I don’t claim it’s anything other than one of the meaner motives, but UD has always adored encountering flatout fulminating hypocrisy. This can’t involve just being – I dunno – silent, passive, and inert in regard to living a life obscenely at odds with your professed foundational values. The hypocrisy I adore announces itself – boldly, loudly, shamelessly, crazily, rambunctiously, crashingly, self-pleasuringly.
Take a look at this blog’s thick hypocrisy file – much but not all of it centering on the noisy superChristian superpiety of superperverted college sports coaches and Liberty University presidents – to share in the perennial delight of truly fa rumore hyperhypocrisy.
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And now we have a new category: Supreme Hypocrisy. Private jet and private yacht enthusiast Clarence Thomas shares this about himself:
“I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it. … I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.”
Who among us wouldn’t? I don’t know anyone who, given a choice between standing in a Walmart parking lot and lying on a beach in Bora Bora would choose abnormal Bora Bora. I mean, yech! Yech! (I’m spitting something nasty out of my mouth.) YECH.
Ah. That’s better. Where’s the fucking parking lot? I want to walk among the RVs…
They never wanted him as president at Jackson State; but students, faculty, and alumni were overruled and had him forced on them, no doubt for many corrupt reasons, this being public education in the state of Mississippi. But of course they were right not to want him, and now, after his arrest for soliciting a prostitute, giving the police a false name, and possessing marijuana, JSU must yet again search for a president. It has had a long string of these; all flame out quickly, though none as dramatically as this latest guy.
This latest guy presents himself in every possible forum as so jesusy there’s no one more jesusy. It’s all God God God God God from this guy; and UD wishes – she really wishes – people would begin to intuit a possible connection between excess jesusism and bein’ bad.
… and although UD knows that not everyone shares her attraction to any combination of flamboyant, relentless (and in the very best cases, litigious) religious self-righteousness plus equally relentless moral debauchery, she hopes that at least some of her readers will enjoy as much as she does the details of the Daniel Greer and the First Baptist Church of Hammond Indiana cases. Both stories have emerged not a moment too soon — just as America’s highest-profile sanctimonious person, Ted Cruz, has fled the scene. Both cases feature noisy revilers of nasty secular culture now in court for staggering sexual and/or financial degeneracy.
Yum. Let’s go there.
Until the current civil case against him, alleging that for years he raped a fifteen-year-old boy in his care (“Rabbi Greer was in his sixties when he forced the minor Eli to engage in acts of sex with him, including forced fellatio, anal sex, fondling and masturbation,” the lawsuit says. “Rabbi Greer frequently gave Eli alcohol at the time he raped and assaulted his child victim. Rabbi Greer showed Eli pornographic films. The lawsuit says Greer sexually abused [Eliyahu] Mirlis at multiple locations, including on school property, at the rabbi’s home, and at motels and rental properties.”), Rabbi Daniel Greer was famous for having spawned one of the Yale Five. His extremely orthodox daughter and four fellow indignants sued Yale University for making them live in debauched secular co-ed dormitories. The suit was of course immediately and irritatedly dismissed as soon as it got to a judge (they “could have opted to attend a different college or university if they were not satisfied with Yale’s housing policy.”), but because the story came out of Yale it got oodles of unwarranted attention.
Now Father Greer bids to make the family name even more famous than his daughter has made it by railing against homosexuality while, according to the complaint, raping a boy for years.
Lovers of out-there religious hypocrisy will also enjoy the mischievous megachurch of mid-America, where … er… let’s see …
Ex-pastor Jack Schaap is currently serving a federal prison sentence …
… Schaap pleaded guilty to transporting a girl to Illinois and Michigan for sexual encounters over a four-week period starting the week before the girl turned 17. He also had sex with her in his church office.
Schaap is named in [a recent] lawsuit, but not as a defendant, accused of helping facilitate a financial fraud that bilked two investors out of more than $200,000
A former deacon at the church, later hired as a financial planner, Thomas Kimmel, 70, is also in federal prison …
In 2014, Kimmel was convicted of multiple counts of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions, according to court documents.
His role as a fundraiser in “Sure Line Investments,” a business buying and selling used cars which devolved into a Ponzi scheme, involved Schaap and snared a number of individuals around the country, according to court documents.
Kimmel was a financial adviser at First Baptist Hammond and traveled the country seeking investment in Sure Line, according to court documents.
And Schaap preached from the pulpit that Kimmel’s investment opportunities would give church members more money to use for God, according to court documents.
Both Schaap and Kimmel received commissions on the investments they secured for Sure Line, 1 percent and 10 percent respectively. That information was never disclosed to church members who invested, according to court documents.
A University of Vermont professor, who took an academic leave to direct a $540 million development project in Senegal — and funded by the United States — is among the top 100 delinquent taxpayers in Vermont.
Taxes from thee, but not from me; and to make it even better his academic specialty is anti-corruption and building civil societies.
[T]he state Tax Department has sued [Moustapha] Diouf twice in recent years in an effort to get him current with his state taxes.
The first lawsuit settled for $30,320 in November 2011 and required him to pay $50 a month, records show. That would take 50 1/2 years to pay off the agreement, but did not include any interest or penalties that might be imposed. It was to cover income taxes owed from 2002 to 2009, records show.
The state sued again in November 2013 to cover taxes for 2011 and 201[2]. He reached a settlement one month later to cover both cases for $43,428, records show. He agreed to have UVM to start sending the state $500 a month in December 2015 and that would take over seven years to become current, plus interest and penalties.
The blogosphere is having fun with Paul Krugman today (see my own take on things in the post just below this one). But lest we forget: Krugman has always been hypocritical about making his own big bucks. This is from Andrew Sullivan’s website, years ago:
KRUGMAN IN HIS OWN WORDS: “Economists also did their bit to legitimize previously unthinkable levels of executive pay. During the 1980′s and 1990′s a torrent of academic papers — popularized in business magazines and incorporated into consultants’ recommendations — argued that Gordon Gekko was right: greed is good; greed works. In order to get the best performance out of executives, these papers argued, it was necessary to align their interests with those of stockholders. And the way to do that was with large grants of stock or stock options.
It’s hard to escape the suspicion that these new intellectual justifications for soaring executive pay were as much effect as cause. I’m not suggesting that management theorists and economists were personally corrupt. It would have been a subtle, unconscious process: the ideas that were taken up by business schools, that led to nice speaking and consulting fees, tended to be the ones that ratified an existing trend, and thereby gave it legitimacy.”
– Paul Krugman, criticizing the subtle, unconscious corruption of academic economists being paid nice speaking and consulting fees, October 20, 2002.
“My critics seem to think that there was something odd about Enron’s willingness to pay a mere college professor that much money. But such sums are not unusual for academic economists whose expertise is relevant to current events… Remember that this was 1999: Asia was in crisis, the world was a mess. And justifiably or not, I was regarded as an authority on that mess. I invented currency crises as an academic field, way back in 1979; anyone who wants a sense of my academic credentials should look at the Handbook of International Economics, vol. 3, and check the index…
I mention all this not as a matter of self-puffery, but to point out that I was not an unknown college professor. On the contrary, I was a hot property, very much in demand as a speaker to business audiences: I was routinely offered as much as $50,000 to speak to investment banks and consulting firms. They thought I might tell them something useful… The point is that the money Enron offered wasn’t out of line with what companies with no interest in influence-buying were offering me. You may think I was overpaid, but the market – not Enron – set those pay rates.”
– Paul Krugman, January 21, defending his getting paid $50,000 for a two-day weekend Enron Advisory Board meeting because the market set the fees.
Newt Gingrich’s speech at the University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday quickly took a turn for the dramatic when the first student to question him brought up his admitted extramarital affair and accused him of being “hypocritical” for espousing moral values.
“I believe in a forgiving God, and the American people will have to decide whether that their primary concern. If the primary concern of the American people is my past, my candidacy would be irrelevant. If the primary concern of the American people is the future… that’s a debate I’ll be happy to have with your candidate or any other candidate if I decide to run.”
The American people are concerned about the future! Which woman will Gingrich next leave his wife for, and how embarrassing/ironic will it be?
Gingrich will continue pretending to run for president until early March, when he “expects an announcement” about whether or not he will continue pretending to run for president.
And there’s no better field for play in this regard than big time university sports.
Here’s some wonderful writing from Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky, about Auburn’s rapidly-tarnishing Saint Cam Newton:
We expect a certain level of stupidity from our athletes. We accept that they’re going to have tons of personal tutoring help, up-to-and-including people writing their papers for them. Hell, it’s college; we expect kids of all kinds to cheat. But to get caught [as Newton did] indicates a stupidity that we just can’t accept. This, and nothing else, is sullying our notion of the student-athlete!
It’s a joke, of course. There’s an All-SEC Academic Team, and being on it doesn’t tend to improve a player’s draft stock. ESPN College GameDay doesn’t go to Knoxville or Baton Rouge or Tuscaloosa for finals week to cover the due date for term papers. We all know these kids are there to play football, and we’re there to watch them, and all we ask them is to make the slightest effort in preserving the illusion of academia mattering. We know they don’t care, but we’re all content to live in our giant happy Moon Bounce, oblivious to anything beyond the bizarre artificial creation that is college athletics. And we get mad when someone pops it.
I like Petschesky’s evocation of the surreality of big time college athletics, since that is what has struck me the most in my years of covering it. I like just as much his point about the fragility of this giant creation, the way it can suddenly be made to explode in our faces, and the way this reality-explosion angers us. Humankind cannot stand very much reality, says Eliot; and indeed fewer sights are more intense, and intensely strange, than university sports figures and fans forced to reckon with the reality of their false and sordid world.
“The same administrators now cloaking themselves in the mantle of free speech have been all too willing to censor all kinds of unpopular stuff on their campuses,” said [one observer]. “It is such utter hypocrisy.”
More on the gay threesome/Moms for Liberty couple.
Bridget Ziegler did nothing as [a] board chair during a public comment session back in March when a woman baselessly accused [a gay board member] of being a groomer who endangers children.
“I asked her to shut down the meeting and she refused,” [the slandered member] recalled on Friday. “So the only way I could protect our students and their families in our community from that ugly, homophobic rhetoric was to shut the meeting down myself by walking out.”
After a video of Edwards walking out appeared online, Christian Ziegler—the chair of the Florida GOP—joined his wife in a smear tag team. He tweeted that Edwards is “Tommy Drama,” adding, “If he can’t take public criticism, he shouldn’t be a public official.”
“As leaders in the Florida GOP and Moms for Liberty, the Zieglers have made a habit out of attacking anything they perceive as going against ‘family values’ — be it reproductive rights or the existence of LGBTQ+ Floridians,” [the Florida Democratic Party Chair] said. “The level of hypocrisy in this situation is stunning.”
The retrial is about to be scheduled! Our guy! We’ve long followed the worst Medicare-Medicaid criminal/most insanely pious Orthodox Jew (In prison, he prayed nine hours a day, “spending so much time praying on his knees that his legs were swollen and purple.”) in the country’s history, through conviction, Trump pardon, and now retrial. And, as world-historical hypocrisy mavens, we are loving every minute. The only spectacle as amusing is the Caged Wisdom sequence in the comedy Arrested Development, which is in fact largely indistinguishable from the ongoing Philip Esformes sequence.
In 2016, prosecutors charged Esformes in what they called the largest-ever scheme targeting Medicare and Medicaid, the government programs for the elderly and the poor. Esformes was accused of bribing medical professionals to admit patients to his network of assisted-living facilities and nursing homes for services that were never provided or were unnecessary.
During the two-month trial, prosecutors asserted that Esformes personally received more than $37 million in the scheme. They told the jury he used his proceeds to finance a lavish lifestyle and pay $300,000 in bribes to the head coach of the University of Pennsylvania basketball team to recruit his son…
In April 2019, a jury convicted Esformes on 20 criminal counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, paying and receiving kickbacks, bribery, money laundering and obstruction of justice…
Esformes worries constantly about a new trial and the threat of incarceration…
Poor baby! I tell you it’s doing nothing for the guy’s mental health that he might, even after Trump pardoned him, serve his prison term for stealing billions of dollars from the American health system and degrading the lives of millions of poor old people. What’s the world coming to when one of the most disgusting crooks America ever produced actually has to serve jail time? Put Esformes in my search engine for even more lurid criminal details!
Believe me when I say that I, like many people who have been burned by the Texas GOP’s seemingly endless appetite for cruelty, ignorance, and hypocrisy, felt a certain satisfaction as I watched yesterday’s coverage of it setting itself on fire. Top moment? When the first group to appear outside the Capitol in Austin in response to [corrupt, impeached AG Ken] Paxton’s call for supporters to turn out was around 100 people preparing for the “Trot for Trans Lives,” a 5K run held in support of transgender Americans affected by the waves of anti-trans rights legislation passed in recent years, including by Texas lawmakers.
University Diaries mainstay, Philip Esformes, who was convicted of running the “largest single criminal health-care fraud [scheme]” in the history of the Dept of Justice (he got twenty years), and who soon after was miraculously pardoned by Donald Trump, is on UD‘s mind this morning. Everyone’s talking about the increasingly plausible claim that DT and R. Giulianisold pardons for two million dollars apiece.
Did they? Did Esformes, a way-pious orthodox Jew (I’ve already told you how much I love shout-out-loud hypocrisy!), shell out the bucks? Can’t wait to find out.
Meanwhile, right after Esformes got sprung, the pissed off feds filed another big criminal case against him (when you’re a world-historical crook, the pickins ain’t slim) so that was maybe two million down the crapper but thanks to tens of thousands of dead and dying old people (nursing homes were Phil’s MO) Esformes has TONS of money so don’t worry.
It’s a Proustian moment for ol’ UD, as another obscenely compensatednon-profit leader explains that he didn’t do his obscene compensation; it was forced on him by the organization’s board.
Proustian because little piggies squealing about their non-profit purity have for lo these many years been a mainstay of this blog, which loves to slop around in greed and hypocrisy; and the non-profit swine who blames his personal greed on a board whose absolute command he/she simply cannot disobey represents a spectacular distillation of greed and hypocrisy …
UD first encountered the board made me do it at her own institution, GWU, one of whose presidents assembled a compensation package so huge that the national media noticed, and it became quite uncomfortable for the school. His defense? I had nothing to do with it; the board forced it on me.
Yes, as the president of a university I am constantly making speeches to our students about the importance of independent thought and action… How many times have I recited Frost’s The Road Not Taken to the little buggers… Yet when it comes to something as important as the amount of money I personally drain from this non-profit, I shrink to a little Oblomov, unable to lift a finger on behalf of any recognizable set of moral values…
UD‘s also reminded of the Bremer Foundation’s board:
In 2004, the three trustees together received nearly $125,000. That figure has increased by nearly 10 times in 10 years… “These institutions get tremendously preferential tax treatment,” [Aaron Dorfman] said. “And because of the tax-exempt status they enjoy, the rest of us pay higher taxes and in effect subsidize nonprofit tax-exempt charitable foundations.”
So this latest dude, who just, you know, drained the money from an organization established to help appallingly underserved American populations, is running for Chicago’s mayor on this record, and given the raucous criminality of that city he’ll probably win.
…. By which UD means that almost every actual, non-fictional human being presents with nuance, a sense of unreachable depth, ambiguity, contradiction. Norman Maclean gets at this when thinking about his tragic younger brother: “[I]t is those we live with and should know who elude us.”
Even those to whom we’re closest, that is, ultimately present as mysteries, exhibit the human traits of unreachable depth and contradiction. Everyone, really – or almost everyone – is recognizably human by virtue of their possession of a complex, enigmatic, and vulnerable private self.
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And then there’s Alan Dershowitz. For as long as he’s been in the public eye, Harvard’s finest seems nothing — nothing — but a strutting monomaniac, a staggeringly unidimensional embodiment of the medieval humor “choleric.” Tip him forward in time and find him, post-medieval, on Moliere’s stage, firing up the floor boards with rage, hypocrisy, sense of entitlement, and faux moral indignation. A person who regards himself as a supremely righteous exemplar in a world of villains, his speech consists of rifle-blasts of accusations against his enemies: LIAR LIAR NAZI WHORE LIAR WHORE NAZI.
Moliere’s Dershowitz has gotten rich defending, in courts of law, female genital mutilators, murderers, and many other bad people, but this, he roars, proves his ethical superiority: GIVE ME YOUR TIRED YOUR POOR NO ONE ELSE WILL DEFEND THESE HUDDLED MASSES. And despite evidence of his using that wealth to lead a rather decadent personal life among rather decadent friends (sometimes they are the same people he is defending in courts of law, or in the newspapers, or, reportedly, to President Trump, in search of a pardon for them), he boasts that he belongs to not one, not two, not three, but FOUR synagogues. So there!
Like all flat characters, Dershowitz is as hilarious as he is heinous; it’s always funny in a startling way to find puppetry rather than profundity – Ubu rather than Macbeth – and as he gets close to death and we realize the long-expected moment of self-recognition or shame or at the very least reflection, the moment he becomes a recognizable human being instead of a machine, will never come, our laughter at him becomes more unsettling. It is guilty laughter, laughter at a person trapped in a failure to become a person.
His latest rifle-blast, in the pages of scummy Newsmax, begins with a boyish, wide-eyed, gentle, baffled photograph of his friend Prince Andrew. In this picture, Andrew asks Why is this happening to me? And in the fevered defense that follows, Dershowitz explains that it’s all because of greedy whore Virginia Giuffre, who also plucked Dershowitz himself out of thin air to sue for millions of dollars. It’s a travesty. A TRAVESTY.
