Coup, Coup Cajoob

by digby

It’s pretty clear to me that it will be a miracle if Hastert survives, mainly because his own lieutenants are turning on him like a pack of slavering heathers:

As conservatives debated whether House Speaker Dennis Hastert should resign over his handling of the complaint, the House majority whip, Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said he would have done things differently if he’d known about it. He was the acting majority leader when the complaint was raised.

Although he did not criticize Hastert, his remarks to reporters in Springfield, Mo., were no endorsement of the speaker’s actions.

“I think I could have given some good advice here, which is you have to be curious, you have to ask all the questions you can think of,” Blunt said. “You absolutely can’t decide not to look into activities because one individual’s parents don’t want you to.”

Palace coups are a staple of Republican house leadership and sometimes they fail quite spectacularly. But this one is such a doozy that I don’t think Hastert survives even though highly moral religious leaders like James Dobson support his covering up for sexually predatory congressmen:

Here’s Bauer at the same event.

Apparently the leaders of the Christian Right have decided that they will win this argument by accusing the Democrats of hypocrisy and whining about the unfairness of the media.

I don’t doubt that a number of their followers, for whom Christianity is no more than tribal identity or a team sport, will be more than willing to go along. But there must be some for whom this creates a terrible cognitive dissonance. In one breath their leaders condemn the libertine, liberal culture (Bauer even going so far as to claim common cause with foreigners — terrorists? — who are aghast that we are exporting our deviant sickness.) In the next they are complaining that the media and the Democrats are being unfair to the Republicans on the subject. It’s hard to tell from these crude videos, but it sounded to me that the biggest applause lines came at the condemnation of the sexual predator while the whining about the media and the hypocrisy of the Democrats, not so much.

But even if I’m indulging in some wishful thinking, the inability of even the Christian Right leadership to work up a head of steam over a Republican cover-up of a predatory congressman says they are heading for a crack-up. They can blame it on the culture all they want, but at some point they are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they are being taken to the cleaners by the corrupt, immoral Republicans —- and the powerful Elmer Gantrys who are so enmeshed in the same corrupt, immoral system that they can’t fully condemn them.

Hastert might hang on, but it’s getting so ugly out there, I doubt it:

The chief of staff for Republican Congressman Tom Reynolds, Kirk Fordham, resigned after questions were raised about his role in the handling of the congressional page scandal, according to Republican sources on Capitol Hill.

Those sources said Fordham, a former chief of staff for Congressman Mark Foley, had urged Republican leaders last spring not to raise questionable Foley e-mails with the full Congressional Page Board, made up of two Republicans and a Democrat.

“He begged them not to tell the page board,” said one of the Republican sources.

People familiar with Fordham’s side of the story, however, said Fordham was being used as a scapegoat by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.

It sounds to me as if Fordham needs some friends to whom he can unburden himself. He’s been treated just terribly, don’t you think?

Update: Ooops. A staffer scorned…

Kirk Fordham told The Associated Press that when he was told about Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward pages, he had “more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene.”

The conversations took place long before the e-mail scandal broke, Fordham said, and at least a year earlier than members of the House GOP leadership have acknowledged.

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