Remember? Dennis Hastert was presented as a nice guy, school coach, remedy-for-past-sins kind of Speaker of the House. Then we learned about those land deals. And now...
According to the indictment, the man who for eight years was second in line to move into the White House, if both the President and the Vice-President were incapacitated, told agents that he was taking all that cash out of the bank because he didn’t trust the safety of the American banking system.
One can put that in the category of proffered hypocrisies. When the news of the indictment broke, many accounts stuck to the theme that every last person who knew Hastert was shocked—during his fast rise in Congress, he was supposedly known, as the Washington Post put it, for having “no skeletons” in the closet. That this might have been the case, even though Hastert was known to have made millions of dollars on a deal involving land bought cheaply and sold, at a striking profit, after he had pushed plans through Congress for a nearby highway, says something about what counts as a skeleton in Washington. ...AmyDavidson, NewYorker
The sexual misconduct hinted at in current reports could be serious. But it shouldn't be the focus of investigation. I hope we'll take just as seriously his (and many others') betrayal of democracy, voters, and decent colleagues. I don't like watching democracy get screwed over and over again by nasty little farts who exploit others, whether it's land deals, or kids, or voters.
