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An Affair to Dismember: The Tawdriness of Florida's GOP Chair and His Moms for Liberty Phony | FlaglerLive

flaglerlive.com 17-12-2023 07:30 5 Minutes reading
Republicans cast themselves as the party of piety, traditional gender roles, and family values. This is at odds with reality. Donald Trump raped New York writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room. Dozens of other women have accused him of sexual harassment. A former staffer on Herschel Walker's failed U.S. Senate campaign is suing Matt Schlapp, head of the influential right wing group CPAC, for sexual battery. Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert went to jail for abusing teenaged boys. To name but a few. Certainly, Democrats are not without sin: Anthony Weiner and Rep. John Conyers, for example, though Dems are more likely to resign when confronted with their appalling behavior. Which brings us to Florida GOP chairman Christian Ziegler, who -- as the entire planet now knows -- has been accused of rape. He claims the sex was consensual. Sarasota police are inclined to disagree. He admits to having an affair with the woman he allegedly attacked. His wife Bridget, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and member of the Sarasota School Board who has vowed to bring "religious values" to education, also admits to having an affair with her. The three of them had sex. Together. Family values! Sen. Rick Scott, the state's legislative leadership, the Cabinet, and other former friends and enablers say Ziegler should step down. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who used to praise Bridget Ziegler to the skies, declaring he wished he could put a Bridget Ziegler on every school board "in every county in Florida," now wants the Zieglers deep-sixed. Ronbo's presidential campaign is disintegrating before the eyes of the nation, so he's trying to change the subject, vowing to dedicate $1 million to -- somehow -- fighting the cosmic injustice of Florida State not being included in the College Football Playoffs. Of course, Ziegler refuses to resign. In an email to fellow Rs which manages to be both self-aggrandizing and self-pitying, he says "anyone" can file a rape accusation and suggests there's some dark "motive" at work: "We have a country to save and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for this process to wrap up." According to the sworn police affidavit, Ziegler took a little break from saving the country and refused to take no for an answer. The woman who says he attacked her had agreed to an "encounter" with both him and his wife but, when Bridget backed out, she canceled, admitting it was Bridget she was really "into." Ziegler showed up at her place uninvited, she says, bent her over a piece of furniture, and raped her. Ziegler continues to insist he's being targeted; he's the real victim; and he'll be exonerated. The Florida Center for Government Accountability, the nonprofit that broke the story (full disclosure: I sit on FLCGA's board but wasn't involved in the center's stories), now reports the police have recovered Ziegler's auto-porn tape. Without going into the (truly ghastly) details of the encounter, the tape suggests the case will be anything but open and shut. So, let's assume for a moment that Christian Ziegler does not get charged with rape. Let's look at the Zieglers in terms their MAGA conservative friends might understand. Christian's an unapologetic adulterer, an unrepentant offender against the Commandments (Numbers 7 and 10, specifically). I guess he could argue the Old Testament does suggest it's all right for certain righteous fellows to have multiple sex partners: Jacob and his four wives, Solomon and his 300 concubines. Nice work if you can get it. But I don't recall Jesus ever putting his stamp of approval on ménages à trois. Like her husband, Bridget's also an adulterer, cheating on her undelicious spouse with another woman. The same woman, as it happens. Nobody should condemn Bridget for having sex with a same-gender partner; it's just that she and her sister Harpies for Hate have made a career of vicious homophobia. Hypocrisy is never pretty, no matter how blond and tan. Bridget's long been an anti-woke warrior princess, a big backer of Ron DeSantis' "Don't Say Gay" law. When a fellow school board member -- a gay man -- was accused at a public meeting of being a "lawbreaker and LGBTQ groomer" by a woman with reported ties to Bridget's Harpies for Hate, she sat there, let him be abused, and did nothing. Although several school board members are calling for her resignation, as of this writing, Bridget is still on the Sarasota School Board as well as DeSantis' absurd Disney oversight board. She's just who you want pushing for wholesome, child-friendly entertainment -- but only if you like the idea of Mickey, Minnie, and Snow White in a three-way. I mean, how is she going to explain mommy and daddy's exotic proclivities to her own kids? Unless the Zieglers move to Kabul or lock their offspring in the cellar for the foreseeable future, their young daughters are going to have some questions. Hell, we all have questions, such as how dare these trashy people presume to set themselves up as moral arbiters? It's not just their sleaziness, it's their staggering arrogance. One of the Moms for Libertines chapters famously quoted Adolf Hitler in their newsletter. In a "media training session" run by Christian Ziegler at their national conference, his advice was "Never apologize. Ever." He added, "I think apologizing makes you weak." To be fair, he did sort of apologize to his alleged victim. The police helped her record their conversations in the days after she says he raped her. He told her he was "sorry." Then he tried to change the subject to his need for a haircut. In a subsequent call, the woman tried to get him to acknowledge that he'd sexually assaulted her. His response? "Those are big words, please don't. No, I didn't." Then he said, lamely, "I never wanted you to feel that way." Christian Ziegler is also still chair of the Florida GOP, though probably not for long. Through rivers of crocodile tears, vice chair and ambitious little toad Evan Power contacted his fellow Republicans, saying: "It is with a heavy heart I write this email to you." He's calling a special meeting to discuss "the situation with the Chairman." In the Republican Party, the wages of hypocrisy is usually promotion. But in this case, exile to political Siberia is more likely. No matter what happens, let's remember there's a victimized woman at the heart of this sordid business.

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My Father's Crèche | FlaglerLive
26.12.23 09:40
by flaglerlive.com

My Father's Crèche | FlaglerLive

The picture above was taken January 1, 1975. I know this because my father, a photographer, was in the habit of stamping the date on the back of his hard copies, signing his name and including a cataloguing reference I never understood. You can barely see the elaborate crèche he built behind the kids' table. I am sitting to the right of my cousin Danielle, to the left of my older brother Gabriel, with a white paper sheet with the word "PRESS" on my vest: even then, whoring for the profession (another picture shows me taking pictures and my cousin Philippe recording an interview of the guests). To the very left is Selma, our maid at the time, from Syria, a sweet creature vaguely suspect my parents abused and paid dirt wages, as Lebanese bourgeois families tended to do with "the help," though my parents forbade us children from ever being served by the help. We had to be our own help, and if we ever spoke the wrong way to her the wrath of dad would be upon us, so maybe they weren't so abusive of her after all. In the distance are my aunt and uncle, Renee and Andre, who are still alive and living in Paris, like Jacques Brel, bless their hearts, as are their daughters, Michelle and Nicole, who in the picture are sitting at the children's table with me but in life have been ensconced in the Emirates, living that good life, for many years, last I knew. We have not stayed in touch as cousins should. As for Selma, who was barely older than me at the time-for all their Sunday Christianity and supposed liberalism, the Lebanese seemed to have no qualms about child labor-I can only hope she has survived the years of devastation in her own country, assuming she made it back. My father never appears in this set of pictures: he was clicking away behind the camera. Three month and 13 days after that picture was taken-after that wonderful New Year's feast when we thought the wonders could never cease-April 13, 1975 happened, and our sumptuous self-indulgence, our nation, our lives broke. The country went to war and didn't stop for the next 15 years, and even then, I'm not sure it has. I eventually escaped, though the more I age, the less those buffers I created with a past too wonderful to bear, because it is irrecoverable, and too crushing to remember, because the distance is so imaginary, seem to be effective anymore. It is in the ordinary of a Palm Coast evening, of a string of Christmas lights or a friend's picture of a manger, that the illusion of that insulating membrane gives way. I imagine I'm like anyone else: I don't like taking down Christmas lights, which I have timed to go off at night but come back on before dawn, so I can see them when I get up for a little quiet meditation between hard covers and before the workday begins, and so they can be on when Cheryl leaves for work. Nor do I like taking down the Christmas tree, tiny though it's become over the years: Christmas trees diminish in size and garlands in proportion to our years. Real trees accumulate rings. Fake Christmas trees she...

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