The Black Hole where the press used to be

This via Steve Gilliard got me to thinking...

Dr. Hager's Family Values
by AYELISH MCGARVEY

When Hager's nomination to the FDA was announced in the fall of 2002, his conservative Christian beliefs drew sharp criticism from Democrats and prochoice groups. David Limbaugh, the lesser light in the Limbaugh family and author of Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging Political War Against Christianity, said the left had subjected Hager to an "anti-Christian litmus test." Hager's valor in the face of this "religious profiling" earned him the praise and lasting support of evangelical Christians, including such luminaries as Charles Colson, Dr. James Dobson and Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham.

Back at Asbury, Hager cast himself as a victim of religious persecution in his sermon. "You see...there is a war going on in this country," he said gravely. "And I'm not speaking about the war in Iraq. It's a war being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians. It wasn't my scientific record that came under scrutiny [at the FDA]. It was my faith.... By making myself available, God has used me to stand in the breach.... Just as he has used me, he can use you."

Up on the dais, several men seated behind Hager nodded solemnly in agreement. But out in the audience, Linda Carruth Davis--co-author with Hager of Stress and the Woman's Body, and, more saliently, his former wife of thirty-two years--was enraged. "It was the most disgusting thing I've ever heard," she recalled months later, through clenched teeth.

According to Davis, Hager's public moralizing on sexual matters clashed with his deplorable treatment of her during their marriage. Davis alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I probably wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time," she explained to me. "But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible."

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Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn't emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could "buy" peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. "Sex was coinage; it was a commodity," she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. "He would say, 'Oh, I didn't mean to have anal sex with you; I can't feel the difference,'" Davis recalls incredulously. "And I would say, 'Well then, you're in the wrong business.'"

By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to let him videotape and photograph them having sex. She consented, and eventually she even let Hager pay her for sex that she wouldn't have otherwise engaged in--for example, $2,000 for oral sex, "though that didn't happen very often because I hated doing it so much. So though it was more painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check on the dresser," Davis admitted to me with some embarrassment. This exchange took place almost weekly for several years.
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As Hager began fielding calls from the White House personnel office in 2001, the stress in the household--and, with it, the abuse--hit an all-time high, according to Davis. She says she confronted her husband on numerous occasions: "[I said to him,] 'Every time you do this, I hate your guts. And it blows a bridge out between us that takes weeks, if not months, to heal.'" She says that Hager would, in rare instances, admit what he had done and apologize, but typically would deny it altogether.

....................

Linda Davis chose not to bring allegations of marital rape into her divorce proceedings; her foremost desires at the time were a fair settlement and minimal disruption for her sons. Nonetheless, she informed her lawyer of the abuse. Natalie Wilson, a divorce attorney in Lexington, asked Linda to draw up a working chronology of her marriage to Hager. "[It] included references to what I would call the sexual abuse," Wilson explained. "I had no reason not to believe her.... It was an explanation for some of the things that went on in the marriage, and it explained her reluctance to share that information with her sons--which had resulted in her sons' being very angry about the fact that she was insisting on the divorce."
...

As for David Hager, after repeated attempts to interview him for this story, we finally spoke for nearly half an hour in early April. That conversation was off the record. "My official comment is that I decline to comment," he said.

Mr Gilliard concludes:

"So let me get this: he would fuck his wife up the ass, call it a mistake, then pay her? Because he got confused?

And this is who Bush wants to have the government advise it on women's health.

I mean, didn't it matter his wife didn't like anal sex? Especially when he raped her like a child molester in prison?

My basic question is what the fuck is wrong with this guy? I mean, he could have found a mistress who liked oral and anal sex and his wife would have gone along. What is all this shit with the anal rape and the money?

Also, does the Bush administration vet anyone? Ever?"

-- End of Mr. Gilliard's comments. --

* * * *

OK, so let’s stipulate that David Hager has the all the hallmarks of a typical high profile Bush Nominee: to wit, he was 170 lbs. of ambulatory offal. A morally and/or sexually warped slab of rotten meat not just unqualified, but uniquely unqualified for the post to which he has been nominated.

And page-by-page it followed the same tired You-Must-Be-Shitting-Me Bush nomination playbook. Specifically, a lavish and mindless defense mounted by the infinitely reprogrammable Golem of the Religious Right: that Reliable Fucktard Militia, trained to hold themselves ferociously blind to facts of any kind – no matter how staggering -- that might conflict with the pronouncements of Dear Leader. Always painting anyone standing in their Shining Path as Christ-hating traitors at 100,000 decibels.

In other words, another one. Another scandal. Another mortifying embarrassment. Another one.
Yet another one.
Yet another fucking one.

Let’s make a little list, shall we?

Not exhaustive – not even really extensive – but just a little, off-the-top-of-my-head list (And FYI, there must be something abroad in the land. I was over at Atrios and found this link to another list of Crimes Against The Truth and Sins Against Journalism thing. How cool! Who knows? Maybe we’ve at long last collectively crossed one a’ them tipping point/critical mass thingies.)

Dick Cheney and a cabal of oil lobbyists rewrites US Energy Policy behind closed doors. When asked, declares the whole this Top Secret.

Bush ignoring warning of an imminent terrorist attack.

Bush lying about the predicate for taking the nation to war.

Bush lying in the State of the Union Address about Niger, Uranium and Iraq.

Bush sacking the one man who told him the truth about the real costs and risks of Iraq.

The Downing Street memo: a smoking gun showing the Bush plan to invade Iraq was a “go” in 2002, and intelligence was being cherry-picked, massaged and deliberately misread to justify a war Bush had already decided to wage. A war that had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.

Tom Ridge’s astonishing admissions that mysterious “others” had basically coerced him into jacking up the Terror Alerts during the run-up to the 2004 election. During which time he publicly swore that no political influence

Voter suppression. Not Diebold stuff, just bread-and-butter corruption.

Swift Boat Liars.

Jeff Gannon – criminal manwhore – loose in the press room as a Bush Administration shill for two years. Regurgitating GOP talking points and calling it “reporting” under his nom de whore. Being leaked classified intel regarding active CIA agents and the timing of the invasion of Iraq.

Tom DeLay and his 1,001 grotesque sins and crimes, from defrauding Native Americans to being in the pay of foreign governments, to criminally redrawing the Texas Electoral map, to extorting the House to rewrite the rules just for him.

Torture as Policy. Secret trials. “Extraordinary Rendition.”

Promoting the author of our new Torture policy to Attorney General.

Presidential Medals of Freedom for Everyone.

Bernie Kerik.

John Bolton.

Dick Cheney’s Halliburton – Known War Profiteers who just scored a sweet $72 million bonus.

Social Security lies, lies and more lies.

We will be greeted as Liberators.

Cake walk.

Slam dunk.

A few regime dead-enders.

And now, David Hager.

You probably have your own list that you can bullet-point at parties, and there’s certainly some overlap, but let’s take a breath and look at the overall picture these individual crimes pointillistically create.

What do they have in common?

A fuck-you contempt for democracy that is truly breathtaking, but that’s no surprise.

A tantrum-throwing derision for fact and causality rarely found outside of DT sufferers, sociopaths and four-year-olds, but that’s no surprise.

An unbroken string of scandals breaking now almost daily over life-and-death issues, any one of which would have resulted in a knee-jerk reflex launching of yet another Special Prosecutor investigation had it involved anyone named “Clinton”, but Republicans of the modern age are either Elmer Gantry or whore and hypocrites of the First Water, so that’s no surprise.

No, the biggest surprise – the wheelman for this vast, criminal enterprise – the one that they’ll be studying in the history books a century from now is the complete and utter failure of the American Press at virtually every level. That’s the one for which I must admit I was unprepared.

In my own Capra-colored way, I always assumed that buried deep in the machinery of our Fourth Estate was a rectifyer that would kick in when we found ourselves up against it. Something in the DNA that would let at least a few of them rise up and take on the Enemy especially when that Enemy took up residence in the White House.

But they didn't. The went down quietly, easily. With no struggle at all they laid down their arms and became capitulators, these spineless Sunshine Journalists who were so slavering seven short years ago.

Remember? Such a ravening wolfpack they were before Rove learned how deeply cowardly and easily cowed they are. Back when they were pounding the shit out of the Clinton Administration so unremittingly. Fairly sometimes, unfairly much more often, but relentlessly. Daily. Sometimes hourly.

And for the last five years...nothing. An article here, an editorial there but in the end...nothing.

A few toadies I could understand, and you can't really count the Limbaughs and Foxes and CNNs of the world who are, of course, simply propagandists not really media in any sense of the word. But whatever happened to all the rest?

Saying that they are gutless for a whole cornucopia of reasons is correct but insufficient. That doesn’t get at the details.

Why? Why, specifically, is this happening? This passes mere incompetence and laziness by light years. Has every single reporter on the national stage been topped on film by Jeffy Gannon? Have they all been caught on video making the beast with two backs with goats and children?

Does anyone out there have any contact with the working press who could perhaps shed some clear light on why Journalism is so abruptly and thoroughly dead?

This is a Total News Embargo on anything negative having anything to do with the Administration taken to such an absurdly lap-doggish extreme that the gargantuan abyss where the Press used to be is practically screaming.

How bad is it? Well, what do you think future generations will make of the fact that with little more than publicly available video clips and clever writing, John Stewart makes better ratings and tell more pure truth in any given four minutes of what is clearly labeled "Fake News" than the Empires of Mainstream Media can manage with a multi-billion dollar budget, a global infrastructure, and a 100,000 Klieg lights, satellites and pairs of hands?

There is nothing in modern history short of the collapse of the Soviet Union with which I can compare it for the scope and speed at which the implosion came, and in the great halls and palaces of Big Media we are left only with trivia and circuses. They have fallen, and they are never coming back.

Viewed within its own context, this self-inflicted crime against democracy is more insidious and more poisonous than any frontal assault any terrorist group could possibly mount.

But viewed against the scrim of the all-out press gangbang that ran 24/7/365 during the Clinton Presidency this lethal, deliberate and consipicuous conspiracy of silence is without a doubt the Story of the Decade.

Maybe of Story of the Century.

Would that there was a Free Press who would report it.