of the IL Republican party got jerked around as well.
I mean, what the hell? Is he a pathological liar? If I knew that there was a document on me that contained allegations of various misbehaviors, that it would definitely be released the next day or so, and people who were close to me asked me what was in it, you bet I’d spill the beans. Those papers contained his own denials of those actions anyway - he claimed all that happened was that they’d gone to some club in Paris without knowing it was a sex club, and left immediately - so it’s not like he said in the records, “she’s a prude, she needs to live a little, show off that bod, it’s fun and exciting at those clubs.”
Admittedly I’m a Democrat, and my husband and I both thought Ryan just looked slimy from day one, but I’d have sympathy for the guy if it was just that - he’s kinky, his ex-wife isn’t, whatever. But when he blatantly lies to his own allies when it’s 100% sure that those records are going to be opened, it makes you wonder what’s up with him.
