BOB L. writes:

Today, the news out of Virginia is that former Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife have been indicted on 14 federal corruption charges and face decades in prison (although will probably get away with far less.)

Gov. McDonnell was a popular, well-liked governor. When he ran for Governor, the media publicized his university thesis, which spoke intelligently (although I have only skimmed it) about issues facing the family. Most controversially, he criticized Griswald and argued for an end to no-fault divorce, alongside more standard Republican proposals like ending abortion and promoting school vouchers. He won in the 2009 landslide by running away from his original positions on these matters and instead, speaking about bread-and-butter issues like relieving traffic congestion.

McDonnell remained popular, even being considered a serious 2016 contender, until he was hit with a corruption probe that resulted in these indictments. The details can be found here, but they’re not particularly sexy. Watergate, this is not. Instead, his wife befriended a successful businessman and donor, and got him to make various gifts to the family. The donor paid for the wedding of one of their daughters. Mrs. McDonnell got a Louis Vuitton purse and an Armani dress, their sons got golf gear, and Gov. Bob got a Rolex enscribed “71st Governor of Virginia.” Real classy stuff.

Now, it is possible that these gifts were just made by the donor out of the goodness of his heart, without expecting anything in return (prosecutors allege that the McDonnells were expected to promote his nutritional supplement business). Of course, even if that were true, it created an appearance of impropriety Christians are taught to avoid (1 Thess. 5:22)–one that cost Mr. McDonnell his career and may see him and his wife in prison (it also likely resulted in the defeat of a good and brave man, Kenneth Cuccinelli, in the 2013 gubernatorial race.)

One would think that any politician concerned about either ethics or his personal ambition would have told his wife to knock off such egregious behavior–pandering for designer clothes and trinkets. When I was thinking about how he could let this kind of pettiness destroy what it took him a lifetime to build, I remembered that I didn’t like him before, but I couldn’t remember why.

Then I recalled this story, arising out of the 2012 GOP primary. A man who not only promotes the idea of women in combat and excoriates conservatives who object to this travesty, but also allows his own daughter to join the military (not out of poverty or desperation either) and be sent to a war zone–well, that man is one who has surrendered to radical feminism.

And that’s when it all fell into place for me. This was a man who had abandoned his authority in the family to embrace feminism. He was incapable of saying no to his wife, just like he was incapable of saying no to his daughter.  Thankfully, his daughter returned from Iraq unharmed. But his wife, lacking a man who would restrain her worst impulses, now faces prison. Their five children have to deal with this humiliation.

This was a man who appears to have once been on the right and true path. He was a man who saw the danger liberalism was doing to the institution of the family. And yet, here we are today. Liberalism has destroyed him and his own family, and it didn’t even need to win at the ballot box to do so.

Laura writes:

I briefly wrote about McDonnell and his turnabout on the issue of working women in 2009. I don’t think he could have survived politically without rejecting his anti-feminist statements, which were unusual in that he criticized female careerism, something no one else even close to national politics had done in many years, but it was still sad that he did.

It’s hard to know about these charges, given the political background, but your analysis confirms my earlier sense of him as “spineless.”

— End of Initial Entry —

Bob L. writes:

Your 2009 comparison of Gov. McDonnell to Dickens’s Joe seems even more apt now.

Regarding the charges: I think they’re an example of overreaching federal prosecutors. Federal prosecutors regularly overcharge to pressure the defendant to plead guilty and thus be able to get away with little or no jail time. I think this is what happened here. The Governor maintains there was no quid pro quo and nothing the federal government has so far shows there was a quid pro quo. A quid pro quo — that is, the Governor took official action or promised to do so in return for the swag he received– is fundamental to establish the main allegations of bribery (“obtaining property under color of right”) and it’s just not there. (Of course, if we still lived under a constitutional government, the federal government would have nothing to do with allegations of corruption against a state governor, but that is a different matter.)

The prosecutors also included various counts of loan fraud and obstruction of justice. I imagine that the McDonnells will see that they cannot afford the enormous legal fees (the indictment indicates they were in significant credit card debt before the Governor even took office and they are being represented by some of the most expensive law firms in the nation) and agree to a plea bargain that spares them jail time.

Regardless of the legal situation, however, it does not take a genius to realize that a prominent politician’s family should not be accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal gifts from a campaign donor. McDonnell must have known this–he was a talented, smart politician, if nothing else. As I said, he was undone by his inability to tell his wife “no.”

Buck writes:

Bob McDonnell is at minimum an intellectual fraud and hypocrite. All successful politicians today are. I have long said that they are all liars, frauds, hypocrites and thieves. Every one of them steals from the taxpayer with impunity, even Ron Paul has to bring home some bacon. McDonnell turned out to be a classic sleaze-ball politician. He and his wife accepted “gifts” and “favors” that any right-minded moron would know as illegal.

Any man or woman can know the truth and what would be the right course of action, and also act against it. Hell, the murdering Uni-bomber’s manifesto is filled with right-minded and agreeable thinking, and he is certifiably nuts.

Bob McDonnell’s thesis, parts I and II, is a near perfect description of traditionalist conservative positions. He makes several statements that could be mastheads on TradCon web sites. He clearly had his head in the right place when he wrote it. I didn’t get to his political prescriptions.

What happened? What it always looks like: he entered into the modern political meat grinder. If candidates are not already obscenely wealthy, then we make them into whores who have to prostitute themselves to get elected and to get what they are increasingly convinced, by us, that they now deserve – to be treated like royalty. We draft them, then we ruin them, then we trash them for failing us.

There’s nothing terribly more wrong or unusual about Bob McDonnell and his greedy wife. They are what is to be expected in this modern paradigm.

McDonnell’s over-reaction to what Rick Santorum didn’t actually say is a symptom of the syndrome. McDonnell knew and had to obscure that he was being an absolute hypocrite, so he dishonestly attacked Santorum to distract the low-information voter and to avoid having to ever respond to what Santorum actually said. McDonnell’s daughter’s military service represents an antithesis of his thesis. He led his own daughters away from “The Compelling Issue of the Decade” to the very place that he so well decried as “the self-centeredness of modern individualism.”

All of our politicians should all be under indictment.

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