Day: June 5, 2006

The Real Threat to Marriage: Top 10 GOP Adulterers

Jon Ponder

Ten Commandments

The traditional media may be interested almost exclusively in the sex lives of Democratic politicians, but on the hypocrisy index, it is hard to score higher than Republicans pontificating about saving the institution of marriage while so many of their leaders are serial and long-time adulterers:

1. President George H.W. Bush allegedly had an LTR with British-born Jennifer Fitzgerald that lasted at least two decades, all while married to Bar, who said, “He didn’t even notice when I stopped coloring my hair.”

2. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, famously married to Maria Shriver since 1986, is allegedly a purveyor of prostitutes, the father of at least one child out of wedlock and a serial groper of women in workplace situations.

3. Sen. John McCain, 2008 Republican presidential frontrunner, and admitted adulterer and alleged philanderer. [Update July 2008: McCain’s Extramarital Affair with Cindy Ended His Friendship with Reagans in the 1970s]

4. Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and another GOP 2008 presidential contender, betrayed his second wife, TV presenter Donna Hanover, with his “very good friend” Judith Nathan, whom he has since married. Hanover also publicly accused Rudy of having an affair with a staffer, Cristyne Lategano-Nicholas.

5. Rush Limbaugh, comedian, (a.k.a. “Rusty Sharpe”) dated Marta Fitzgerald while she was married to someone else. Marta later became his third wife. (He and CNN’s Daryn Kagin recently stopped dating.)

6. Bill O’Reilly, propagandist, who is married to Maureen McPhilmy, tried to have phone sex with Andrea Mackris, who sued him for sexual harrassment.

7. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, is probably the most audacious serial adulterer in any political party.

8. Former Rep. Bob Barr’s notoriety as an adulterer was one of many ironies around the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA) which he wrote, and which was passed with the leadership of fellow adulterers Sen. Majority Leader Bob Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

9. Rep. Henry Hyde, who served as chairman of House Mangers in the adultery-related impeachment of President Clinton, was a home-wrecker himself. Hyde had an affair when he was a young and foolish man of 41 while he and his girlfriend were both very much married. Her husband later said Hyde broke up his family.

10. Gary Bauer, professional moralizing Christian nationalist, experienced a mutiny when he was running for president when actual Christians on the staff of his 2000 presidential campaign quit in protest over Bauer’s “inappropriate” behavior with a 26-year-old deputy campaign manager. Euww.

11. (Updated) Had to add this one sent in by reader S.O. that probably should have bumped poor old Henry Hyde on the list: Neal Horsley, and rightwing religious nut, freely admitted to a kinky sex life, including this outrageous exchange on Fox’s Hannity & Colmes:

AC: “You had sex with animals?”

NH: “Absolutely. I was a fool. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule.”

AC: “I’m not so sure that that is so.”

NH: “You didn’t grow up on a farm in Georgia, did you?”

AC: “Are you suggesting that everybody who grows up on a farm in Georgia has a mule as a girlfriend?”

NH: It has historically been the case. You people are so far removed from the reality… Welcome to domestic life on the farm…”

UPDATE: Thanks for all the emails. Our list attempts to identify the top 10 adulterers so there were several top contenders that didn’t make it:

  • Rep. Bob Livingston, the man who would have been House Speaker after Newt if Larry Flynt hadn’t uncovered some very kinky dirt on Livingtston. He was a top contender but since he never really served as Speaker, was bumped for Bauer.
  • It is true that Nancy Reagan was pregnant when she married Ronnie, but neither of them was married to anyone else at the time. By Republican standards of “abstinence only,” Nancy clearly did not say “no.”
  • We covered the rumors of troubles in the marriage of the president and Laura Bush but the evidence of this is spotty.
  • A definite top 10 contender is the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, a sanctimonius Clinton-hater, who, as reader TL reminds us, “[Apparently] had a fling with the DAUGHTER of someone he was having an affair with and then arranged for (or at least condoned) the abortion of their child.”
  • Back-bencher Rep. Don Sherwood of Pennsylvania, whose adultery with a younger woman was revealed after he tried to strangle her, didn’t make the cut, but someone please tell us he won’t be re-elected. (And thanks, M.H. and others, for the reminder!)
  • Reader Tim pointed out the track record of Rep. Jim Nussle of Iowa, who used his wife and autistic child as family values props then left them for a high-powered lobbyist after he was elected.

Keep ’em coming!

Poll: We’re Slouching Toward Theocracy

Buck Banks

Bible babble: George Barna, the Pollster of the Lord, has just come out with another survey purporting to assess the spiritual state of the nation. Somehow, Barna always seems to find what he’s looking for in his nationwide telephone surveys.

His latest poll supposedly confirms Americans’ “reputation as a highly religious people” because “half of all American adults said that their life has been ‘greatly transformed’ by their religious faith.”

People who are usually conservative on political matters were almost twice as likely as those who are generally liberal to cite great personal transformation as a result of their faith.

Overall, 51 percent of the survey respondents said they have been greatly transformed by their faith, about one-fourth (28 percent) said their faith has been helpful but has not produced significant transformation, and nearly one out of five (17 percent) claimed their faith has not made much of a difference in their life.

Women were more likely than men to claim their faith has had a great impact (56 percent vs. 45 percent). Residents of the South were the most likely to cite such an effect (63 percent), while folks in the Midwest were about average (50 percent), and adults in the West (44 percent) and Northeast (39 percent) were much less inclined to attribute such influence to faith. Nearly two-thirds of African-Americans (62 percent) assigned great impact to their faith, compared to half of whites (50 percent) and Hispanics (49 percent), and barely one-quarter of Asians (27 percent). People who are usually conservative on political matters were almost twice as likely as those who are generally liberal to cite great personal transformation as a result of their faith (64 percent versus 35 percent).

Now there’s the chicken-and-egg question: Are we liberals godless because we’re liberal or liberal because we’re godless?

Barna honed in on the pesky 17 percent who said their faith has made no difference in their life. Want to know who they are?

  • Men (21 percent of the 17 percent) were 62 percent more likely than women to say faith meant little in their lives
  • People under 25 (35 percent) — more than twice the proportion among older adults
  • Asians (48 percent) were three times as likely as all other ethnic groups to be faith-free
  • Liberals (28 percent) were three times more likely than conservatives to say faith has made no difference for them
  • Lutherans (16 percent) and Methodists (14 percent) — twice the proportion among other Protestants
  • Atheists and agnostics (64 percent)

Whoa, athiests and agnostics I expected to shun the Lord, but Lutherans and Methodists? What is this world coming to? Barna knows:

“The current political clash between conservatives and liberals over the role of religion and faith in the public square is partially attributable to the fact that so few liberals have had a life-changing experience driven by their faith,” Barna commented. “Conservatives are nearly twice as likely to say that their faith has transformed who they are and how they live. It is only natural that they would therefore want others to have similar breakthroughs, while those who have never had such experiences are more likely to feel threatened by policies designed to foster a faith-oriented renaissance. The absence of a life-changing spiritually-driven experience may also explain why liberals are less likely to believe in God, to attend church, to read the Bible, to donate to religious institutions, and to portray themselves as being spiritually inclined.”

[…]

CA Gov: One Day before Primary Voting, Dem Voters Still Undecided on Angelides and Westly

Jon Ponder

With primary voting tomorrow, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez aptly summed up the current state of the Democratic race between Phil Angelides and Steve Westly for California governor:

State Controller Westly has 35 percent to state Treasurer Angelides’ 34 percent, with 26 percent undecided.

California’s Democratic primary for governor, in particular, is an affair so sleazy and vicious it would inspire revolt, except that no one is paying attention.

The latest Field Poll underscores this:

“During the 60-year history of the Field Poll, there never has been as large a proportion of voters undecided so close to the election in a top-of-the-ticket major party primary,” according to DiCamillo and Mervin Field of the Field Poll…

The Field survey found that Angelides and Westly remain tied, each with about one-third of the Democratic vote, but with more than one-quarter undecided…

State Controller Westly has 35 percent to state Treasurer Angelides’ 34 percent, with 26 percent undecided.

Advantage: Schwarzenegger.

Reid Email Calls Out Republican Pandering

Trish

Did you get the email from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, signed by Harry Reid, with a link to sign a petition asking the Senate to get real? If not, here’s the gist:

…it’s election season and down-in-the-polls Republicans are turning to their same old playbook – fear and division. Later this week, Bill Frist, in an attempt to appease extreme right wing elements of the Republican Party, has promised that the Senate will vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment and attempt to write discrimination into the Constitution for the first time in 230 years.

…We don’t need another Terri Schiavo moment where we spend valuable time away from the important work…

…Senate Republicans and their big oil friends have forced more than ten votes to drill for oil in ANWR, but not a single vote to lower gas prices…

We need a President and a Congress that doesn’t play divisive politics. At a time of war, Republicans should unite the country and focus on the real issues, not divide and undermine its founding principles.

Go here to sign the petition.

The Fundamental Flaw in the Bush Policy

Trish

Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jay Bookman had an Iraq epiphany after reading a blog by former Air Force intelligence officer John Robb, who is now a security and anti-terror consultant. “The problem,” Robb wrote at Global Guerillas, “has become bigger than our will to fix it.”

Bookman says that, in fact, was always the case.

Since the American people wouldn’t buy a big war, we got sold a tidy war, a war in which “mission accomplished” could be declared quickly and Iraq could fund its own reconstruction.

The truth is, the gap between the problem and our will to fix it has existed from the moment this invasion was conceived. It was the fundamental flaw in the Bush policy, the single thing that doomed it to failure.

If we were going to invade and occupy Iraq, we should have done so with hundreds of thousands of troops, after months of intensive planning. We should have committed ourselves to spending as much money as it took, as much time as it took, as many lives as it took to ensure Iraq’s security.

But that level of national will did not exist, and the Bush administration knew it. Even in the wake of Sept. 11, they knew that the American people would never buy an optional war that large and expensive. They also knew that without a draft, they lacked the manpower that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki and others told them they needed.

Yet they wanted this war so badly — they yearned in their bones to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein and establish American military power in the heart of the Middle East — that they went ahead and did it anyway.

Since the American people wouldn’t buy a big war, we got sold a tidy war, a war in which “mission accomplished” could be declared quickly and Iraq could fund its own reconstruction. It was a fake war, an illusion of war, a war deceptively downsized to fit political will and not reality.

No wise leader does that. No wise leader commits his nation to a war he suspects it is not prepared to win, and we will pay a heavy price for that miscalculation.

Bookman predicts we will be in Iraq for years, defending our military outposts while the rest of the country grinds into increasingly violent decline. It’s not a very optimistic picture but is there anyone who thinks it’s not a possibility?