Tim Mahoney Affair, Democrat Hypocrisy, and Media Bias

I still remember the name of Florida Representative Mark Foley even after two years.  It’s like that line I heard over and over and over again from George Bush, Senior: “Read my lips: no new taxes.”  I still remember that one 16 years later without having to check out the accuracy of the quote.

Why do I remember that line so well?  Because it was played so many times by the media that I couldn’t get away from it.  President George Herbert Walker Bush had campaigned on holding the line on taxes, and the Democrat-controlled Congress subsequently forced him to break his promise if he wanted to accomplish anything during his administration.  And then they nailed him for it.

In the case of Mark Foley, the investigation just went on and on and on.  Democrats used the Foley story and the hoopla over Senator George Allen’s meaningless “macaca” slang to paint the Republicans as out-of-touch racist and pervert hypocrites.  And it worked pretty good.

You probably won’t remember the name “Tim Mahoney” in a couple of years.  You may well not even know about it now.  But that’s only because the same media that ginned the name of Mark Foley into a Republican witch hunt won’t do the same thing to Tim Mahoney even though he replaced Foley in the same West Palm Beach, Florida district and even though he did much, much worse.

Mahoney spent $121,000 of taxpayer money to keep an aide with whom he was sexually involved with from talking after she threatened to sue him.  Mark Foley, by the way, never actually had sex with anybody in the course of his sexual scandal.

Here is a partial transcript of the recorded exchange between Mahoney – who is married and who so self-righteously proclaimed that he would be better than the Republican he was replacing – and Patricia Allen:

MAHONEY: You’re fired. It’s correct. It’s what I believe. You’re fired. Do you hear me? Don’t tell me whether it’s correct or not.

ALLEN: Tell me why else I’m fired.

MAHONEY: There is no why else.

ALLEN: Yeah there is.

MAHONEY: No–just you’re fired because I said that you y’know … not the judge and the jury. Ok? You’re fired. D’you hear me? Call what’s her name in Anchorage, Alaska if you want to keep on thinkin’ like y’know that I’m not being fair or somehow this is a negotiation. This, this is not a negotiation. Ok? Y’know, you’re not in a position to negotiate with me on this. Ok? My position. Ok? You work at my pleasure. Do you understand what that means?

ALLEN: What does it mean?

MAHONEY: It means that you work at my pleasure. If you’re doing the job that I think that you should do, you get to keep your job. Whenever I don’t feel like you’re doing your job, then you lose your job. And guess what? The only person that matters is–guess who? Me. Do you understand that? Now this is how life really is. This is how it works.

“You work at my pleasure.  Do you understand what that means?”

It means that we Democrats can use our female staff like frivolous little sex toys, and even pay hush money with taxpayer money, and Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emmanuel will still come rushing to our defense.  You working at my pleasure means that you pleasure me.  And if you don’t like it, why don’t you give Sarah Palin a call.  Maybe she’ll care.  Democrats sure won’t.

That’s right.  Rahm Emmanuel and other senior Democrats have done their best to help Mahoney keep his seat:

Senior Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives, including Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), the chair of the Democratic Caucus, have been working with Mahoney to keep the matter from hurting his re-election campaign, the Mahoney staffers said.

ABC has at least run the story, though there’s little chance they will keep pounding away at it like they did with Mark Foley.  Who else has run the story?

Here’s a delicious bit of irony that underscores the sheer hypocrisy of Democrats.  Mahoney – that paradigm of virtue – was tasked to lead the way in the Democrats’ ethics reform package.

Republicans, and the kind of independents who vote for Republican candidates, are the kind of people who demand moral accountability.  When a Republican screws up, he’s usually gone pretty damn fast.  The media – and his own party – drive him out of office.  Not that that matters to the media, who continue to hound the matter as long as it is useful to their liberal friends in Congress.

If Mahoney were a Republican, we would hear the worst portions of the audio tape over and over and over again while we learned every new detail of the media investigation and any other investigation – slowly leaked out for the next three weeks to obtain maximum political damage.  And they would craft the narrative that the Republican Party degrades women and that the Party that nominated a woman for Vice President actually vilifies womens’ rights and self-respect.  But he isn’t a Republican; he’s a Democrat.

So the story will probably go the way of Democratic Rep. Jack Murtha, who falsely and repeatedly accused Marines in Haditha of war crimes who later turned out to be completely innocent.  Or Democratic Rep. William Jefferson, after FBI agents discovered $90,000 of bribe money found in his freezer.  Two years later, he is still serving, and Democrats will re-elect him for another term.  Or like Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel, who didn’t feel he needed to bother following the very tax laws he wrote for everyone else as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.  Or Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, who not only assured the stock-buying public that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be solid buys in the future just before the GSEs went belly up (Enron’s Ken Lay would have rotted in prison for doing the SAME THING had he not died first); but who also had an homosexual relationship with a Fannie Mae ececutive while he had oversight over Fannie Mae, and never bothered to disclose the relationship in spite of the clear conflict of interests.

Democrats – who routinely attack Republicans for much, much less – never seem to care about moral accountability.  And the media that hold Republicans’ feet to the fire for much, much less never seem to be willing to make them care.

Update: Mahoney has now been forced to acknoweldge other affairs, including at least one MORE case which appears to have had illegitimate or illegal finances.  Again, the real issue is the fact that 1) the Democratic Party leadership came to help this scumbag win reelection even though he’s lower than whale poop; and 2) the media demonstrates that it is a Goebbels-like propganda machine in its total hypocritical double standard over how it handled Mark Foley vs. Tim Mahoney given a sex scandal in the same district at the same time before an election.

Tags: Barney Frank, Charles Rangel, Democrat, Fannie Mae, George Bush, Jack Murtha, Mark Foley, Patricia Allen, Rahm Emmanuel, Republican, Sarah Palin, Tim Mahoney, transcript, William Jefferson, work at my pleasure