Dennis Hastert -- hypocrite du jour.

I make no secret of the fact that I was up to about the age of 21 or 22 a pretty die-hard conservative. I’ve come to realize in the ensuing 15 years or so that what I really was, though, was a robot programmed to spew right-wing talking points that I didn’t fully agree with, and that certainly didn’t make sense when juxtaposed to the life experiences my friends and loved ones in the theater and comedy scene recounted to me. But that experience “in the bubble” as it were gave me an insider look at the Bill Clinton years from the place where he was most hated, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that it was absolutely a moral crusade that they couched in lofty terms like “respecting the rule of law,” but ultimately Republicans were leading a witch hunt based on a sexual dalliance, and nothing more.

The more we learn about the men who led that witch hunt though, the more disgusted I am by the fact I had to witness it in the first place.

There’s the fact that Newt Gingrich was literally fucking his current wife on the side while he was castigating Clinton’s moral turpitude, and that’s tasty hypocrisy. But the story of Denny Hastert isn’t just hypocritical, it’s evil, cruel, and vomit inducing. We found out months ago that Hastert was indicted and ultimately convicted for paying hush money to a man that Haster allegedly sexually abused when he was a high school teacher, but a Chicago Tribune report has uncovered that Hastert may have had more in common with Jerry Sandusky than John Adams.

…a Tribune investigation has uncovered new details of the case — at least four people have made what law enforcement sources say are credible allegations of sexual abuse against Hastert. (source)

So let’s get our facts straight here. While Hastert was leading an impeachment charge against Bill Clinton largely because of a personal sexual relationship with an adult woman, he was hiding his past as a sexual offender whose crimes were perpetrated on teenage boys. The details of the Tribune’s report are far more disgusting than Bill’s affair with Monica, inappropriate that it was. Because in the end, both Lewinsky and Clinton knew what they were doing, and they were both adults. No one that Hastert abused was an adult, and considering that they were players on the football teams he coached, I could make a solid argument that he was abusing his authority figure role in a far more heinous way than Bill did.

If you want all the lurid details, you can read the Tribune piece in full. I just want to focus on the broader subject for now. I keep wondering when conservatives are going to wake up and realize their culture war is a sham. The Republicans have had plenty of congresses and White House tenures since Roe vs. Wade, for instance, to make a move there, and they simply haven’t. When you add to that the numerous times a “family values” conservative has been caught putting his dick in a place it shouldn’t have been, you should get the idea that they’re all probably full of shit on some level and you should stop leading moral crusades. Except, we all know that won’t happen, but why?

Why can’t they see that stories like these are exactly why their party is in decline? Hubris, sure. But what the hell makes them so delusional and self-unaware?

It’s basic human hypocrisy, I think. They get so blinded by their own ideological crusade that they lose site of their own humanity. In Hastert’s case, though, it’s something far more stomach-churning. He absolutely crucified — metaphorically speaking — Clinton over his sexual escapades, but as uncool as Clinton’s Oval Office beejers were on some level, how could Hastert sleep at night knowing full-well what he’d done?

These are questions that keep me awake, but that I’ll never find an answer two. Kinda like, “What does Donald Trump’s real hair look like?” or “If Rush Limbaugh wasn’t so full of shit, how much would he actually weigh?”

C’est la hypocrite.