Beltway Conservatism: The Diaper Dangles

There are occasions when Washington reminds me of a overstuffed diaper that has grown dangerously pendulous because of parental inattention. At any second – in response to any random gyration of the blissfully oblivious toddler wearing it – the nappy may over-stress its fasteners, releasing to public inspection the malodorous mass contained therein.

As I said, there are times that this image offers a suitable metaphor for our ruling elite.

Deborah Palfrey, the 50-year-old former proprietor of the Pamela Martin & Associates Escort Service in the Imperial Capital, has been arraigned on various prostitution, racketeering, and money laundering charges. This seems like a churlish thing to do to someone who has serviced the carnal needs of the political Establishment for 13 years. One would think that the whores laboring in the public sector would display a hint of professional courtesy toward their colleagues in the private sector, but such isn't the case.

Seeking to raise money for her legal defense (a difficult thing to do given that the feds have attached her assets – sorry, this story is a minefield of double entendres – for forfeiture), Ms. Palfrey floated the idea of selling the telephone records and other details that would reveal the identities of her former customers.

Palfrey's suggestion was characterized by federal prosecutors – a group not generally noted for deference to the rights and reputations of those incriminated in prostitution cases – as something that “could be considered veiled threats to cause embarrassment to former customers and employees.” So the prosecution in Palfrey's case filed a motion seeking a “protective order” that would suppress public disclosure of that information and permit its use only in preparing her defense.

It was a little less than a decade ago that Bill Clinton, facing impeachment over only the most trivial of his manifold crimes against the Constitution and public decency, used White House spokes-nebbish George Stephanopolous to warn that he might deploy the “Ellen Romecsch Strategy” if the threat to remove him from office became acute.

That phrase refers to an East German spy with whom John F. Kennedy had an concealed extramarital affair, and it connoted a clear threat to render transparent all of the opaque glass houses in which Washington's preening poseurs reside. The Clinton junta's illicit possession of confidential FBI files made this threat plausible.


Deniable disclosures soon appeared in the press about the sexual transgressions of conservative Republicans – such as Reps. Henry Hyde, Don Burton, and Helen Chenoweth. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, compromised by his own concupiscence, resigned after the 1998 mid-term election, as did his immediate successor, Louisiana Representative Bob Livingston, shortly after being appointed Speaker.

(Please forgive a brief digression. The late Rep. Chenoweth, a lovely and principled woman whom I was honored to call a friend, explained to me that the affair had taken place decades ago, when she was unmarried, and before her Christian conversion. We had that conversation while I was soliciting her help to deal with a vindictive IRS enforcement action against me that she said was unambiguously a form of retaliation for my involvement in a national campaign to impeach Clinton.)

All of this offered critical hints regarding the extent to which the Republican leadership and rank and file were morally compromised. And this represents only those caught in acts of conventional adultery.

What are we to make of the more repulsive possibilities suggested by the examples of high-profile Republican rent-boys James Gannon and Matt Sanchez?

“Jeff Gannon” (nee James Guckert) is the homosexual prostitute who posed as a White House reporter for a GOP-aligned outlet called the Talon News Service; in that capacity his job was to tee up softball “questions” for Scott McClellan, thereby acting as a lifeline when the administration spokesliar was under assault by actual reporters.

In addition to being an oft-touted source for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, Gannon appears to have enjoyed extraordinary White House access before he received credentials as a “reporter.”

Matt Sanchez is a former homosexual porn star and gay prostitute who has demeaned himself even further by becoming a partner in a New York marketing firm. Given his background it should not be surprising that Sanchez is utterly shameless and adept at self-promotion.

Sanchez (given his previous occupation, his surname represents another potential land mine) is currently a 36-year-old Marine Corps Reservist and a non-traditional student at Columbia University. His self-marketing as a stalwart Reaganite Republican besieged by heartless “anti-war zealots” paid off with television appearances on various Fox “News” programs, and during the most recent version of the annual Nuremberg Rally called CPAC he was given the purportedly prestigious Jeanne Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award. He also received the honor – if that's the correct term – of posing for a photo with Ann Coulter, the right-wing pundette I've taken to calling the Missing Winter Brother.

(Continues below...)

Hey, kids -- it's the musical Winter Brothers!


Here's Edgar belting the blues...








... heeere's Johnny, tearing up a beautiful 'burst Les Paul ...











... and here's "Annie," leading a sing-along of the Horst Wessel Song! "Flag high, ranks closed, the SA moves with silent, solid tread..."

Oddly enough, one would think that Sanchez would be ostracized by the Legion of Decency that is the Beltway Conservative Movement. But the disclosures about his past appear to have made him a more sympathetic figure on the Right -- or even lent him a certain cachet.

What does it say about the conservative movement that figures like Gannon can embed themselves in it so easily (did I just hear another mine going off)?

Once it's understood that the conservative movement is simply a support mechanism for the Republican Party, it becomes easier to put this whole matter in perspective.

The two “mainstream” parties are entirely interchangeable, both in form and function – two cheeks of the same diaper-enshrouded derriere, happily wallowing in the feculence that is their natural habitat.

Be sure to check out Pro Libertate - the e-zine, which is available through The Right Source website.

My Amerika (first in an occasional series)

"America's Sheriff," Mike Carona, poses with America's Feliks Dzerzhinsky -- Tom Ridge, founder of our Cheka, the Department of Homeland Security.

Several decades ago, Latvian filmmaker Albert Jekste produced a documentary entitled “My Latvia” depicting the Soviet conquest and occupation of the Baltic States. The most memorable sequence in that film presented, in deadpan, roll-call style, a roster of Soviet-appointed civic officials and their previous occupations.

Without exception, each had been a career criminal, generally in the same field as his new “legitimate” profession: The new head of the central bank had been an armed robber, the police chief had been the local underworld boss, and so on.

A similar amalgamation of the criminal underworld and political “over-world” is taking place as America descends into an abyss of Soviet-style corruption and tyranny in the name of Homeland Security. But we have to take note of a very important distinction: We're doing it to ourselves.

As occasion warrants, I'll present case studies illustrating what we could call the “My Latvia Syndrome.” I suspect that we'll suffer from a crisis of abundance rather than one of scarcity in this respect.

Today's example focuses on Mike Carona, a self-professed Christian Republican from Orange County – the Mecca of modern conservatism – who has been designated “America's Sheriff” by Larry King. (Here is a gallery of photos, letters, and other keepsakes from King and other celebrities from the "I Love Me" page of Carona's re-election campaign website.)

A balding man in his early 50s with a swimmer's build and the earnest, buck-toothed demeanor of the world's oldest Boy Scout, Carona is a key homeland security adviser to George W. Bush and California Governor Schwarzenegger. He is also a serial adulterer (click here and scroll down to see a photo of Carona during a Russian junket cradling his, ahem, interpreter, who is depicted in another photo wearing the Sheriff's uniform). To this can be added the fact that he's a bosom chum of at least one significant Mafia figure.

The official certificate naming Carona a "senior adviser" on homeland security affairs.

Several years ago Carona filled his campaign war chest was filled with illegal contributions from a felonious businessman as part of a kickback scheme involving a proposed system called High-speed Avoidance Laser Technology (HALT), which could be used by police to disable automobiles by remote control.

HALT is described in the patent (number 6411217) as “a remotely operable vehicle disabling system where a remote command transmitter transmits a command to a receiver capable of terminating vehicle operation and situated within a vehicle to be so disabled.... The system comprises, first of all, a remotely operable transmit unit for transmitting a command shutdown message which may preferably be an infrared beam. Second, the system comprises a command-receiver vehicle unit capable of responding to the command and physically situated at a site of the vehicle such that a shutdown message from the transmit unit can reach the vehicle unit.”

HALT was to be produced by CHG Safety Technologies, whose founder and CEO, Charles H. Gabbard, had applied to become a California police officer in the late 1950s. After being found unsuitable for such service, Gabbard embarked on a career on the other side of the law, building a criminal resume that included armed robbery, attempted robbery, embezzlement, sundry parole violations, and a murder charge.

In 2000, after “going straight,” Gabbard met Sheriff Carona (who was a little more than a year into his first term) by way of a mutual friend: Lobbyist Bob Levy, a retired U.S. Marshal hard-wired into California's vast network of law enforcement unions and pressure groups.

Gabbard enlisted Levy, Carona, and other influential figures in a scheme to give HALT a monopoly by having the legislature mandate its installation in all automobiles state-wide. The felon-turned-police state profiteer handed out tens of thousands of dollars in bribes (in the form of illegal campaign donations) to then-Governor Gray Davis and various state legislators. His most generous gifts were bestowed on Sheriff Carona.

In February 2000, Carona, Levy, and Gabbard worked out an arrangement through which the Sheriff would promote Gabbard's technology in exchange for campaign cash. In fulfillment of his end of the deal, Carona “spent untold thousands of taxpayer dollars to hold a HALT demonstration at El Toro [a former Marine Corps base] on March 16, 2000, and six days later sent a glowing product-endorsement letter to state officials considering a plan, Senate Bill 2004, to mandate Gabbard's products on all California vehicles,” reported the Orange County Weekly (which has produced Pulitzer-caliber exposes of the myriad law enforcement scandals afflicting that community).

Even more shocking was Carona's offer to provide “certain inmates” at the County Jail to help Gabbard manufacture his product.

On May 18 of that year Gabbard came through with the quo for the Sheriff's quid, in the form of $40,000 in donations from CHG executives during a “birthday party” for Carona at Villa Nova restaurant in Newport Beach.

When the dirty deal became public knowledge, Carona reacted by blaming the entire affair on his second-hand man, Assistant Sheriff George Jaramillo.

Both Jaramillo and his wife received tens of thousands of dollars in “consulting fees” from Gabbard to promote the HALT technology. On January 30 Jaramillo was given a year in jail and three years of probation as part of a plea agreement. He had faced the prospect of 13 years in prison on bribery, misuse of county property, and lying to a grand jury.

Carona insists that he was deceived by Jaramillo, a one-time close friend whom he was grooming as a successor. ("He is not only like a brother to me, he is my brother," Carona once insisted.) But there is a solid evidentiary trail connecting Carona himself to the kickback scheme, and besides, as Sheriff he should bear much of the blame for a scandal involving his second-in-command.

But Carona – or “Calamity Mike,” as the OC Weekly refers to him – appears to be immune to accountability in any form.

*A few years ago, “America's Sheriff” was photographed (wearing his uniform) in a boozy embrace with Rick Rizzolo, a Las Vegas “adult entertainment” mogul who has been identified by the FBI as a Mob associate.

*In September 2003, Carona issued a memo granting Joseph M. Medawar, a con man-cum-filmmaker, access to Orange County's Emergency Operations Center (EOC), a high-tech crisis headquarters center intended for use in the event of a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. The EOC hosts classified training exercises involving most federal and state law enforcement and emergency response agencies.

The Lebanese-born Medawar, who has close ties to Saudi Arabia, claimed that he was filming a pilot for a television series to be called DHS, which would “celebrate federal agents and President Bush.” (He had paid Orange County Congressman Dana Rohrabacher $23,000 for an old script.) A federal indictment described Medawar's enterprise as a scam that defrauded investors of more than $5.5 million.

Thumbs up for evil! Carona poses with demented GOP presidential aspirant John McCain (left), and with McCain's rival Mitt Romney (right).

It's tempting to perceive Carona as a reality-based version of Chief Wiggum, the spectacularly corrupt and heroically inept Police Chief from The Simpsons. As Greg Hall can testify, Carona is more commissar than clown.

Hall, a 40-year-old businessman, was involved in a fender-bender on July 17, 2005. Upon their arrival the police gave him two Breathalyzer tests, both of which revealed a blood alcohol level of 0.00. Hall was cooperative, telling the officer that he had consumed a single beer and was taking Paxil, a prescription antidepressant. For no particular reason, Hall was arrested on suspicion of DUI and taken to the Orange County Jail.

Following a drug test, Hall was left to stew for what he was told would be no longer than an hour. When a group of Carona's deputies appeared on the scene, Hall politely complained that his handcuffs were too tight.

This mild complaint provoked the knot of deputies – a five-man gang referred to in Carona's department as the “Psycho Crew” -- to treat Hall “like a pinata.”

The handcuffed businessman, who had done nothing wrong and wasn't suspected of a violent offense, was subjected to a three-minute beating. He was dragged down a corridor, had his face repeatedly shoved into cell bars and slammed into the concrete floor, and received countless punches and kicks to his ribs.

Hall was left with “a concussion, broken ribs, a gash in his leg, an eye contusion, broken veins in his feet, a shattered front tooth, lacerations and bruises over his body, contusions to the knee, neck pain, a fractured right wrist and nerve damage to his left hand,” recounts OC Weekly, citing medical records. “The handcuffs were locked so tightly that the steel sliced his hands and caused dangerous swelling. An imprint of a deputy's boot could be seen on the back of his leg for days.”

The intensity of the assault made the terrified businessman lose control of his bowels, causing him to evacuate in his pants; his assailants, taking sadistic glee in their handiwork, derisive calling their victim a “sh*t monkey,” and left him in a cell to bleed. Some of them returned later to tie a black mesh hood over his head – a fitting coda to a performance straight out of Abu Ghraib.

Hall was left bleeding, with his hands cuffed behind his back, sitting in his own feces, for more than twelve hours. Deputies denied him food and water or access to a telephone. Eventually his leg wound was stitched up – without anesthetic – and he was permitted to stagger out of the jail without apology or explanation for the treatment he'd received.

This isn't the first time Carona's goon squad has tortured a jail inmate. In December 1999, four deputies assaulted a 20-year-old inmate in an isolated corner of the facility, torturing him by crushing his testicles. Prosecutors conceded that the torture had occurred, but insisted that they were stymied by a “code of silence” within the Sheriff's Department.

A class-action lawsuit brought against Carona's department was dismissed in April 2005 by now-retired federal judge Gary L. Taylor, who was appointed by the George Bush (the elder). Taylor stipulated to the abuses, and acknowledged that there was “room for improvement” -- and then offered the written equivalent of a shrug by saying that “the county and the sheriff show every indication they will perform that high duty.”

Sheriff Carona, predictably, described Taylor's ruling as a “great victory.”

Just a few weeks later, his deputies, entrusted with the “high duty” to maintain professional standards of inmate safety literally beat the sh*t out of an innocent businessman, just because they could.

For maintaining standards of conduct worthy of a Soviet satrap, Mike Carona, “America's Sheriff” and senior national security adviser to George W. Bush, has earned the distinction of being the first figure profiled in our “My Amerika” series.

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