Evil Chuckie looking for spot
On All-Time Worst Politician List
Yes, he looks like evil Chuckie and while Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., isn’t the most despicable politician in American history yet, don’t underestimate him, he may yet join the ranks of such stalwart American rapscallions as Aaron Burr, Huey “Kingfish” Long, George Wallace, Laurence Keitt, Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman, Jesse Helms, John E. Rankin, James K. Vardaman, Pat McCarran and Henry Styles Bridges and of course, the king of them all, Gen. Bone Spurs.
As National Trafficking Awareness Month draws to a close, it seems fitting to review Gaetz’s history, starting with the year long, ongoing federal investigation into alleged sex trafficking with a 17-year-old girl. Gaetz says he’s innocent and clean as a hound’s tooth and has never, ever, ever had sexual relations with a minor and has never, ever, ever paid for sex.
Curiously, in 2017, he was the only member of Congress to vote against a law to boost the government’s human trafficking investigatory powers, as he claimed he wanted less and not more government interference into Americans’ lives, apparently even those who prey on children. Along the same lines on Feb. 27, 2018, Gaetz voted against the “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act,” which had by then been combined with the “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act.”
A conservative fanatic, Gaetz was elected in 2016 and is one of trump’s strongest bootlickers. He is the son of former Florida State Sen. Donald J. Gaetz, who founded VITAS Healthcare Corp. in 1983 and later sold it for nearly $500 million in 2004. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice sued VITAS for allegedly committing Medicare fraud since 2002, when the senior Gaetz still worked at the company. Daddy Gaetz denied any role in any wrongdoing and the case was confidentially settled in January 2018.
One year after trump loyalists stormed the Capitol in the nation’s bloodiest assault on the capitol, Gaetz and equally horrible Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., disgorged fantastical claims that the attack was actually a conspiracy by Democrats to dethrone trump. Gaetz counts among his supporters the pernicious Proud Boys and Holocaust deniers and incessantly repeats the lie that trump lost the election because of widespread voter fraud.
The 39-year-old Gaetz eloped last year to California to marry Ginger Luckey, a vivacious 26-year-old who Gaetz had met when she was 18, at Mar-A-Lago, trump’s obscene South Florida castle retreat. Keep that age in mind because the feds are investigating if Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old, possibly in return for payment and possibly involving illegal traveling across state lines to have sex.
Ginger Luckey is a name that only a film noire writer could imagine. She is the sister of Palmer Luckey, who Forbes has estimated is worth more than $500 million. Mr. Luckey founded the virtual reality company Oculus VR, which he sod to Facebook in 2014 for a reported $2 billion. He also was a big trump donor in his 2016 presidential campaign.
According to her LinkedIn site, Ms. Luckey is a student at Harvard Business School Online while she also works as a food analyst for the company Apeel in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Apeel markets a product to make avocados, citrus and other types of fruit last twice as long as usual by using a tasteless edible coating made from plant materials. The coating’s formulation can be modified for strawberries, mangoes, apples, bananas, kumquats, citrus, and asparagus. Apeel was founded in 2012 by James Rogers who received a $100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help reduce post-harvest food waste in developing countries that lacked refrigeration infrastructure. After the initial grant, Apeel has raised $110 million in financing to date. Funnily enough, Gaetz has frequently taken potshots at Bill and Melinda Gates jumping on the lame conspiracy theory that Gates has fueled the COVID-19 pandemic for financial gain.
The probe into the sex allegations against Gaetz surfaced during a federal investigation of Joel Greenberg, a rich Florida politician and former tax collector for Seminole County, Fla., who was convicted on sex trafficking charges involving a minor. In an alleged confession letter, on Sept. 4, 2017, Greenberg called Gaetz to let him know that a teenager both men had paid to have sex with was underage.
Greenberg is cooperating with investigators who also have met with a number of Gaetz’s former allies. A federal grand jury has heard testimony from an ex girlfriend of Goetz. The Justice Department also reached a plea agreement with another Greenberg friend, former shock jock “Big Joe” Elliccot, who admitted to drug and fraud charges. According to his lawyer, Ellicot has said that he saw Gaetz attend parties involving extensive sex and drug use. Gaetz also has reportedly bragged to other politicians about having sex with women, including showing them photos of naked or topless women.
The Washington Post reported that Gaetz used websites to set up dates with women in exchange for dinners or hotel stays. If money was exchanged in return for sex, it would qualify as soliciting prostitution. The Daily Beast reported that in 2018, Greenberg made Venmo payments to three young women totaling $900, describing the money on the app as for “Tuition” or “School.” Gaetz sent Greenberg $900 the night before on Venmo, writing in one transaction “hit up ___,” using a nickname for a 17-year old girl.
Gaetz’s sister-in-law, Roxanne Luckey, is not a fan of the congressman, as she has posted TikTok videos labeling him as “weird and creepy” and “a literal pedophile” which she later modified to “ephebophilia,” attracted to mid- to late-adolescents.
Meanwhile, the N.Y. Times reported that when trump was still president, that Gaetz sought a pardon for crimes he may have committed even though the congressman hadn’t been charged with any crime. Trump refused to issue a pardon.
Gaetz has been nothing but verbose in promoting unfounded, wing nut theories, including that COVID-19 was leaked out of a Chinese research lab and that the lab had received a $3.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
He has a rather spotty personal history, having received 16 speeding tickets in Florida between 1999 and 2014. In 2008, he was arrested for drunk driving after leaving a Florida nightclub. He failed an eye test and refused to submit to a field sobriety test or a Breathalyzer test.
During the nationwide protests against the police killing of George Floyd, Gaetz tweeted that the protests showed the “antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?” He also supported Kyle Rittenhouse, a self-proclaimed right wing militia member who was acquitted in the murder of two people during demonstrations in Minnesota that erupted after a police shooting of an unarmed man.
While a member of the Florida House of Representatives, Gaetz led an unsuccessful effort to allow Floridians with concealed-weapons permits to carry weapons openly in public. He also was one of two members to vote against a Florida bill against revenge porn in 2015.
And the day after the abortive resurrection at the capitol, Gaetz said, with no evidence, that there was “pretty compelling evidence from a facial recognition company showing that some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters” but were rather “masquerading as Trump supporters, and in fact were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.”
In January 2018, Gaetz invited alt-right Holocaust denier Charles C. Johnson to attend trump’s State of the Union address. Gaetz said he didn’t know Johnson who he said had showed up in Gaetz’s office asking for an invite to trump’s address. But Gaetz later went on to defend Johnson in an interview, saying that Johnson was neither a Holocaust denier nor a white supremacist.
And as further evidence of Gaetz’s existence in a parallel and opposing universe, he was one of 18 House Republicans to vote to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for his role in peace talks with North Korea.
Last year, Gaetz and Greene took a nationwide “America First Tour,” where they repeated the claims of 2020 election fraud. Also, last year, Gaetz was one of 21 House Republicans to vote against a resolution to give the Congressional Gold Medal to police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Here’s a few facts about the hall of shame of American politicians, to which Gaetz could one day be added.
* Henry Styles Bridges was a Republican senator from New Hampshire who was an ardent anti-communist and defender of infamous red-baiter, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisc., and joined in witch hunts of alleged communists and gay civil servants, during the “lavender scare.” Bridges gained infamy after he threatened to reveal that the son of incumbent Democratic Sen. Lester Hunt of Wyoming was a homosexual who had been arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover policeman. Sen. Hunt later committed suicide at his Senate desk.
* Sen. Pat McCarran of Nevada was another overzealous anti-Communist who wrote the Internal Security Act of 1950 which ordered all communist organizations to register with the government and created a board to investigate suspected communist sympathizers. Alleged sympathizers would be barred from working for the government. McCarran was a known xenophobe and anti-Semite.
* James K. Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi in 1903. He was notorious for his support of lynching and for a sadistic game in which he released convicts from prison and then set out a mounted posse and bloodhounds to catch the terrified convicts. Vardaman said of lynching, “if it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”
* Mississippi Rep. John E. Ranklin served from 1921 to 1953 and earned the distinction of being the most vicious bigot in congress. He supported the Ku Klux Klan, opposed efforts to curb lynchings, and was a committed anti-Semite and anti-Japanophobe. In a blatant reference to the Holocaust, Ranklin said that Jews “have been run out of practically every country in Europe in the years gone by, and if they keep stirring race trouble in this country and trying to force their communistic program on the Christian people of America, there is no telling what will happen to them here.”
* Jesse Helms, a U.S. Senator from North Carolina from 1973 to 2003, never apologized for his racism and in his 1990 reelection campaign, Helms released the “white hands” campaign ad, which depicted white hands crumbling a rejection slip while a narrator’s voice declared, “You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.” Helms also supported the apartheid regime in South Africa.
* Benjamin Tillman, a South Carolina politician in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, promoted discrimination and lead the “Red Shirts,” a paramilitary group similar to the Ku Klux Klan. In 1876, Tillman participated in the “Hamburg Massacre,” in which six African Americans were murdered. He was never tried for his crimes and 14 years later, was elected governor of South Carolina, where he encouraged lynching African Americans as punishment for alleged sexual misconduct.
* Laurence Keitt was a pre-Civil War southern politician who led the worst of the worst political groups, the so-called “Fire-Eaters,” a faction of radical, pro-slavery politicians who promoted secession and rejected all proposed compromises to keep the Union intact. The most violent and ardent fire eater was Keitt, who was elected to Congress in 1852. During the Civil War, Keitt was a brigadier general and in 1864, he was wounded during battle and died of his injuries.
* George Wallace was the governor of Alabama who promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” as a presidential candidate of the American Independent Party. He was determined to rescind progress made by African Americans and on Election Day, Wallace won the states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.
* Huey Long was governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and later was a U.S. Senator. Long was a radical populist whose tactics mirrored those of Benito Mussolini as he used intimidation and bribery to pass his reforms, earning him a reputation as an American dictator. President Franklin Roosevelt considered him “one of the . . . most dangerous men in America” for his plan to redistribute wealth. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist Katherine Anne Porter called Long “the worst sort of Fascist demagogue.” Before Long could begin his campaign to redistribute wealth, he was assassinated by a crazed physician.
* Aaron Burr burnished his reputation when he killed Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel. After Hamilton’s death, Burr was vice president but was replaced by George Clinton when President Thomas Jefferson’s first term ended in 1805. Rather than go away peacefully, Burr hatched a plot to use a small army to seize a sizable part of the Louisiana Territory and Mexico and declare himself emperor. Burr was arrested in 1807, and was found “not guilty” as he had not engaged in an “overt act.” But in the eyes of the American people, Burr was viewed as a traitor and spent the rest of his life in obscurity and died in 1836.