Washington Times calls for Hastert's resignation

Tony Blankley of the Washington Times calls for Dennis Hastert's resignation.

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

Should Hastert resign?

The switchboard at The Washington Times has been lit up all morning with reaction, positive and negative, to this editorial, excerpted below, from Editorial Page Editor Tony Blankley:

The facts of the disgrace of Mark Foley, who was a Republican member of the House from a Florida district until he resigned last week, constitute a disgrace for every Republican member of Congress. Red flags emerged in late 2005, perhaps even earlier, in suggestive and wholly inappropriate e-mail messages to underage congressional pages. His aberrant, predatory — and possibly criminal — behavior was an open secret among the pages who were his prey. The evidence was strong enough long enough ago that the speaker should have relieved Mr. Foley of his committee responsibilities contingent on a full investigation to learn what had taken place, whether any laws had been violated and what action, up to and including prosecution, were warranted by the facts. This never happened …

House Speaker Dennis Hastert must do the only right thing, and resign his speakership at once. Either he was grossly negligent for not taking the red flags fully into account and ordering a swift investigation, for not even remembering the order of events leading up to last week’s revelations — or he deliberately looked the other way in hopes that a brewing scandal would simply blow away. He gave phony answers Friday to the old and ever-relevant questions of what did he know and when did he know it? Mr. Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation, an investigation that must examine his own inept performance.



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I couldn't resist doing a post on Tony Blankley's web log. The Washington times is owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and is a right wing publication with ties to the Bush administration. I'll be surprised if it is left on...

linus Says:
Looks to me like the Republican party needs another figurehead, what with so many of the neoconservatives unable to remember pertinenet facts and events.
Even Condaleeza Rice, who was once the provost of Stanford University uses this ploy. The old “one voice” routine, along with the “I don’t recall” unless It’s convenient trick, is repetitive and predictable. Remember….An elephant never forgets…

posted at 10:09 PM
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The Republicans, Moonies and the Washington Times

Posted by Damm yankee on October 31, 2004 at 01:54:06

If House Speaker Dennis Hastert were really concerned about drug profits being laundered into the U.S. political process, he would not be sliming billionaire financier George Soros with that suspicion. Hastert would be looking at a principal conservative funder: South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon.

While Hastert was unable to cite a shred of evidence that the liberal Soros is funneling illicit money, there is a substantial body of evidence that Moon has long commanded a criminal enterprise with close ties to Asian and South American drug lords. The evidence includes first-hand accounts of money laundering disclosed by Moon confidantes and even family members. Besides those more recent accounts, Moon was convicted of tax fraud based on evidence developed in the late 1970s about his money-laundering activities.

Since serving his tax-evasion sentence in the early 1980s, however, Moon appears to have bought himself protection by spreading hundreds of millions of dollars around conservative causes and through generous speaking fee payments to Republican leaders, including former President George H.W. Bush.

Moon himself has boasted that he spent $1 billion on the right-wing Washington Times in its first decade alone. The newspaper, which started in 1982, continues to lose Moon an estimated $50 million a year but remains a valuable propaganda organ for the Republican Party.