Should we still call him “coach” as well?
I mean if we are going to participate in the fiction that the plea agreement between former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon is justice, then we might as well take it to the absurd extreme when we next see Hastert shopping for wrestling singlets at Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Absurd in the extreme is the only way to describe a plea deal that may put Hastert in prison for six months when he was facing 10 years on charges for which the feds had him dead to rights.
It is Hastert’s underlying “misconduct,” as the feds introduced it and termed it, that is central.
If the feds know Hastert to be guilty of the crime that they insinuated he committed in their indictment, then this is not simply a case of a special dispensation for a former political panjandrum. It is a case of taking a pass on putting a possible child molester behind bars for the greatest amount of time possible.
In the indictment, Hastert is charged with paying hush money — up to $3.5 million — to an unnamed individual for past “misconduct.” Federal law enforcement sources have separately indicated to the media that Hastert was paying to cover up the sexual abuse of a student from decades ago when he was a wrestling coach and teacher at Yorkville High School.
If that is what the feds believe occurred and believe they could prove in a court of law were it not for the statute of limitations, then why would they not use the pinching-Al-Capone-for-tax-evasion model and go for the maximum available punishment on the banking charges against Hastert?
If they do not believe the allegations, then why did they leak such scandalous claims?
Either way, Fardon has some explaining to do to a public that pays his salary and expects equal justice before the law.
If Hastert were not a former House speaker but a nameless sexual predator, would Fardon have handled the case the same way? Would he have struck the same plea bargain?
Hastert, too, owes the public a full accounting, including at his allocution when he is sentenced in February.
That accounting should not be limited to the extortion but also should address the decisions he made while he was the third most powerful person in the Western world and whether the darkness in his past influenced the judgment he exercised as speaker on matters of public concern, such as the sex scandal in 2006 that led to Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., resigning.
Finally, as we consider who we thought Denny Hastert was before his indictment in May and who we now think Denny Hastert is now, one additional reckoning is in order.
For the “I’m a fiscal conservative but anything else goes” crowd within the Illinois GOP who suggest we ignore a candidate’s character and private conduct as long as everyone is getting paid — folks who have been awfully quiet during the Aaron Schock and Hastert meltdowns — remember this: When you induce a state of moral comatosity in a party, if you wake up at all, you do so in the superminority.
Dan Proft is a talk show host on WIND-AM 560.
