Posts Tagged ‘Barack Obama’

ADULTEROUS POLITICIANS

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

ADULTEROUS  POLITICIANS
(I don’t have time to provide references, so you will have to Google.)

Politician                                                      “Offense”

President Warren G. Harding         had mistress living in the White House. Evidently they sent her on a long trip to the Orient during the presidential campaign.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt     several long term mistresses (mitigating factor: Eleanor)

Pres. candidate Wendell Willkie     living with mistress before running for president

President Dwight Eisenhower                     Had an affair with (female) driver during WWII.   General George  Marshall wouldn’t let him divorce  Mamie.

President John F. Kennedy         Sex maniac. Multiple affairs and one night stands.  At one point he shared a mistress with Mafia Don Sam  Giancana.
President Lyndon Johnson              Played around

Pres. candidate Nelson Rockefeller  Multiple affairs, including Angie Dickenson.  Second wife, “Happy”, gave birth to their child one day before 1964 California primary. Bad timing!  Nelson died en flagrante in 1979.

Pres. candidate Robert Kennedy     Multiple affairs, including one with Marilyn Monroe.   (There is some question about what involvement, if any, he and JFK had with Monroe’s death by accidental drug overdose in August, 1962.)

President Richard Nixon                 No affairs that I know of. Rather, he screwed the  entire country.

President Ronald Reagan                Active sex life after divorce from Jane Wyman and  before marrying Nancy.  (Said he often didn’t remember the name of the woman he woke up in bed with. )  Their daughter Patti was born eight months after their wedding.

President George H. W. Bush          Supposedly had affair with State Dept. staffer named Jennifer. Never confirmed.

Senator Bob Packwood (R-OR)        Multiple shenanigans with staff members and others. Forced to resign in 1993.

Pres. candidate Bob Dole                  Divorced first wife in 1975. Shortly thereafter married Elizabeth Hanford.

President Bill Clinton               Sexual predator. Possible rapes and sexual assaults. Getting blow job in Oval Office besmirched the presidency, but it was not an impeachable offense.

Vice Pres. candidate Joe Lieberman    Divorced first wife in 1981. Met his second wife,  Hadassah Tucker, in 1982.

Pres, candidate Al Gore                 No offense, Tipper.

Pres. candidate John Kerry          Divorced first wife. Second wife Theresa is widow of  Senator John Heinz, a fact she doesn’t let anyone  forget.

Pres. candidate John Edwards        Had affair with staffer, which produced a baby.  She  snared him by saying “You’re so hot!”

Pres. candidate John McCain       Divorced first wife after returning from Vietnam, where he was a POW.  Then married beer distributor heiress Cindy Hensley.

Pres. candidate Rudy Giuliani     Peccadilloes too numerous to mention, including  shopping while dressed in drag.  Announced divorce  from wife Donna Hanover at press conference.  She  later pitched him out of Gracie Mansion, and he stayed with some gay friends.

Pres. hopeful Newt Gingrich         Multiple infidelities.  Served first wife with divorce  papers in hospital room where she was being treated for cancer.  Had affair with future third wife while married to the second, (and during Clinton  impeachment proceedings.)  Recently converted to  Catholicism.

Congressman Henry Hyde (R-IL)   Busted up first marriage of his second wife at age 41.  He called it a “youthful indiscretion.”

Senator David Vitter (R-La)         Relationship with hooker while in the House. An “adult entertainer” may challenge him for his senate seat.

Senator Larry Craig (R-ID).            anonymous gay sex in public restrooms.

Senator John Ensign (R-NV)          Affair with staffer whose husband was also on his staff.

Gov. Elliot Spitzer  (D-NY)            Relationship with hooker.

So did (or does) any of the above affect these politicians’ ability to govern or serve?

JFK: Who was watching the “nuclear button”?
Clinton:  Could have been subject to blackmail (by the Israelis?) Fighting impeachment was a great distraction.

In general, the answer is “no”, except when they are breaking the law, or the hypocrisy factor.  (Family values, fighting prostitution, my wife is an integral part of my campaign, etc.)

Barack Obama benefited from two marital scandals while running for the US  Senate in 2004, one during the Democratic primary and one which removed his probable Republican opponent. So, such scandals can sometimes have a very positive effect!

So why aren’t there any women on my list?

Eleanor Roosevelt.  Some say she was a lesbian.  (Especially lesbians!)
Nancy Reagan and Frank Sinatra?  Only on Saturday Night ,Live.
Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster?  She certainly was justified.

Well, enough of this salacious political gossip.  After all, it’s Fathers  day

Update (6/27):  Now you can add Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) to the list. He wants to stay on as governor to set a good example to his sons.  A strange reason!  Anyway, it won’t cancel out his bad example. His wife is great! (Born and raised in the Chicago area.)

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Bill Ayers Doesn’t Fully Clear the Air

Saturday, December 6th, 2008

“The Real Bill Ayers” is the title of a rather self-serving column by Ayers in today’s New York Times. He is to be applauded for keeping a low profile and not rising to the bait when attempts were made to smear Barack Obama during the campaign through his casual association with a “domestic terrorist”. However, his column gets a bit dicey when he describes his activities 30-40 years ago. Here is one excerpt.

“Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.”

Here is the letter I sent to the Times.*

I was also part of the anti-war movement 40 years ago, and I participated in many non-violent protests. Ayers is very clinical, almost antiseptic, in describing his “vandalism”. His description of the founding of the Weather Underground is rather bizarre. Exactly what group was making bombs in the Greenwich Village Townhouse? No one set a bomb there. Ayers hasn’t fully owned up to his past and, fortunately, he remains a marginal figure, especially when it comes to having had any effect on our President-Elect. (end of letter)

I would like to add that setting off bombs is not a “symbolic act”. How can one be sure there will be no “collateral damage”. As for Ayres “co-founding” the Weather Underground. That was, in fact, a name change. Before the Greenwich Village explosion, they were known as the Weathermen, but then they went “underground”

And there were deaths associated with Weather Underground “activities”. Consider Kathy Boudin. According to Wikipedia

“In the 1960s and 1970s, Boudin became heavily involved with the Weather Underground,… . The Weathermen used bombs to vandalize the Pentagon, the US Capitol, the New York Police Benevolent Association, the New York Board of Corrections, as well as the offices of multinational companies. Boudin, …was a survivor of the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, the premature detonation of a nail bomb that had been intended for a soldiers’ dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey.[2]

In 1981, she and several members of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army robbed a Brinks armored car at the Nanuet Mall, in Nanuet, New York. After Boudin dropped her infant son, Chesa, at a baby sitter’s she took the wheel of the getaway vehicle, a U-Haul truck. She waited in a nearby parking lot as her heavily armed accomplices took another vehicle to a local mall where a Brinks truck was making a delivery. They confronted the guards and firing immediately broke out, severely wounding guard Joe Trombino and killing his co-worker, Peter Paige. The four then took $1.6 million in cash and rendezvoused with Boudin“.

Two policemen were killed in a subsequent shootout. Again, from Wikipedia:

“Boudin hired Leonard Weinglass to defend her. Weinglass, a law partner of Boudin’s father, [Leonard Boudin] arranged for a plea bargain and Boudin pled guilty to one count of felony murder and robbery, in exchange for a single twenty-year-to-life sentence. She was paroled in 2003.”

Bill Ayres and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, raised Boudin’s son. This does not mean, of course, that they had any part in, or even advance knowledge, of the robbery. However, Ms. Dohrn did go to jail for seven months for refusing to testify about the robbery. A useful source is the interview with Bill Ayers in the NY Times, published on September 11, 2001 (The mother of all bad timing!)

So is Ayres repentant? No. Remorseful? No. Was he a “domestic terrorist” ? Using his terminology, only a “symbolic” one. We can be certain of one thing, however. For many years, he has not harbored a terrorist bone in his body. If he did, as I’ve said many times before, the Bush-Cheney crowd would have put him in jail. You can count on it.

* I also posted the letter as a comment. However my comments never appear, but rather go to “Times People”, which, as near as I can tell, nobody reads.

1981, she and several members of the

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The New Yorker cover for July 21st, and Invoking Rush Limbaugh

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

As a longtime New Yorker subscriber, I’m used to the occasional cover which readers consider to be in bad taste. This one is so slapstick, it looks like it belongs in Mad Magazine. As for being offensive, I’m sure Cheney supporters were more offended to see him depicted as the Halloween pumpkin. The people in this country have different grasps on reality, but surely they can all take, if not appreciate, a joke.
Gary Kamiya has a great column on this in salon.com . The only problem I have is with the title and his invoking of Rush Limbaugh:
“Rush Limbaugh Was Right. The blogosphere’s reaction to the New Yorker cover proves that the Bush era has killed a lot of liberals’ sense of humor. And that’s not funny.”
Here are excerpts from the beginning of the column.

It’s official: The Bush era has made liberals so terrified of right-wing smears it has caused them to completely lose their sense of humor.
Much as I hate to repeat one of Rush Limbaugh’s flat, stale and unprofitable applause lines, that’s the only conclusion I can draw after witnessing the left-wing blogosphere’s bizarre reaction to the New Yorker cover [pictured above]
depicting Barfack Obama …. . To judge from the reaction of much of the left,
you’d think that New Yorker editor David Remnick had morphed into some kind of
hideous hybrid of Roger Ailes and Roland Barthes and was waging an insidious
Semiotic War against Obama.

Here is the letter I sent to salon.com
Rush Limbaugh Is Not Right

I thought Gary Kamiya’s article was great, except for the inappropriate title. Rush Limbaugh hates liberals. He denigrates them on a daily basis. He doesn’t think they were ever capable of having a sense of humor, so how could they lose one? And when he attacks liberals, it is not meant as a joke.

Limbaugh dissembles about his past statements on a regular basis. He constantly attacks the “drive-by media,” but then quotes them when he agrees with something they say. He has a legion of followers who hang on his every word, oblivious to his reworking of the truth, his rewriting of history and his logical inconsistencies. True, he is clever and funny, but he is also diabolical.

People on the left are always going after Fox News, but that organization is diverse, albeit slanted to the right. I am more worried about the legion of dittoheads Rush continues to nurture and amuse with his often hateful commentary. They constitute the Limbaugh cult, and I don’t think their cult leader, “El Rushbo” as he likes to call himself, is entitled to be given any credibility as a serious and thoughtful commentator. The dittoheads may buy into all this, but why should anyone else?

Here is the Cheney cover and a Tom Toles cartoon from today’s Washington Post.

Added Insight (7/17): I’ve figured out the “problem” with the Toles cartoon. The pictures on the covers are taken out of context. One must also consider the names of the magazines. The New Yorker, as is their usual practice, did not include the title of the picture, “The Politics of Fear”, on their cover, so the irony was not readily apparent. I think that their “laid-back” style has backfired in this case, and that they have outsmarted themselves with possibly disastrous consequences.

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