7th Wrestler: Jordan “Definitely Knew”

Deliciously, GOP Rep. Jim Jordan's problems and accusations that he was well aware of sexual abuse taking place with members of the Ohio State wrestling team by the team physician. Now, seven of the former wrestlers have stated that Jordan had to know what was happening and merely looked away rather than protect the team's members. All of this is coming out as Jordan, a reactionary, anti-gay, anti-woman Republican had been maneuvering to succeed the toxic Paul Ryan as speaker of the House of Representatives.  With luck, the growing scandal will derail Jordan's efforts and, with more luck, force him from office.  Jordan embodies so much of what is wrong with today's Republican Party.  Here are excerpts from the Washington Post:

A seventh former Ohio State University wrestler said Saturday that he believes Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) knew about inappropriate behavior that allegedly took place in the school’s athletic department three decades ago, as two more former team members came to Jordan’s defense.

David Range, who wrestled for Ohio State in the late 1980s, said Jordan had to have known about alleged sexual misconduct by Richard Strauss, an athletic doctor whose behavior is under investigation by the school, because it happened regularly to team members and people talked about it.

“Jordan definitely knew that these things were happening — yes, most definitely,” Range told The Washington Post. “It was there. He knew about it because it was an everyday occurrence.”

Range said he never discussed the issue directly with Jordan one on one and did not know whether anyone made a formal report, but he said Jordan was present during group conversations in the locker room about Strauss’s behavior.

“We talked about it all the time in the locker room” while Jordan was there, he said.

Range said Strauss, who has been accused of abusing athletes in more than a dozen sports during his time as an athletic doctor, touched wrestlers inappropriately during examinations and ogled them in the locker room showers.

Jordan has been under scrutiny since July 3, when NBC News quoted three former wrestlers saying he knew or must have known about inappropriate behavior in the athletic department. Three others have said the same in news accounts since then.

The reports come at a delicate time for Jordan, who has been under pressure from conservative political organizations to mount a bid to replace Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who will not run for reelection.

Asked for comment for this story, a spokesman for Jordan referred The Post to his interview with Fox News on Friday night.

Michael Alf, who joined the team in the late 1980s, said the environment in the Ohio State locker room was “definitely disturbing,” with non-team members using the showers to ogle the wrestlers.

“There was definitely inappropriate things that in my opinion were pretty disgusting going on all around us. You just took your shower and got out,” he said.

Nothing more fun that exposing the hypocrisy of a "family values" Republican.  I truly hoe this takes Jordan down before it is all over.

The GOP's Dark Suicide Pact

The descent of the Republican Party into total insanity is now nearly complete.  When extremists and con men like Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan are "too moderate" for the  spittle flecked, knuckle dragging party base, you know that things may beyond the point of no return.  A piece in Salon looks at the sad state of affairs, much of which was engineered by the GOP establishment that put short term electoral success ahead of any remote long term strategy or comprehension of the damage that would be done by the Frankenstein monster they created, i.e., the Chistofascists/Tea Party dominated party base.  One irony to me is that the Christofascists blame gays for the fall of the Roman Empire, but in reality it was ignorance embracing, incurious people like them who killed Rome and ushered in the Dark Ages.  Here are column highlights:

It is time once again to ponder the question of whether the Republican Party can be saved from itself – and if so, what exactly there is to save and why anyone should care. The GOP’s current struggle to find someone, or indeed anyone, who is willing to serve as Speaker of the House of Representatives, the position once held by Henry Clay and Sam Rayburn and Tip O’Neill – the president’s most important counterbalance and negotiating partner, and traditionally the second most powerful job in Washington – is of course a tragic and/or hilarious symptom of much deeper dysfunction.

How large are Heaven and Hell, measured in cubits and ells? Not large enough, it appears, to encompass the pride and arrogance of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of 40-odd far-right Jacobins who first sabotaged Boehner’s speakership and then torpedoed the candidacy of his chosen replacement, Kevin McCarthy.

In the great tradition of doomed revolutionaries, the Freedom Caucus prefers death, or at least political annihilation – which will be theirs one day, and sooner than they think – to the dishonor of compromise.

They could just as well be called the Suicide Caucus – or the Satanic Caucus, in the grandiose spirit of Milton’s fallen angel, who fights on with no hope of victory: . . .

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the Republicans were boring and small-minded but not especially crazy. They pursued a disastrous foreign-policy agenda during the Cold War, but they were not alone in that, and one could argue that marked the first stages of betraying the tradition of Edmund Burke-style conservatism. On fiscal and social issues, they stood with country-club middle management and small-town Presbyterians and the affluent families who owned the third-largest bank in Indiana or a chain of hardware stores in and around San Diego.

I believe that the Republicans have brought their gruesome predicament upon themselves and that they richly deserve their fate, although they have certainly been nudged toward the precipice by Democratic cowardice and incompetence. 

Whoever the GOP shoves to the podium, whether it’s Ryan or Darrell Issa or Jason Chaffetz or someone even dumber than them, will either have to default on the national debt in November and shut down the government in December or face yet another enraged right-wing revolt. Either way, this Congress (and most likely the next one too, regardless of who is elected president) is a lost cause, and the future viability of bipartisan politics is very much in doubt.

That big Republican victory in the 2014 midterms was a masterfully engineered work of fiction – an artifact of voter suppression, voter apathy and the intensive gerrymandering imposed by GOP-dominated state legislatures after the 2010 census. Republican candidates won barely 51 percent of the vote, but thanks to the imaginative redistricting plans imposed in numerous states, that modest margin was dramatically over represented in the final result. 

Now the Republicans in Congress, along with the “mainstream” or “establishment” Republican presidential candidates, are discovering what should have been obvious all along: The Frankenstein voter base they bred and nurtured with so much money and so much cunning does not like them or trust them. The fanatics of the Satanic Suicide Caucus and their supporters do not want the current Republican leadership to govern anything, or even try to.

When they [the GOP base] repeat its catchphrases about fiscal responsibility and social order in their metallic parasite voices, what they really mean is fiscal holocaust, social anarchy and class war against poor women, black people and immigrants. They dream of conquest, but whatever they can’t conquer – starting with their own political party – they will happily destroy.