No longer content pretending to be an unbiased journalist, Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post has entered the fray.
If there's one thing that conservatives have in excess, it's testosterone and the inability (or disinterest) in restraining the aggressive behavior that their excitable personalities stimulate. The same is true for women conservatives. The question now is, who is VandeHei carrying water for? His wife or Bush?
VandeHei's wife, Autumn Hanna, apparently comes to the Republican Party with credentials from just about all of their different interest groups, not the least of which is as a true believer from the Christian Right. When she worked for Tom Delay, Mrs. VandeHei was Delay's "go to" aide for the GOP's family policies' legislation. Mrs. VandeHei appears to have signed on to the fundamentalist agenda which believes that faith-based organizations, and not the government, should be the providers of aid and assistance to citizens in need. From an interview she did with the Home School Legal Defense Association:
I believe firmly that the church has abdicated its role in terms of its involvement in social issues—addressing the needs of the poor and helpless—the “widows and orphans.” One of my goals for the future is to work to reconcile the church with their responsibility in terms of society’s disadvantaged, so that the private sector can reclaim what we’ve left in the hands of the government.
Mrs. VandeHei is on the board of "Horton's Kids," non-profit organization that provides tutoring and mentoring to the children of Anacostia in D.C., by raising money Tom Delay-style.
Charitable acts are laudable, except when one hand giveth and the other hand pulls the rug out from under you. Republicans talk a good game about self-reliance and individual responsibility, but if they meant it they wouldn't be preventing the citizens who live in D.C. from having representation in Congress. As howardpark reminds us:
Every so often I like to point out that there are 550,000 or so taxpaying citizens who live in the District of Columbia who don't have Senators. Also, it's not well known that the very first action of the Republicans, when they gained control of the House in January 1995, was to strip our Representative of her right to vote on the House floor.
Mrs. VandeHei's conservative political activism extends beyond family issues into tax and budget cuts, environmental and energy policies.
The question that needs to be asked in order to determine journalists' impartiality isn't "Could Jim VandeHei remain objective reporting for a national newspaper of record and be married to a political zealot?", but rather "Would a political zealot such as Mrs. VandeHei marry someone who wasn't also a zealot?"
Filed under: Republicans, VandeHei, Autumn Hanna, Tom Delay, media
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