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More GOP Family Values

It just gets worse and worse.

In May I did a post about Great Moments in Republican Family Values that kind of creeped people out. In it I wrote about John Schmitz, a big California Republican during the 70's, a member of the John Birch Society who thought Nixon and Reagan were liberals:

He won a US House seat in 1970 trumpeting family values. "They like to be called gays," he said. "I prefer to call them queers." He described pro-choice supporters as "a sea of hard, Jewish and (arguably) female faces," and made a career decrying America's moral decrepitude. When George Wallace was shot and dropped out of the 1972 Presidential race Schmitz stepped in and ran as the candidate for the American Independent Party, garnering 1 million votes.

He had a picture-perfect family and a cheerleader daughter named Mary Kay he liked to call "Cake" who absolutely adored him. But all was not as it seemed to be. In 1982 a woman named Carla Stuckle was accused of child abuse and was forced to name the father of the child as a condition of his return -- and she named her former professor, John Schmitz, who it turned out had another family on the side. Schmitz acknowledged that the boy was his, as well as the child's older sister, but he said "I do not and will not support him financially. It is her responsibility to take care of him." Conservative voters had slightly different standards in the 80s, I guess, because it ended Schmitz' career. When Stuckle died the two children were taken in by psychic Jeanne Dixon, and when Dixon died in 1997 the children became wards of the state and went to an orphanage.

Young "Cake" was evidently devastated by the experience. Or so she claimed when she was on trial years later for statutory rape under her married name, Mary Kay LeTourneau.

I wish I could say there was a happy ending to all of this, but it just gets worse. Johnny Wendell sent me an article today from the LA Times about what happened to her brother Joseph, who grew up to join the Bush Administration, of course, and has now been forced to resign in scandal:

When Joseph E. Schmitz took over as the Pentagon's inspector general in 2002, the largest watchdog organization in the federal government was under fire for failing to fully investigate a senior official, falsifying internal documents and mistreating whistle-blowers. He publicly pledged to clean it up.

Three years later, similar accusations now surround Schmitz.

Schmitz slowed or blocked investigations of senior Bush administration officials, spent taxpayer money on pet projects and accepted gifts that may have violated ethics guidelines, according to interviews with current and former senior officials in the inspector general's office, congressional investigators and a review of internal e-mail and other documents.

For the past three years, Schmitz's job has been to throw a monkey wrench into any attempt to look into the multitudinous wrong-doings of any senior BushCo. appointees:

At one point, investigators even stopped telling Schmitz who was under investigation, substituting letter codes for the names of individuals during weekly briefings for fear that Schmitz would leak the information to Pentagon superiors, according to a senior Pentagon official.

Joe Schmitz is a sad, sad case, which does not excuse his guilt. But the larger -- and much sadder -- story is that even if the sick fucks of BushCo. are run out of office in the next election and never heard from again, their legacy of aggressive hate-mongering, intolerance, mental illness and complete moral bankruptcy will be with us for decades to come.

John Schmitz is long dead, we're still paying for his crimes.

posted by Jane Hamsher @ 9/25/2005 07:00:00 PM