I don't get it

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  .....Gosh, it’s been a tough week for one member of our Board of Trustees—namely, fading OC rightwing guru and Prince of Darkness Tom Fuentes. That’s mostly ‘cause it’s been a tough week for some of his mentees.
.....MIKE CARONA. Take pious family man Mike Carona. You shoulda heard Fuentes’ introduction of the Sheriff at IVC’s 9-11 ceremony back in September. I covered the event for Dissent, thinking, “How come all these people are so respectful of this manifest rat bastard? What’s the matter with ‘em?”
.....I know, these are silly questions. Somehow, I never seem to stop asking them. I must have a screw loose, a hole in my head. Something.
.....Not long after the ceremony, the excrement hit the fan, what with federal indictments, etc.
.....Carona and crew (Schroeder, et al.) did what they always do: they nakedly pursued their interests, the public interest be damned. So, natch, Carona did not step down but instead took a leave only to return to work this week. He’s getting paid, but, essentially, he’s leaving the actual work of Sheriff to an underling.
.....How very righteous. Er, not. But he’s still got that flag pinned to his shirt. He still goes around praying and rolling his eyes.
.....That’s when the LA Times called for a recall (Recall Mike Carona) of the fellow, arguing

Carona has every right to his day in court, to fight the charges that he traded access to his office and power for gifts and money. But he and his department never would have reached this day, never would have come under scrutiny in the first place, had he run his department with an ethical hand. Instead, from his first day in office, Carona has been selling out the title of sheriff, providing supporters and others close to him with extraordinary favors. Just one example: hiring two top political supporters as his chief assistants even though they were patently unqualified for the jobs, so much so that Carona needed special dispensation to make the hires legal.

.....Um, those two guys are now in jail. Eventually, if there is any justice (silly me), Carona will join them there. But his unsavory (incompetent, reckless, hypocritical, etc.) character was manifest long before the indictments.
.....That didn’t prevent Fuentes from praising him to the heavens four months ago.
.....I just don’t get it. How come the people who go out of their way to stand for piety, rectitude, and patriotism are so often the least pious, the least righteous, the least other-regarding? Why are they so often the ones who cause the biggest headaches for those who actually do the good works that need doing? Tell me that!

.....CHRISS STREET. Yet another Pal o’ Fuentes is OC Treasurer Chriss Street, yet another manifestly ratular Rat Bastard. Fuentes advised him during his successful run for that office.
.....According to today’s Times (Public agencies withdraw from O.C. investment pool), things are going from bad to worse for Street:

Four of the seven public agencies that voluntarily participate in Orange County's investment portfolio have withdrawn almost all their cash in recent months amid concerns over Treasurer Chriss Street, and others are reviewing whether to keep their money in the pool, according to public finance managers. …Since becoming treasurer more than a year ago, Street has been beset by investigations into his private business dealings before entering office and questions about his handling of county business. …Street came into the treasurer's office as the hand-picked successor to now-Supervisor John Moorlach, whose management of the office for 12 years after the bankruptcy was largely admired. But Street ran into trouble even before he was elected. Questions emerged about whether he engaged in self-dealing while overseeing the affairs of a bankrupt trucking firm, which has since become the subject of a federal investigation. Local prosecutors are examining whether he sought to steer contracts for county work to friends and business associates….

.....Let’s face it: those close to Street must’ve been pretty clear about what kind of guy he was/is before he took office (in fact, the unpleasant facts about Street’s “business dealings” were reported long before the election).
.....But that was OK with them. How come?
.....Again, I don’t get it. The people I know—admittedly, many of them are progressives, atheists, skeptics and the like—would never dream of doing the nasty and corrupt things that Fuentes’ friends do as a matter of course. Nor would they support someone who would consider doing these things.
.....How come, when the Fuentes crowd lay claim to righteousness whilst dismissing my crowd as wicked and benighted, nobody calls ‘em on it? I be stupefied.
.....It’s like the President. He’s obviously a loutish and base kinda guy. So what’s with all the endless respectfulness? How come Brian Williams doesn’t just say, “Well, here he is again, embarrassing us with his cluelessness and naked cynicism and dishonesty. Um, he was in Israel today pretending to give a shit. It’ll be a great day when someone half-way intelligent and decent takes over the Presidency.”
.....So what’s with Brian? It’s as if it would be less-than-objective to state an obvious fact. Is Brian less-than-objective when he takes a side in the shape-of-earth “controversy” (it’s round)? Don’t think so. So why is it different noting the obvious facts re Bush?
.....How does that work exactly?
.....Sometimes, I think it goes like this: if one makes a great show of one’s “faith” and patriotism—not by actually doing anything, but mostly by wearing little flags, pledging at big flags, praying in hushed halls, engaging in eye-rolling whilst facing the heavens—one is ipso facto a soldier of the Right and the Good.
.....Even if, notoriously, one has a very hard time living up to the “values” of official rightness/goodness (that’s Fuentes all over), the fact that one loudly aligns oneself with respectable religion (Christianity or Judaism, not some silly “sect”) and a kind of unreflective and uncritical love of country common among Kohlbergian ten-year-olds, then, no matter how far one strays from the path of virtue, one is fundamentally one of the good guys, and no amount of intelligence and decency achieved by a “secularist” or “humanist” can ever compete with those credentials.
.....It’s a kind of Moronic Logic for a Moron Age. If that’s the thinking, then I may as well go back into that cave over there.

.....JEFF NIELSEN. Another member of Fuentes’ team of pious rat bastards is Jeff Nielsen, who was again in the news this week.
.....Yesterday, the OC Weekly (BOY, OH, BOY!) reported that

Jeffrey Ray Nielsen, the once-cocky Orange County political activist who espoused conservative principles while molesting underaged boys, will enter a pre-prison program in the coming weeks with one more headache: One of his victims has filed a civil lawsuit seeking $1.35 million. …The plaintiff, whom we'll call John Doe, filed the suit in late December in Fairfax County, Virginia. It was there, in the city of Falls Church, in 1994 and 1995, that Nielsen used his positions as an aide to Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and a church youth counselor to rent a room from a Virginia family with a 13-year-old son, Doe. The family had no clue that Nielsen, a Bible thumper with friends in high places, was a clever sexual predator interested in sleeping with middle-school and high-school boys. …The Weekly first reported Doe's tale in September 2006. Nielsen—who, at the time, faced criminal charges for repeatedly molesting a Westminster High School freshman—angrily denied any pedophile conduct. Indeed, the man who keeps stuffed animals on his bed called the allegations "delusional" and the Weekly part of a liberal conspiracy to frame him because of his friendship with Rohrabacher and Scott Baugh, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party. Last March, a Newport Beach jury deadlocked after Nielsen's lawyer, Paul S. Meyer, savagely attacked the teenage victim on the witness stand while Nielsen posed as a generous, caring Christian with lofty ideals about mentoring troubled youth. …In December, after four years of angry denials, Nielsen finally admitted to molesting both youngsters. In exchange, he won a reduced prison sentence of three years, though he will have to register as a sex offender for the remainder of his life….

.....RAGHU MATHUR. This reminds me of a moment during the Chancellor’s Opening Session on Wednesday. The Chancellor hates Rich McCullough and is responsible for M’s retirement as President of Saddleback College (Rich is slated to retire in June).
.....But that fact didn’t prevent Mathur from singing Rich’s praises on Wednesday and handing him a big plaque. Listening to the Chancellor, you’d swear that Rich had no greater friend in this world than Raghu P. Mathur.
.....Now, see, I’d never do that. I’d be thinking, “I hold this fellow in low regard, cuz he refused to be a team player [i.e., helping me to screw my enemies, micromanage the shit outa things, etc.], and so, I’m willing, I guess, to brush up against the endless tributes to him, but I sure as hell ain’t gonna join in them, cuz that would be seriously dishonest and cynical and fundamentally corrupt. It would be a kind of gross hypocrisy, and I ain’t goin’ there, nope.”
.....But that’s just me. And my friends. You know: all those nasty atheists and progressives and godless America-bashers, the "liberals" who do all the work in this goddam district whilst enduring endless attack from Mathur (“faculty leaders” seek to “control” the district), Fuentes (over-paid faculty work a “36-hour week”), and all their equally corrupt and appalling rightwing, church-going, flag-wearing friends.
.....I don’t get it.