Bush endorses woman-batterer
During National Character Counts Week, Bush Stumps for Philanderer
By Dana Milbank
Friday, October 20, 2006; A02
LA PLUME, Pa., Oct. 19
So it has come to this: Nineteen days before the midterm elections, President Bush flew here to champion the reelection of a congressman who last year settled a $5.5 million lawsuit alleging that he beat his mistress during a five-year affair.
“I’m pleased to be here with Don Sherwood,” a smiling president told the congressman’s loyal but dispirited supporters at a luncheon fundraiser Thursday. “He has got a record of accomplishment.”
Quite a record. While representing the good people of the 10th District, the married congressman shacked up in Washington with a Peruvian immigrant more than three decades his junior. During one assignation in 2004, the woman, who says Sherwood was striking her and trying to strangle her, locked herself in a bathroom and called 911; Sherwood told police he was giving her a back rub.
At a time when Republicans are struggling to motivate religious conservatives to go to the polls next month, it is not clear what benefit the White House found in sending Bush to stump for Sherwood — smack dab in the middle of what Bush, in an official proclamation, dubbed “National Character Counts Week.”
The president encouraged public officials “to observe this week with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs” — but public officials responded with some unusual ceremonies and activities: The House ethics committee is holding hearings on the page sex scandal; the FBI raided buildings as part of a probe involving Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.); and Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), the eighth person convicted in the Abramoff lobbying scandal, is refusing to vacate his seat in Congress.
On the other hand, while other Republicans proclaim their independence from Bush, Sherwood is one of the few still eager to bask in the president’s faint glow. (Another was Sen. George Allen of Virginia, who, after a summer of racial and religious gaffes, was happy to welcome Bush in Richmond on Thursday evening.) Bush may be at a lowly 35 percent in the polls here, but Sherwood should be so lucky: Only 1 in 5 residents definitely intends to vote for him next month. By Sherwood standards, Bush is still a rock star.
“My family and I are humbled by having our friends support us, especially when one is the leader of this great country,” Sherwood said in introducing Bush.
His wife and adult daughter stood on stage, human shields against scandal. Their discomfort became apparent when Bush, trying to defuse the controversy, praised the letter Carol Sherwood wrote to her husband’s constituents this week about the “needlessly cruel” decision by his Democratic opponent to run an ad about the mistress’s allegations. “I was deeply moved by her words,” he said, while some in the dead-silent audience noticed an agonized look on daughter Maria Sherwood’s face.
Bush was careful to avoid the usual lines about family and conservative values; he also skipped the usual first-name-only reference that would indicate that “Don” is a buddy. Onstage, he gave Sherwood the obligatory handshake and photograph but quickly moved to stand with the female Sherwoods.
The president otherwise kept his talk in the comfortable realm of terrorists and taxes. “As this campaign gets closer to the stretch, you will hear a lot of rhetoric and a lot of partisan charges coming from the other side,” Bush warned. “Their goal is to distract you.”
The nature of the accuser’s allegations — she said Sherwood gave her “facial lacerations, bruises about the head, neck and other portions of her body, head injury, injuries to her teeth, mouth and gums, back and neck strain, injuries to her scalp” — makes it more than a distraction. Sherwood continues to deny abuse after reaching the secret settlement.
Still, the loyal listeners wanted to believe Bush — and not the polls that show Sherwood as a goner, down by 15 points. “It all depends on how forgiving the constituents are,” said Harry Strausser III, whose name tag bore the red star of the big donors at the $350-a-head lunch. As for Bush’s elliptical reference to the scandal, “given the fact that the unfortunate situation occurred, you can’t ignore it.”
His father, Harry Jr., added, wistfully: “He’s done a lot while in Congress. It’s an unfortunate situation, the Washington problem with the woman.”
There weren’t quite enough attendees to fill the 25 tables. Campaign volunteers, working to minimize reporters’ contact with the donors, guarded the media in a roped-off pen in the rear of the room, even escorting them to and from the restroom. When the event ended, the Secret Service joined volunteers in attempting, unsuccessfully, to restrain reporters behind ropes until the attendees left.
Such precautions — Thursday’s whole event, in fact — would have been unnecessary if Sherwood, a car dealer and conservative Republican, had avoided that “Washington problem with the woman,” as Strausser tactfully put it. But the rural, reliably GOP voters began to sour on Sherwood with news of the lawsuit; the mood worsened when the Mark Foley page scandal renewed questions of sexual misconduct among lawmakers.
“It’s the perfect storm of events,” exulted Chris Carney, Sherwood’s Democratic opponent. The Penn State professor and naval reservist is enjoying Bush’s “last-ditch” effort to rescue the congressman. Working a lunchtime crowd at a diner not far from the Sherwood event, the Democrat didn’t have to work hard to win support, even from Republicans.
“I’m leaning towards him,” Diane Kosar said after Carney visited her booth. Opposed to abortion and eager for a crackdown on illegal immigrants, she has voted for Sherwood in the past.
But this time, even the president can’t save him. “Sherwood’s been okay,” Kosar said, “but as far as what he did with the young girl, that was a bad thing.”
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Yolanda Carrington:
The gender gap in action! Supporter Strausser Senior: “He’s done a lot while in Congress. It’s an unfortunate situation, the Washington problem with the woman.†Ex-supporter Kosar: “Sherwood’s been okay…but as far as what he did with the young girl, that was a bad thing.†I guess there’s just some things that transcend the party line.
As for the Prez’dent, are we really surprised? I don’t think dude’s made a critical decision in all his six decades breathing. Sherwood’s team asked, he came. Simple as that.
21 October 2006, 2:02 amG.:
Cue the rhetoric on how “America” is defending the rights of women living under Muslim rule…
In 5… 4… 3…
21 October 2006, 11:52 amfrank:
All,
22 October 2006, 12:55 pmHere I am again, perplexed-who are the hell am I supposed to believe has the capability to lead this country? Are we all on our own? A 27-yr old mother of three, originally from Mazar-E-Sharif, was shot point blank in the head while she held the hand of her three year old daughter this past week in Fremont, CA, in a neighborhood known as Little Kabul; the cops don’t know yet who did it. Some are saying that it was a hate crime, that she was shot and killed because she is a Muslim woman. IMO, it doesn’t fucking matter WHY she was killed, it matters that she is dead, and that her children have lost their mother.
I am trying to look at all the possibilities, and the ramifications, of this senseless death. Is this heinous act indicative of OUR culture, OUR superficiality, OUR obsession with wham-bam action flicks, and what I know now is a male-dominated power trip? Possibly.
I went to the movies last night and saw flags of our fathers-I am so sick of violence,of war-
I also picked up Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake- god, I am fearful for my family, and my friends, and alot of the folks on this blog who I only know through their writing. Like-minded folks will have to link up when the shit hits the fan.
As for the elections, I’m throwing my hands up…
Ify:
As soon as Putin made his infamous rape joke, people were calling in to BBC’s channels to remind us that a man’s feelings about rape should not affect a man’s job. Same thing with Mark Foley. Can someone explain this disconnect. The Governors of Minnesota and California have both proclaimed proudly that they have abused girls/women in the Philippines and Brazil. And as long as the left supports Islam and it fighters you are supporting a religion that dogdes an analysis on the way women are treated by Muslim men internationally. Men abusing women seems to increase their stature. We are going to get to a point were when convienent, Republicans will smear this women with as a woman with “personal issues and personal scores to settle, trying to take down a candidate”. Mean while, the state department recently issued a report that said that Iran has a large number of sex slaves around the middle east. That is true but, it is so nauseating when republicans use human rights for a political tool, but denigrate them when they can be used against them. Oh well. See ya.
22 October 2006, 9:45 pmStan:
Ify, I have been deleting you for exactly what is going on here. So I am posting this as a public warning and as your last chance at FS redemption.
The other posts of yours that were moderated out engaged in the same blanket Islamophobia as this one. We don’t tolerate anti-Semitism here. We don’t tolerate overt racism, sexism, immigrant-bashing, or gay-bashing here. In this day and time, when our government is killing people by the hundreds of thousands and locking people up without notice or evidence and kidnapping people to be tortured… and all this is sustained and supported politically by the US populaiton based directly on the demonizaton of Islam and of Islamic people… FS is definitely not going to be part of that, or allow commenters to fan those flames.
Speaking as a leftist, I neither support nor oppose any broad religious tradition (Chistianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.). But when the US state, which is now running a world system that is delivering not only increased poverty and war, but ecocide, is confronted in its predations, the world does not wait for that opposition to come from Robin Hood and his merry men, with assistance from the fair Maid Marian. The resistance comes from people organized the way they are at this historical juncture. I could go on for some time about Christianity, comapring it as broadly as you characterize Islam, with Islam, and it would not look good.
Leftists oppose many things in principle, but anyone who is serious about politics knows that it happens in the dirty, complex world. Iraqi and Iranian people can sort themselves out, and women from those countries will enter their own struggles, wihtout direction from the Great White West, and if they ask assistance, those who can, will. Hell, the same applies here in the US, in looking at the Black Nation.
You generalizations about Islam (which will not be posted again) do absolutely nothing to help the people (which include the women, btw) of those countries; nor does it advance our understanding. It just demonizes Islam.
I got a news flash for ya, Ify. US businessmen have a huge number of teen and pre-teen sex slaves right this minute, being warehoused in sex tourism centers outside the United States.
23 October 2006, 8:43 amTellurian:
As a leftist you neither support or oppose religious traditions? I’m shocked, shocked, Stan. They not only are based on lies and delusions, but are morally and spiritually perverted. We antitheists know that the gods are imaginary, but we hate them anyway. Of course one must distinguish the religious loonies who are indoctrinated from childhood into their worldviews from the worldviews themselves. What we need is a greater respect for people and a greater contempt for our opinions.
23 October 2006, 3:49 pmIfy:
Fair enough. I will watch what I say here, on huff po etc. I don’t agree that we should just leave situations alone. And as for taking a religion apart, people are far more willing to do it with Christianity/America were they don’t find any recent real dirt and nothing happens to them. But I have learned from what you said, which could have been said with alot more venomous edge. And I do apologize for uninformed Islamophopia. I don’t like what I read from their feminist/Ms., but I am far from an expert, and the last thing I want to do is inspire the hatred/suspicion/other mentality that makes it no big deal to violate people’s rights and kill people. Thanks for the post here and on huff po which inspire repentance and love people far better that I have seen a majority of Christians do of late.
23 October 2006, 8:45 pmIfy:
Tellurian spare me your lectures. You would do better to be specific and then go to specific religions and their religious leaders with you pontifications. Go to specific leaders of ALL religions and address ALL current events. Not just Iraq. Tell them what you say directly to their faces. I suppose I am banned now.
23 October 2006, 10:11 pmStan:
Odd turn of commentary on a post about Bush endorsing a batterer, but that just goes to show that complex systems are unpredictable. (-:
The three predominant Abrahamic religious traditions were all shaped not merely by religious beliefs but by the socioeconomic structures of the societies in whch they emerged. Pastoral and patriarchal, slave-holding, and pre-feudally monarchical. There is a reason that we hear acolytes called sheep and stories of the blood of the lamb of God (pastoral economy), and have references (later reinforced in translation during the rise of European feudalism) to the King of Kings (this is a political position, no?).
While I am certainly, personally, a heathen, I find militant atheists — for the most part — to be most concerned with demonstrating their individual intellectual superiority over those ignorant religionists. It’s an illusory position in my experience. Most of those who make the extremely superficial claim that “religion begets violence, yada yada yada” (with nil reference to actual material social conditions) couldn’t contend as debaters in the same room with a prophetic Black minister that I saw last week in Durham, nor with the likes of, say, Paul Tillich. And, of course, the militant secularists (anti-religionists) have about as much chance to connect with real masses of real people to do real social action as I do of becoming a US Senator from North Carolina.
They seem to be smugly satisfied with their discovery that no one is really watching, but unconcerned with why religion persists the way it does in the face of their evidence… which is often as mystifying as what they critique. It was one of my favorite atheists, Charlie Marx, who pointed out that religion is a reflection of the need for comfort and meaning in a painfully reified world. He didn’t say the critique of religion was an end in itself, He called it a “prerequisite” to getting at the real root causes of human misery that were rooted in oppressive secular social power. He said that, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” This oft misunderstood phrase needs one clarification… back then, opium was widely and commonly used as a pain-killer (not a high), so this might better translate today as “religion is the aspirin of the people.”
In other words, opposing religion is opposing the fever (which is the body’s defense) instead of the pathogen.
The so-called Objectivity of many secularists, as we have discussed herabouts at some length, is every bit as mystical as transmogrification or visitation by a ti loa at a Haitian gede. We might be better off spending our time fighting the religious fallacy that “money grows” than engaging in what I call the “fish wars” — the competing bumper-decals between seculars and Christians. The most destructive world religion today is Economics.
In my own political life, I have found fewer more effective or constant allies than politically active faith-communities. They share the same political goals as many of us on the left. The difference between us and them, that I have seen, living here in the American South, is that people listen to them. Imagine these same anti-religionists in 1967 — say — opposing the Civil Rights struggle, which was a religiously led mass movement.
24 October 2006, 6:13 amSully in Boston:
I dont understand how you can have a problem with Bush appointing a woman batterer when you are advocating support for the imperial Democrats whose hands are just as bloodied as the Repubs in their imperial ambitions.
The Dems are part of the same ruling class! Why dont you run as a third party instead of supporting the Dems? You are smart and charismatic and a good speaker.
Say it aint so Stan.
No one knows when there will be a revolution, complexity theory right? So why not try to push in every way possible for the revolution rather than supporting the other party of the same oppressive state.
24 October 2006, 7:09 amYolanda Carrington:
Stan, I second everything you said in your reply to Tellurian, and I would add that this absolutist secular position is exactly what alienates leftists from the masses of people. I had to learn this lesson the hard way from my cousin, who’s a dedicated Christian, as is most of my maternal family. Being baptized in the blood of Christ Jesus is as important to my loved ones as radical feminism-Marxism is to me. Being anointed in His Heavenly Kingdom is what helped them survive in this system.
I would also add that absolutist secularism is a byproduct of white male privilege. The rational scientific philosophical traditions we employ to arrive at “objective truth” were developed by white men, and tend to be most accessible to white men with access to higher levels of education (read: university schooling). Also, the hypothetical “reasonable person” that drives philosophical-scientific inquiry reflects white man standpoint, and as a consquence rational inquiry has never been the most user-friendly tool for women. So whose secular “truth” are we talking about anyway?
Is it any coincidence that most dedicated religious folks globally are women of color? I don’t think so.
24 October 2006, 7:40 amDeAnander:
The most destructive world religion today is Economics.
amen to that
Hornborg’s commentary (which I was just reading this morning) on the function of the sacred in ensuring sustainability, would be very relevant here. it is the only bulwark against totalising instrumentalism.
24 October 2006, 3:59 pmDeAnander:
maybe I shoulda said, may be one of our few remaining bulwarks against totalising instrumentalism. was being a bit absolutist — or despairing — there.
but even secular revolutionary sentiment arises at its best from a sense of the sacred — El Che said all revolutionaries should be driven by love, love of the people and love of life. and that is another way of talking about the sacred, no? the sense of sacredness, of values that are sufficient per se and do not revolve around our personal/human convenience and self-aggrandisement, is behind our resistance to slavery, our resistance to extirminism, our love of place, our love of community.
one doesn’t have to believe in a Big Bearded Guy Up In The Sky to acknowledge and defend the realm of the sacred….
Feynman said that understanding fluid dynamics doesn’t make the ocean any less beautiful. it makes it even more beautiful, more mysterious, more delightful. understanding the microbiology of soil ought to inspire us with more awe and respect for what goes on in every tablespoon of the stuff, sustaining all landlife on the planet.
well I’m wandering here, trapped at the crossroad of my own lifetime in Big Science and my painful awareness of the lunacy of Cartesian reductionism on which much of that science is based.
24 October 2006, 4:29 pmJames M:
I was raised in one of the most conservative fundamentalist religious traditions that I know of, outside of, say, Wahabbism … namely, White Southern Baptism. It’s truly a remarkable feat for someone to exceed the arrogance of a true believer of that ilk, yet the militant atheists seem to do it so effortlessly. I’m impressed.
Thanks for the debunking of this belief system in the preceding comments; reading them was quite a pleasure.
24 October 2006, 5:20 pmIfy:
Hey yall heads up on Meredith May from the San Fran Chronicle. She has some articles from a “sex slave”. I got the first tip from Concerned Women for America. Turns out that San Fransisco is one of the main hubs for sexual slavery. Once again I apologize, for the demonization of Islam in previous post, especially since the worst violations of womens right’s are being done and coordinated by westerners from the States. And there are all kinds of people who are rejecting these violations. From evangelicals to liberal feminist. Gavin Newsom, did a sting with some cops and caught 6 guys gang raping one girl. The average day for these women and their pimps. Newsom my boy has been on top of his game. “These People better recognize that San Fran will not be the sex slave capital.” So hope is coming.
25 October 2006, 1:32 amhoward:
All,
This thread has gotten really interesting, both because of how it developed (a discussion on violence
against women weaving through a discussion about inherent patriarchality of “secularist” ideology) and
also just for the content, which I find fits in with some things I’ve been seeing lately.
At the risk of taking this thread even further afield –
Is anyone familiar with Sam Harris’ book End of Faith? It is ostensibly a critique of the
irrationality of religion and how the human race just has to get over it to survive. The middle third or
so is, as far as I’m concerned, the real purpose of the book, that is a vicious Islamophobic rant.
Believe me, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage have nothing on this guy. He advocates taking over
middle eastern countries but in a more “benign” way than we have up to this point and then making
a “space for civil society to grow” — and oh, but of course we should make it look like it really came
from inside those societies so they won’t catch on that it is us trying to change them. As an example
of his razor-sharp reasoning, Harris makes a near-hallucinatory argument for torture, saying that it’s
“hypocritical” (I think he must really mean “inconsistent”) to accept collateral damage from our bombings and other escapades on the one hand, but to be squeamish about torture on the other —
so the solution for Harris is to learn to accept torture, perhaps with pharmacological aids if necessary to mask the agony of those being tortured (so the torturers aren’t psychologically damaged!).
IMO Harris gives away his game entirely in the book and in pieces he wrote in the LA Times and
Washington Times when he states flatly and categorically that there is absolutely no valid
explanation other than radical Islam for the terrorism coming out of the middle east (he explicitly
rejects socioeconomic considerations or consideration of US military and political intervention). After
all, he says, there are oppressed people all over the place, but only these ones have the bad taste to
strike back to such devastating effect (I didn’t mention that Harris is fixated on suicide bombers) —
so what could their problem be if not their religion?
He mocks (or at least attempts to mock) Noam Chomsky at one point, saying that all Chomsky wants to pay attention to is “body count” when clearly the West’s superior and benign intentions need to be taken into account in comparative moral reckonings between Us and Them. (oh, and of course US/Israel has “moral high ground” over Hamas/Hezbollah because “we” go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties while “they” purposely target the innocent — and this written after the Israel/Hezbollah conflict this summer).
I know the phrase gets used alot, but you can’t make this shit up.
At any rate, Harris looks like the perfect poster boy for some of the things Stan, Yolanda Carrington,
and Denander say above.
*********************************************************
For an interesting take on what it means to be a committed leftist and still feel a need to connect
with familiar spiritual traditions without necessarily being a religious person, there is a series of
three or four pieces by Robert Jensen (the U of Texas/Austin journalism professor many of you may
be familiar with) on Counterpunch. too lazy to link them here, but just go to counterpunch.org and
search say “Jensen religion” and see what comes up.
I am 53 years old and still continuing to discover what it means to be a preacher’s kid from an
25 October 2006, 9:00 amisolated farming community in Iowa who has also been an activist of some sort since about the age of 15.
Yolanda, I especially appreciated your comments about your family in this regard. Thank you all for
some really good discussion that has definitely helped me move my thinking along.