Coach Hastert

++The whole Hastert case is extremely weird. Observing Republican scandals,the allegations of the Coach's sexual abuse of a student really doesn't look strange put up against the series of sex crimes the GOP committed in the late 1990s. 

++However,the timing is very odd. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo tried to parse this yesterday. Hastert had started paying "victim A" in 2010,long after he had left office and become a lobbyist. Why then if the abuse was committed when he was a high school teacher and wrestling coach some years before he had even been elected? Josh tried to link it to Hastert's new annual income but admitted that didn't cut it.

++The abused and there seem to be many are now middle-aged. And yet none have come forward publicly now or more importantly when politically relevant.

++Hastert's lawyer got the Justice Department to censor its own indictment so we don't know the abused name or what the abuse consisted of. Only after persistent questioning by the media did the sordid accusations come out.

++Subsequently, Denny has resigned from the lobbying firm and also the school of public policy named after him at Wheaton College.

++People thought it was ironic that he was being investigated for violations of the Patriot Act, which he championed. But that leads to concern since the money-laundering elements of the act were meant to prosecute individuals materially supporting terrorism or drug trafficking. Neither applies here. 

++He was clearly being blackmailed. Here again,the case gets murky. The prosecutor claims discretion on whether the alleged crime--sex abuse--were more serious than the act of blackmail. So the blackmailed get prosecuted.

++The other thing that always bothers me is that he was indicted for giving misleading statements to the FBI agents investigating the case. This is becoming too common a crutch for prosecution in this country.

++Remember the prosecutor can stand up in court and openly and knowingly lie about the facts in a case. I have even seen prosecution witnesses do this also without any repercussions.

++I almost agree with Dershowitz in this case that "it smells." 

++Barnie Frank says that between New Gingrich's affairs, Bob Livingstone's affairs,and Denny Hastert's involvement with "minors", Bill Clinton comes off as a choir boy. 

++The whole Hastert scandal does bring up the whole roster of GOP sex crimes in the 1990s, particularly the sexual abuse of congressional interns.  But the conservative news outlets have abandoned Hastert, except for Geraldo Rivera, while have rallied around Josh Duggar, who sexually abused a series of under-aged girls. And the Duggar family got those incidents expunged from the police records. And without irony Josh Duggar was the spokesperson for Tony Perkins' homophobic Family Council.

++I do know Denny Hastert and the news was so out of character for the person Washington knew--and that his town of Yorksville remember. I guess we can expect more to unravel in the next week. But while we get fixated on the sex abuse,we might want to watch the legal maneuverings. 

++We know from the 1990s Catholic pedophile cases how destructive such abuse is and how it affects people for a lifetime. We really have not come to grips with what exactly after all these years the legal system is supposed to do with this. Bill Cosby is Exhibit #1 in serial sex abuse--but with women of legal age. Does just the publicity handle this. The statute of limitations has run out on most of these crimes. We still don't know how to handle here cases.