Democrats were quick to criticize Hastert’s latest suggestion. “That’s totally absurd. It fits a pattern of simply throwing out whatever slander occurs to them,” the Republicans, said Matt Bennett, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee in New York. “This is what the Republican leadership does. They lie about people.”


These are scary times. And it's an ominous sign of the times that the Speaker of the House can float such a false and extremely defamatory charge and have the behavior go almost unnoticed in the press.

Think about it.