The tables turn: Those zany Republicans are behaving like Democrats

THIS IS MY MOST RECENT HIT PARADE OF REPUBLICANS WHO MAKE ALL OF US PROUD TO BE AMERICANS.... PLEASE ADD TO IT Republican activist Parker J. Bena pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography on his home computer and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and fined $18,000. Republican parole board officer and former Colorado state representative, Larry Jack Schwarz, was fired after child pornography was found in his possession. Republican strategist and Citadel Military College graduate Robin Vanderwall was convicted in Virginia on five counts of soliciting sex from boys and girls over the internet. Republican city councilman Mark Harris, who is described as a “good military man” and “church goer,” was convicted of repeatedly having sex with an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Republican businessman Jon Grunseth withdrew his candidacy for Minnesota governor after allegations surfaced that he went swimming in the nude with four underage girls, including his daughter. Republican campaign worker, police officer and self-proclaimed reverend Steve Aiken was convicted of having sex with two underage girls. Republican director of the “Young Republican Federation” Nicholas Elizondo molested his 6-year old daughter and was sentenced to six years in prison. Republican president of the New York City Housing Development Corp. Russell Harding pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer. Republican benefactor of conservative Christian groups, Richard A. Dasen Sr., was found guilty of raping a 15-year old girl. Dasen, 62, who is married with grown children and several grandchildren, has allegedly told police that over the past decade he paid more than $1 million to have sex with a large number of young women. Republican Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the rape of children in Iraqi prisons in order to humiliate their parents into providing information about the anti-American insurgency. See excerpt of one prisoner’s report here and his full report here. Sex and Shoplifting 1) In March 2006, Claude Allen, Bush's top domestic policy aide, was arrested when he tried to return items he had shoplifted from Target for cash refunds. Allen, who made $161,000 a year, blamed stress from Hurricane Katrina. 2) In 2005, bloggers perked up their ears when a reporter named Jeff Gannon asked a softball question at a Bush press conference. Some sleuthing turned up nude photos of Gannon—whose real name was James Guckert—on male escort websites. 3) Randall Tobias, Bush’s AIDS Czar, mandated that organizations must oppose prostitution in order to receive American aid. It later emerged that Tobias purchased services through the notorious D.C. Madam, though Tobias maintained he only bought “massages.” 4) The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service would not seem to be the sexiest government agency. But a departmental investigation last year found that officials had “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” Where’d the Money Go? 5) When testifying before Congress in 2007, L. Paul Bremer, the former ambassador to Iraq, was unable to account for as much as $12 billion—about half of his budget—as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority between May 2003 and June 2004. According to a report by Rep. Henry Waxman, contractors brought bags to meetings in order to collect shrink-wrapped bundles of money. 6) In 2004, Pentagon auditors found that Halliburton had not adequately accounted for $1.8 billion of the bill it sent to the United States government for its work in Iraq and Kuwait. 7) Also that year, Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Army Corp of Engineers' chief contracting officer, charged that KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary, unfairly received billions of dollars worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq. Greenhouse was demoted in 2005. Disappearances 8) In 2002, Canadian citizen Maher Arar was detained at an airport in New York and spirited away to Syria where he was tortured and held for 10 months by his captors before being returned home. Canadian officials investigated Arar's case, declared he was innocent, and paid him $9 million in compensation. American officials refused to admit the mistake and instead kept Arar on a terrorist watch list. 9) Army Captain James Yee, a Muslim chaplain in Guantanamo Bay, was hooded, shackled, and detained in solitary confinement for 76 days on charges of espionage. Within a year the case against Yee had collapsed and the Army tried to save face by charging him with hoarding pornography. All the President’s Wordsmiths 10) In an e-mail to friends, Danielle Crittenden, the wife of White House speechwriter David Frum, bragged that her husband had written Bush’s famous “Axis of Evil” line. The e-mail leaked to Slate.com, causing a minor scandal. 11) Part of the self-created mythology of White House speechwriter Michael Gerson was that he composed his speeches in longhand. But as fellow scribe Matthew Scully later noted: “At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John [McConnell] and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.” No Administration Friend Left Behind 12) First, there was Columnist Gate: In 2005, USA Today reported that conservative commentator Armstrong Williams received a $240,000 contract from the Department of Education to promote No Child Left Behind on his television show and to sell other African American journalists on the legislation. Later, The Washington Post uncovered a similar deal with columnist Maggie Gallagher to promote a marriage initiative for the Department of Health. 13) A Defense Department report in 2006 urged the military to end its practice of paying Iraqi journalists to publish pro-American stories in their newspapers, arguing the tactic would "undermine the concept of a free press." 14) According to The New York Times, Karl Rove scored lobbyist Ralph Reed in a lucrative contract with Enron in 1997 to gain his support in the 2000 presidential race. 15) David Safavian, the former chief of staff of the General Services Administration, was convicted of helping Jack Abramoff on a shady land deal as well as concealing a "lavish weeklong golf trip" paid for by Abramoff. 16) As head of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz was forced to resign in disgrace after he helped his "female companion," Shaha Riza, score a $60,000 pay raise and promotion—and then tried to cover it up. Down the Memory Hole 17) Bush fundraiser Lurita Doan's gig as chair of the General Services Administration went down in flames when she was accused of asking agency staff to help Republican candidates win elections. Doan denied any wrongdoing. When witnesses said she asked her staff at a meeting "How can we use GSA to help our candidates in the next election?" Doan claimed she had no memory of the presentation. 18) Though Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, was suspected of being the anthrax mailer, that didn't keep Bush and Cheney from openly speculating that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks and even going so far as to pressure FBI officials to come up with a Bin Laden connection, according to the New York Daily News. Mission Accomplished 19) In 2003, Bush went to a warehouse in St. Louis to give a speech entitled “Strengthening America’s Economy.” But the boxes laid out before the presidential podium bore the label "Made in China." The labels were then obscured with white paper. The White House blamed an "overzealous advance volunteer.” The Last Word 20) The administration ethos was nicely summarized during the attorney-general scandal investigation in a testy exchange between former White House Political Director Sara Taylor and Sen. Patrick Leahy. Taylor: "I took an oath to the president. … And I believe that taking that oath means that I need to respect, and do respect, my service to the President." Leahy: "No, the oath says that you take an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States. That is your paramount duty. I know that the President refers to the government being his government—it's not."

Oh, since those zany Republicans are in disarray, we can all just sit back and have a nice chuckle.

You people just don't get it: Our country has been raped and mugged. The damage is deep and profound. The wealthy have used the Republican Party to drain the US Treasury through the war and other scams.

We're bankrupt, and the wealthy have stolen untold billions of our tax dollars. Bush spent our health-care money to kill a million Iraqi civilians. Standards protecting workers and the environment have been trashed. The Constitution has been overturned.

Meanwhile the wealthy, through their ownership of the Democratic Party, will see to it that none of the money is recovered, and none of the Bush-Administration criminals will ever see the inside of a courtroom.

It doesn't matter what sideshow those zany Republicans put on: They've done what they were paid to do. Mission accomplished.

I just about pissed myself I laughed so hard when I hear about so many in the Rethug party being "pissed off". Finally we're seeing derision and division in the Rethug party, and it's just wonderful to watch. For so many years I've noticed that the party seemed to have the upper hand on solidarity, and it's so satisfying to see that come to an end.

Though it wouldn't be the best thing for the country right now, I almost hope that the Rethugs go above and beyond to try and impede attempts by Obama and the Dems as far as stimulus and recovery, and piss off even more of the voting population. The Rethugs are already on the majority of people's crap list, I'd like nothing more than to see the party fragmented or even totally crushed into oblivion.

But then I wonder who or what would fill the gap...

Could the disappearance of the Republican Party, and, indeed, most Republicans, be anything but beneficial to the body politic?