Guest Blogged by Steve Huff
Theodore Robert Bundy, one of the most infamous serial killers of the last half-century, was a Republican activist while studying law at various universities in the west and northwest.
John Wayne Gacy, a serial killer who equalled Bundy in viciousness and notoriety, was very active as a Democrat in his Chicago neighborhood — even had his photo made with former First Lady Rosalynn Carter.
Politics and sex crime. Sometimes, they go together. Perhaps because both deal with dominance, and power. Bundy and Gacy would simply be two of the most extreme examples.
Of course, both sides of the aisle get hit, but lately, it is Republicans who are taking a consistent battering in this arena.
My first entry here on The BRAD BLOG was about a stalwart in Illinois Republican politics, Tom Adams. The mayor of the wealthy enclave of Green Oaks, 30 miles north of Chicago, was recently arrested on a kiddie-porn rap.
But before I ever heard of Tom Adams, I was blogging at Huff’s Crime Blog about a pair of political hacks/flacks whose hypocritical conservative Republican poses were ripped away and their inner predatory nature exposed.
I am exquisitely sensitive to displays of sheer hypocrisy, having grown up in a city that sits squarely on the proverbial buckle of the bible belt. I know they have always been part of the political arena. I also suspect that some of the following won’t be news to BRAD BLOG readers. What has struck me continually though is that the supposedly liberal mainstream media seems to be virtually ignoring these stories lately — perhaps stung by the “L” word? I don’t know.
The guys in question were not politicians themselves, but men who in some instances appointed themselves to help politicians attain higher office. They were flacks, using predatory and manipulative techniques that are native to the typically antisocial personality usually convicted of the crimes these men were convicted of committing. These kinds of guys and gals are the political arena’s more obvious instances of Snakes in Suits.
This entry is about an ultra-right-wing talk show host and campaign manager in Arizona who had his past served back to him on a platter, and things didn’t go well from there.
Steve Aiken {ed: See note at bottom of article}
Steve Aiken was the campaign manager for Arizona Republican Randy Graf, who is running for Congress in the 8th Congressional District to fill a seat about to be vacated by Jim Kolbe.
On June 16, 2006, ABC News published a report about Aiken by Brian Ross on its blog, The Blotter. From Ross’s report:
Aiken says the candidate, Graf, was fully aware of the conviction when he was hired as campaign manager…
Graf fired him anyway:
Aiken was a talk show host with an ultra-conservative pose on KVOI-690 in Tucson. Between his trials and tribulations in Pennsylvania and his makeover in Arizona as a “straight-from-the-hip” “former cop” and security dude, Aiken was distributing blatantly homophobic press releases for The Traditional Values Coalition, based in Washington, DC.
Many examples of the tripe Aiken put out were posted to the Usenet, now Google Groups. This is just one example, posted to alt.rush-limbaugh on October 19, 2001. Read it at your peril, as it isn’t worth a quote.
Randy Graf seemed to shake Aiken off pretty well, and after Graf fired him, so did KVOI. Maybe someone really checked into his background, as I did.
Aiken presented himself in Arizona, and at www.steveaiken.com as a “former cop.” Technically this was true. Of course, he’d rarely had a job as a cop that was full-time, and when he did, he ended up involved in an accident that saw the end of the Trumbauersville, PA police department and the township there sued by the family of a teen for more than a million dollars. The allegation was that Aiken caused the teen to crash his vehicle on a dark country road. The family won that suit.
In 1991 Steve Aiken had a mail-order divinity degree, and he incorporated the Youthquest Evangelistic Association in Lexington, PA. The call of the Association was to assist youth who were troubled, having problems at home. Instead, Aiken preyed on them. This culminated in his 1995 conviction for the corruption of morals of minors — two minor girls. Those were the charges for which Aiken spent a couple of months in jail.
The jury deadlocked on the charge that Aiken molested one of his accusers.
The last time Aiken popped up in a Pennsylvania newspaper was in August of 2000, when a short article in the Allentown Morning Call showed that Aiken allegedly committed a kind of home invasion:
Aiken apparently went to Washington shortly after that and began his rabid hating on homosexuals. (That probably didn’t go over well during his short stint in prison, I’d bet. Or maybe it began there.)
Then it was on to Arizona, and becoming, for a time, a political insider. Archived versions of steveaiken.com will give you a taste of Steve Aiken prior to June 16, 2006.
Aiken, on his website, now only promotes his “book,” and it appears that he addresses why he wanted to help Randy Graf get into Congress in that book, saying about outgoing Republican Congressman Jim Kolbe that it was Aiken’s “fiercest battle” to “help force [Kolbe] into an early retirement.”
The wikipedia bio for Jim Kolbe (who survived the first challenge from Graf in 2004 and decided to not seek re-election this time around) may give a good idea as to why Steve Aiken felt that way about another Republican.
Jim Kolbe was the first openly gay Republican to address the Republican National Convention.
In that sense, there is perhaps a certain consistency in Steve Aiken’s behavior.
You have to wonder just how consistent he was in other ways, as well.
{Ed Note: The “Steve Aiken” referred to in the above is NOT Steve Aikens from Clovis NM. Mr. Aikens, with an “s” at the end, wrote to ask us to make that clear, since he’s been contacted inappropriately by folks who have read this item and misidentified him as the one referred to in the article.}
Where’s Jim Jones when you need him?????
Praise the Lord and pass the Kool-Aid!!!!!
Hypocritical
Holier than thou
Law and Order
Protectors of Family Values
Child Molesting
Statutory Rapists
Christo-Nazi – Jesus Freak – Fascists
Bless them all. Satan’s Maggots
They have the audacity to proclaim their Godliness
and use this as a weapon in the political area.
Disgusting/deplorable/despicable hypocrites they are !!
Can’t brook the filth in my ear, but from everything I’ve read, and heard on Liberal Talk Radio, Right Wing Talk Radio is poison from start to finish. It breeds armies to fall behind people like Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh. It is truly anti-American stuff.
Big Dan is probably going to blow a gasket when he reads this.
A-99/Com. # 3
Thinks you may have the wrong name there,..
Link
Sorry, oldturk, didn’t mean to leave you out. It’s just that big dan is so famous for his anti-“Limboob” rants!
Steve, maybe you should just step behind something thick while the cussing and flaming and vitriol fly, because, come to think of it, there are a few, shall we say, perturbed BradBlogotopians when it comes to this subject?
Not our favorite people! Not by a long shot.
Is there something in the drinking water
in the State of Ohio ? Link
What the hell is going on over there ?
Christo Fascists Jesus Freaks gone berzerk.
Step behind something? Hell no. I’m enjoying this. There was a reason I covered these guys. Even though some of my beliefs might seem to the right of some of Brad’s readers, guys like Aiken and the dude I’m writing about next are distilled examples of some things I see in the right that will ensure I never, ever actually become a Republican. Not as long as the party only steps away from these dudes and acts like they never happened. (Randy Graf’s reaction to Aiken is a good example. “I knew that.” Then he fires him, which says to me, uh, no, he either didn’t know any of this, or knew it and only fired Aiken when it became public… and what does that say about Randy Graf?)
I grew up on the buckle of the bible belt in Nashville, TN, a city where the churches vye with the porno shops for commercial property distribution on each street corner. I know hypocrisy is in all politics because only Louisiana kicks Tennessee’s ass for dirty pols. So when I noticed a run of stories where pedophiles and molesters in the news happened to end up being Republicans every time, I had to write about it. In part, the msm seems to drop the stories as quickly as they write them up. But I also feel like these guys should be object lessons to Republicans. Men like Aiken are precisely what so many people loathe about the right, and the right needs to figure that out. If that makes sense.
Will they figure it out? Politics seems to be the purview of the thick, in some instances, so who the hell knows? Doubt it, in the current climate. The moralistic posturing will continue, the argument will get diverted to issues like flag-burning or choice, and the yammering will drown out these glaring instances of thinly-veiled evil.
Know who one of Steve Aiken’s last guests on KVOI was?
On June 17, 2006, his whole first hour was with Ann Coulter.
Betcha even if she knew who she was talking to, she didn’t go anywhere near the whole “corrupting morals” or alleged molestation thing.
In an e-mail exchange someone wrote to me referring to a book that’s on the market now, saying that one of the basic points seemed to be that those of us in the center all the way over to the far left need to band together and get our stuff straight before guys who talk as Steve Aiken does get total control. I agree. Because too often, it seems the moralistic rhetoric from the Steve Aikens is masking an evil, ugly core.
I may not agree on some issues with some people who read this blog, but the places where we do agree — like our feelings about guys like this — matter more to me than the points where we don’t.
I told you they were going to use child predator laws to take away our civil liberties with that new bill, The Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), which overwhelmingly passed, (410 to 15), about a week ago.
Thank God there are only 15 admitted child predators in the congress! I must get 50 petitions a week to sign, but not a mention of this one, so I guess it’s up to me to alert the masses.
Well, OK, it only pertains to poor people who have to use library computers. First they came for the poor people – – – you know the rest!
Here’s a paragraph from the short article:
Interactive news pages?
Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan were neo-cons, albeit the word wasn’t used back then.
RLM 😛
as a shrink, I suggest you also look again at John Dean’s recent work on the authoritarian personality and the Republican Party – the ‘current’ party, and the neocon phenomenon. All of the cognitive, emotional, and psychopathological features of authoritarians is quite consistent with the pathology of predators against the helpless (e.g., child abusers etc.). It is the research from the psychologists that Dean cites often in his book. We’ve known about this shit for a long time. But few politicos ever took a look until John Dean’s book emphasized it.
Dr. RDW #11
You said “We’ve known about this shit for a long time.”
Yes, it was quite popular in the latter days of the Roman Empire.
Just as we are now in the latter days of the American Empire…….
Child sexual predators hide behind the veil of Christianity.
Under age minors/children
& polygamists
= Fundamentalists Later-day SAINTS
Link: To prosecution of the above.
Here’s an excellent web page on the Republicans’ “make-your-own-reality” approach to sex:
http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/...n_Sex_Scandals
Speaking of the perverted and the power-mad, guess why Tony Blair is on the west coast this week. He and Poppy B are attending this year’s “festivities” at the Bohemian Grove.