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player ready...These are the worst of times for sanctimonious hypocrites.
Maybe if they had taken the Gospel’s advice and not thrown the first stone. Maybe if they had taken the high road and told Monica Lewinsky’s tattle-tale “friend” to go home and mind her own business.
But no. Instead, they mounted their high horses, loosed their terrible swift swords and proceeded to lecture the nation ad nauseam about family values and personal morality.
And they have been paying for it ever since.
First came news that Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), the high priest of last year’s presidential impeachment, once had a home-wrecking sexual affair with a married woman named Cherie. Then came Robert Livingston, the righteous Republican from Louisiana, who was about to take over as speaker of the House until he was exposed by a porno magazine as a serial adulterer. And just recently it has emerged in divorce-court proceedings that the previous Republican speaker, the morally omniscient Newt Gingrich of Georgia, had been getting it on all the while with a House Agriculture Committee aide named Callista.
Why, it was enough to make a secular humanist believe in divine retribution.
Only now, just when you’d think the hypocrisy couldn’t get any deeper, here comes the scandal-of-scandals, unfolding like a sordid centerfold at that temple of Midwestern conservatism–Michigan’s Hillsdale College.
With any luck, you have never heard of Hillsdale College. Mine ran out a few years ago when somebody–probably one of my right-wing “fans”–put me on its mailing list. It’s a storybook campus with 1,200 students about 90 minutes this side of Detroit. It’s also revered by hard-line conservatives, libertarians and Bible-wavers as a national model of what higher education ought to be. Hillsdale refuses to accept any federal funding (not even Pell grants or GI grants) so as to keep out liberal governmental influences. Or, as their mission statement puts it, to avoid “succumbing to the dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called `social justice’ and `multicultural diversity.’ “
Hillsdale’s pride and joy is its Imprimis monthly lecture series and digest–a program that draws the best and brightest conservative speakers from around the country. Earlier this year they had Thomas Sowell on the evils of affirmative action, and Dick Lowry, editor of the arch-conservative National Review, on the way “modern media” demonizes moral authority figures. Last year there was Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.), bootstrap-lifter Jack Kemp and, of course, national moral scold William Bennett, who gave a speech titled: “Does Honor Have a Future?”
To their credit, Bill Bennett and Lowry’s National Review have been trying to get to the bottom of what’s been going on this fall at Hillsdale. We’re not talking varsity football. It’s more like a tragic mixing of “Peyton Place” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
The short version, being reported in next week’s National Review, goes something like this:
Longtime college president George Roche III, a prodigious shaker of right-wing philanthropic trees, has been forced to resign following the suicide last month of his daughter-in-law, Lissa Roche. Mrs. Roche, who was managing editor of Imprimis, blew her brains out with a .38 special on Oct. 17, shortly after telling her husband, George IV, a history and physical education teacher at the college, that she had been having a 19-year affair with his father. Her suicide also came on the heels of President Roche’s decision to divorce his wife of 44 years . . . only to marry somebody else.
Apparently, George III recovered sufficiently from the loss of his daughter-in-law to go on a Hawaiian honeymoon earlier this month, but he was recalled by the Hillsdale board and asked to resign. (A maneuver that will allow him to keep his pension.) Now the ex-president of Hillsdale College is denying all and invoking God as his witness. Also, a college vice president, who earlier had corroborated what allegedly happened, has changed his story to square with George III’s denial. Other school officials have begun deriding the dead woman as a “pathological liar.” (The Republican version of “trailer-park trash”?)
The whiff of a cover-up, meanwhile, has prompted Bill Bennett to resign as co-chair of a search committee set up to find a new president for Hillsdale.
“Of course they thought he (George Roche III) did this,” the former U.S. secretary of education said last week. “They should stop playing games. This poor woman is dead and the turn here is: `She’s a pathological liar.’ The whole thing just reeks.”
I’ll second that, Mr. Bennett.
I’ll also give you, and all my judgmental friends, this benediction, as we approach Thanksgiving and the season of charity and forgiveness:
Let us remember the contrite words of our president, who said to us only last year: “I misled people, including my wife . . . and I deeply regret that.” And later: “I am working at repairing my life and my marriage.”
Recall also that our Puritan forbears are best remembered for Thanksgiving, a feast of sharing, not for the Salem witch trials.
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And finally, the next time you pick up a stone, remember Hillsdale and stuff it in your pocket.