hyde-hyde.jpgLast week was just chock-full of MSM obsequies for the recently deceased Henry Hyde. The Usual Suspects talked up his Hyde Amendment and his role as the lead House Manager in the Clinton impeachment nonsense, and were universal in saying what a nice sweet kind honorable old guy he was.

Here’s the Henry Hyde they won’t tell you about.

This is the Henry Hyde that had the extramarital affairs (yes, plural: As the daughter of Cherie Snodgrass, his most famous mistress, said of her mother, "She knows she wasn’t his first and she wasn’t his last") — which the mainstream press, so hot to nail Clinton for same, ignored until Cherie’s ex-husband went to Salon to tell his side of the story.

To be fair to Hyde, he was far from the only hypocritical adulterous Republican eager to condemn Bill Clinton for things they did with eleventy-five-billion times the frequency or intensity. Newt Gingrich, Helen Chenoweth, Dan Burton and Bob Barr — to name four right off the top of my head — themselves had sex lives that made Clinton look utterly strait-laced in comparison. So many horndog Republican hypocrites were outed during this time that the GOP’s leaders and their media allies started adopting the phrase "It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup!" in self-defense, as if none of them had ever tried to hide their affairs. But Henry Hyde was the Big Kahuna, the alleged moral giant, the guy with an "in" with the Vatican and all that. And he was leading the charge against Clinton.

Mr. Hyde’s sexual hypocrisy and determination to bring down a sitting president for non-state-related matters may not be the most disgusting side of him. This is, after all, the same Henry Hyde that worked to keep the news of Iran-Contra suppressed for a few extra months, long enough to keep it from having an impact on the 1986 midterm elections:

In August 1986, for instance, Hyde was one of the ranking members of the House Intelligence Committee who trooped down to the White House to question National Security Council aide Oliver North about press accounts linking him to a secret operation to supply the Nicaraguan contra rebels in defiance of the law.

After North and his boss, John Poindexter, denied the allegations, Hyde joined Rep. Dick Cheney, R-Wyoming, and committee chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, in rejecting a bill that would have authorized a formal investigation.

Later that day, since I had co-authored an Associated Press story citing 24 sources about North’s secret network, one of Hamilton’s aides contacted me to say that the committee had sided with the “honorable men” at the White House over our 24 sources.

“It wasn’t a close call,” the aide added.

It was, however, an erroneous call.

Two months later, on Oct. 5, 1986, one of North’s contra supply planes was shot down over Nicaragua, and the following month, the Iran-Contra operation, which involved using profits from secret arms sales to Iran to help finance the contras, was revealed.

But wait, there’s more!

In "Henry Hyde’s Moral Universe: Where More Than Time and Space are Warped" (Common Courage), Dennis Bernstein and Leslie Kean offer a catalog of Hydean hypocrisy, painting a canvas of Hyde’s record that is broader than most people know — and not one bit flattering. They provide some fascinating new details to expand on Salon’s account, based on the first lengthy interview with Hyde’s lover. They show the man who pleaded that "lying must have consequences" defending lying by his friend and hero from the Iran-Contra scandal, Oliver North, even when it involved North’s deceiving Congress and the American people about illegal executive branch actions. The fervent defender of "the rule of law" when it came to Clintonian evasions about sex was willing to take the stand to defend lawbreaking by another Hyde hero, extremist anti-abortion leader Joseph Scheidler.

[...]

The most serious charge against Hyde, which Bernstein and Kean ably summarize and bring up to date, concerns his role in the costly failure of an Illinois savings and loan of which Hyde was a member of the board of directors. Hyde’s S&L debacle led to federal investigations and lawsuits, and even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune last fall called for an investigation of how Hyde managed to avoid any legal or financial consequences for the S&L’s spectacular failure.

The gist of the S&L story is this: In 1981, after stepping down from the House Banking Committee, Hyde went on the board of directors of Clyde Federal Savings and Loan, whose chairman was one of Hyde’s many banking industry political contributors. Congress deregulated the savings and loan industry in 1982, and Clyde began dealing in risky financial options, participating in loans for luxury condos in Texas and buying certificates of deposit from a bank in the Cayman Islands, a financial center notorious for money laundering. Hyde was not only aware of such deals but often made or seconded motions on the board to pursue them. By 1984, when Hyde left the board, it was clear to the directors from reports they received that the institution was failing, but Hyde and others on the board continued to abuse their positions, giving improper financial rewards to insiders and even allowing the institution to overcharge the government on servicing student loans.

Those who followed the Whitewater portion of the get-Clinton witchhunt, the years-long effort by the right wing and their media allies to destroy the Clintons (an effort that Joe Conason and Gene Lyons call "The Hunting of the President" and others call "CoupGate") will remember how the Clintons were accused of the horrible, awful, tragic disaster-crime known as the failure of Madison Guaranty.

The Clyde S&L bailout cost the Feds more than Madison Guaranty ever did — $67 million to Madison’s $60 million.

(By the way, the total cost to the taxpayer of Ken Starr’s probe of Madison Guaranty came to $73 million, and aside from subverting the government from within didn’t have much to show for all that money, other than showing once and for all that Starr’s prime targets, Bill and Hillary Clinton, were innocent. In comparison, as of September of last year, MSNBC noticed that Patrick Fitzgerald had spent only $1.5 million in three years of his PlameGate probe that would eventually convict Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby (who Bush swooped down and rescued to keep Libby’s mouth shut about Rove’s, Cheney’s and Bush’s roles in PlameGate because Bush is just such a noble guy). This is far less than any other OIC probe in history. That’s because while most of the other OIC probes were Republican-driven fishing expeditions, Fitzgerald’s probe was a legitimate exercise in prosecutorial duty. But I digress.)

But Hyde’s Jekyll-Hyde act doesn’t end there. There were other actions that showed the amorality behind his public pose:

If Hyde had been less slickly misleading about what he believed and who he was, Bernstein and Kean might have found him unbearably right-wing but less offensive. But they also abhor what they see as his phony sanctimony and his willingness to lie and deceive. For example, they argue that Hyde was a key figure in promoting the blatantly false and misleading "Birmingham memo" in 1987 to conceal the involvement of the Contras with drug trafficking. They also have contempt for his contradictions. For example, despite his claim to defend the rule of law and the Constitution and his role as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Hyde was instrumental in pushing through the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. The act greatly limits the ability of people sentenced to death under state law to obtain federal court review of their convictions, thus undermining the right of habeas corpus enshrined in the Constitution. It’s particularly galling because Hyde’s home state has been forced thus far to acknowledge the innocence of 12 men sentenced to die, including one who last fall came within hours of execution.

The verdict is in: Sexually and in most every other way, Henry Hyde was about as moral as Alaska is tropical. But his defenders in the GOP/Media Complex won’t tell you about that.

(Image created by Phoenix Woman using the photo from Hyde’s Congressional biographical entry.)

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