Former Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert, serial child abuser, is dead

NBC:

Former Rep. Dennis Hastert, who served eight years as speaker of the House — longer than any Republican in U.S. history — and then spent more than a year in prison after he left Congress for scheming to cover up sexual abuse allegations, died over the weekend, according to the Kendall County Coroner’s Office in Illinois.

He was 84.

I've always been mildly curious as to what Dennis Hastert, one of the truly malevolent men in Republican politics, thought about this new Republican era. Not curious enough to look it up, mind you. But at least back in 2016, when his sentence was handed down, the man was perfectly cogent. He was in his mid-70s then, and Remorseful during his sentencing hearing in the way that all convicts with top-tier defense lawyers announce themselves to be.

He must have been cogent enough, in the years afterwards, to watch how the Jeffrey Epstein scandal unfolded. He would have watched Rep. Jim Jordan breeze by his own abuse scandal with the full-throated backing of nearly every Republican in the chamber. The scandals of Jordan's good chum Matt Gaetz, caught both in standard Floridian corruption and the sex trafficking of a minor and squeaking away from both without ever being tarred as disgraced. He would have watched current speaker Mike Johnson do his damnedest to hide whatever needed to be hidden.

He must have watched as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal got closer and closer to Donald Trump, a man with a history of boasting about his preferences and purchases and past assaults, only to run up against blank pages in all the places that might have hinted at what the two "close friends" were up to, in the spaces between photographs.

Hastert was sentenced in 2016, the same year Trump ran away with the Republican nomination for the presidency. None of this is distant history.

In 2015, then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., had Hastert's portrait removed from a hallway in the Capitol. The removal of the portrait — one of Ryan's first acts as speaker — came shortly after Hastert pleaded guilty.

So that is a hell of a change, from 2015 to now, and you have to wonder what Hastert thought as he watched the post-him Republican Party dump him down the memory hole only to pull out every possible stop to ignore and defend and stonewall investigations into the abusers who came afterwards. Was he pissed?

Did he fume, as he watched Trump restaff the whole Justice Department into his personal child predator defense team? Did he stare at Mike Johnson on his television, thinking if only I could have hidden it even a few more years, the whole party would have made this go away for me?

Who knows. Maybe. But Dennis Hastert was a dirtbag during the days when he and Newt Gingrich were tearing up the party, they both were very obvious dirtbags who leaned hard into the post-post-Watergate theories of Republicans Are Allowed To Do Anything, So Fuck You even as they hid their own dirtbag scandals. And given that, he probably knew full well that the party he built was helping all those other predators because they were in power. Hastert was a has-been, and nobody in politics gives a shit about protecting a has-been.

You can't even get the new party to defend the Bushes, the Cheneys, or the Rumsfelds. The Johnson and Trump-led party has memoryholed Reagan, they're not going to give a damn about an old man in a wheelchair facing consequences for child abuse for the first time in his rotten malevolent life.

If he was Jim Jordan's age, though? Still in Congress? He could have held out. If he'd still been in good enough shape to be useful to the king predator, Donald Trump? He might have been heading up the Department of Justice right now.

Poor Dennis Hastert. He had the bad luck to be sentenced in 2015, just one year before his party decided that being a serial child predator was just fine after all.

He was the last Republican to ever have to pretend at feeling shame. It must have made him so damn angry.

If you want an example of how our politics have changed, then to now, you can find it on X, the everything app.

Yes indeed, he was indeed sentenced for "banking fraud." That is quite true. It was 'banking fraud' he undertook in an effort to cover up a history of child molestation but the sentencing was indeed for "banking fraud."

You have to feel a little sympathy for the editor responsible for that blurb, yes? The current president of the United States remains accused of both serial "banking fraud" and being a serial child molester, so which part of it are you supposed to downplay in order to least enrage him? Journalism in a kleptocracy is hard work.

But the other part of Hastert's story is that he lived out his whole congressional career without anyone finding out about his past. He handed over his gavel and fked off when Democrats regained control of the House rather than serve in the minority, and it wasn't until almost a decade after that the nation learned that he had covered up the abuse of multiple children during his days as a high school wrestling coach.

During that whole long career, he managed to keep it secret. It only did him in later, after he became a has-been.

I wonder, then, what we will find out about the current crowd long after they think they got away with it all.

First off, Karoline Leavitt is the third of Trump's secretaries to join Fox (the Times forgot Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who held the gig before becoming the governor of an actual damn state), and second off "fierce and nimble" is a hell of a way to describe a serial liar who always took glee in abuse and who reveled in her own mocking answers to reporters who asked her about every day's newest and most obscene corruption scandal.

And it is just presumed, right now, that abusive, demeaning, manipulative lying to the American people is what the White House does now and what Americans most want to see on their shitty, squeaking "news" stations. There must have been a bidding war for Leavitt, who supposedly left the White House to spend more time with her family before quickly deciding that no, by God, she'd already had her fill of that. CBS News would have been courting her. Half of the chairs on the CNN sets are reserved for the most ostentatious Republican liars the network can hire, all of them premised on the notion that Americans yearn to have important-sounding people lie to their faces all the time, every day, with the nice smarmy smile that says I am enjoying lying to you and I want you to know it.

What does that have to do with Dennis Hastert dying, other than both of them being announced the same day? Not much, probably.

But it's maybe useful to remember that all of the past modern giants of Republicanism ended up as nobodies soon enough, and that no matter how many portraits they put up of you they will tear them down again, after you're no longer of use and they no longer have to cover up your suspected sex crimes against children in order to squeak out one more vote for cutting Elon Musk's taxes.

We already know much of what Leavitt tried to cover up, in the White House. But the biggest shoes, the oversized shoeboats of the sort Marco Rubio now paddles around in, have not dropped. They will. It's inevitable, when working for a man who has proven himself corrupt and vicious down to his very DNA.

We only found out Dennis Hastert was a serial child molester ten years after he lost power. He was the second most powerful figure in America for a very long time, then he wasn't, then It Caught Up.

There are a whole lot of people in Washington and on the airwaves, as we speak, that are feeling that lesson in their bones right now. And while none of us give a particular damn about Dennis Hastert dying, that is very, very satisfying to know.