Just as Republican voodoo economics involve a lot of smoke and mirrors to depict a picture far different from objective reality, so too does the "family values" image of GOP politicians. As noted before on this blog, seemingly 90% of the time when a political sex scandal explodes, it's a Republican, not a Democrat involved. Especially, if it involves gay sex, something the "family values crowd claims to eschew. With the Bob and Maureen McDonnell corruption trial getting under way, it seems will will get yet another glimpse behind the smoke and mirrors and learn that Republicans are the last people who should be preaching family values, seeking to police the sex lives of others and trying to position themselves as arbiters of morality in general. A column in the Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the image Republicans like Bob McDonnell seek to project while in truth, behind closed doors it's a veritable Peyton Place. Here are highlights:
When Bob McDonnell ran for governor in 2009, he depicted his family as the Cleavers: bustling and wholesome. Five years later, running for his life, McDonnell is depicting his family as the Bundys: bitter and dysfunctional.
In opening arguments Tuesday, federal prosecutor Jessica Aber offered a methodical, detailed case for convicting McDonnell and wife Maureen of public corruption. She focused on the transactional nature of the couple’s relationship with Jonnie Williams Sr., whom Aber labeled a “vitamin salesman.”
Aber outlined the government’s view that McDonnell went to elaborate lengths to conceal his relationship with Williams, even withholding on bank documents any mention of a $50,000 loan from Williams and disclosing it only after learning that he and his wife were under federal scrutiny.
In return for his beneficence – at least $165,000 in cash, stock, gifts, vacations, designer clothes, and posh jewelry – Williams expected McDonnell to use the weight of the governorship to legitimize his disputed, tobacco-derived dietary supplement, Anatabloc, Aber said. Williams envisioned state research of his product and making it available to public employees.
[A] tidbit bordering on the salacious: Maureen McDonnell had a crush on Williams, regarding him as her “favorite playmate,” Burck said The former Washington Redskins cheerleader was drawn to the multimillionaire executive because of a deep fissure in her marriage, widened by the demands of McDonnell’s career.
The McDonnells’ body language has been saying as much for days. The two routinely make separate entrances at the fortress-like federal courthouse on East Broad Street. And in U.S. District Judge James Spencer’s cavernous, wood-paneled courtroom on the seventh floor, they are seated apart, separated by two lawyers. McDonnell coolly greeted his wife ahead of Tuesday’s proceedings. They were expressionless as defense sketched a portrait of their marriage.
Maureen McDonnell, Brownlee said, had grown to hate her husband, angry that there “was not enough money, not enough time, nothing left for her.” Brownlee continued, “This broke their marriage apart.”
Juxtapose that with the image Bob McDonnell advanced as a candidate for governor. To blunt his controversial graduate school thesis – it decried working mothers, cohabitation, homosexuality, and premarital sex – McDonnell ran television commercials in which his wife and five children were front and center.
In one “Leave to Beaver”-esque advertisement, Bob and Maureen were a model of suburban contentment, sitting in front of a trim house as their smiling, chattering kids bounded out the front door, with one of the twin boys cheerfully demanding the keys to the family car. Now, several of those children are witnesses at their parents’ trial.
As I said, it's a veritable soap opera. Meanwhile, I cannot help but wonder what really goes on behind the doors in the home of the always heinous, anti-gay animus filled Victoria Cobb. Is she spinning a similar fairy tale to her cretin like followers at The Family Foundation?
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