Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Alfred S. Regnery's long strange trip
What with Bill O'Reilly in full rut - albeit, nervously fondling his falafels and gnawing on the corner of a monogrammed Carinthian leather checkbook - Sinclair Broadcasting muckamuck David "Lick my Lollipop" Smith's old timey adventures in Baltimore beaver management - Antonin Scalia's Opus Dei olive oil orgies - Rick Santorum's strange animal husbandry fancies - Peggy Noonan's sleek brown shoe fetish - Ann Coulters usual bus station hooker micro-mini flash-dance "buy me" spasms - am I forgetting anything? - oh yeah!, that millionaire Republican disco-pimp who was married to the Star Trek character. Almost forgot about him. Anyway, just being reminded of all of this hot conservative gun lover bolt yanking action got me so worked up that I had to relieve myself all over a sleek and sexy glossy magazine photo of the new Benelli Super Black Eagle II semi-automatic with blue/syntheitic finish. Beyond perfection! Boy am I relaxed. (I hope the Benelli's ship me a valuable complimentary prize for that plug).
Anyway, let me pull my pants back up here :-) ...ok!... some time back I managed to bang out a post about Al Regnery (of Regnery Publishing) which mentioned a Penthouse magazine article from November, 1985 titled "The Truth and Alfred Regnery", by Larry Bush [no pun intended]. I'd remarked at the time that I'd like to look at the pict..., I mean read, read this article - and - if anyone out there had some time and could dig it up by all means let me know. Well, as fortune would have it, someone did find that old article and has written a summary of what is contained therein. Reader Aaargh was nice enough to write this one up for us and I've posted the entire submission below. So, here's Aaargh:
*****
Behind the Facade of Al Regnery
Contributed by Aaaargh
Regnery Publishing is well known for it's publication of conservative smear jobs such as Unfit for Command and Michelle Malkin's bizarre fear-mongering demand for institutionalized racism, In Defense of Internment. But little is publicly known about the sordid personal past of Al Regnery, the President of Regnery Publishing, Inc. and publisher of right-wing magazine The American Spectator. It turns out that proffering lies in an attempt to influence elections are nothing new in the Regnery family.
The public face of Al Regnery on the Regnery Publishing website is fairly inoffensive and nondescript:
Madison, Wisconsin, 1976.
What isn't mentioned in that summary above turns on events that took place in Madison, Wisconsin in 1976 while Regnery was practicing law with an old line conservative Madison firm. He decided to run for district attorney; against the urging of his employers. He would have been wise to heed their advice. Campaigning as a law-and-order hardliner - get tough bringer of justice to the lawless dopeheads and sex fiends of Madison - he opposed rehabilitation in favor of one week maximum security prison time for juvenile offenders.
When things started going badly for his campaign things also started to get a little strange around the Regnery household. Regnery's wife Christina, eight-months-pregnant, reported obscene phone calls that demanded that her husband drop out of the race. He claimed harassment and vandalism by supporters of his opponent James E. Doyle (now governor of Wisconsin), but, by the end of October the stakes got much higher.
According to Christina's story, as recorded in the police report, she was standing nude in the bathroom of her home on Halloween afternoon, with her children asleep in their bedrooms, when she suddenly saw "two men standing there," one white and one black. She reached for a towel but they told her to leave it behind and to step into the bedroom and smell something. She claimed that they told her that they had turned off the pilot light on the kitchen stove, turned up the burners, and would open the doors to the children's rooms if she did not cooperate. According to Christina they told her that Al should have taken their advice and quit the campaign. They then produced a paring knife, she continued, but decided it was too dull, and instead attempted to cut her breasts with embroidery scissors. Dissatisfied with that, she said, they found a razor blade and started cutting her very-pregnant stomach. According to her they raped her with a can of hairspray tucked inside a condom and then with a can of feminine deodorant spray. After that the two men took her, she claimed, into the bathroom where they forced her to perform fellatio on them. She stated that the men eventually left through a door in the basement. At least that's the story Christian Regnery gave to the police.
Christina is known to have awakened the children and gone to a neighbor claiming to have been cut with a razor and raped. Her neighbor urged her to call the police but she refused. She wanted to talk to Al first. Al states that he arrived home, found no one, and called the police himself. The officer took Christina's statement then took her to Madison General Hospital. She was found to have 73 slash marks, numerous scratches, 17 lacerations around her nipples, with 15 punctures on the left breast.
A shocking story indeed. The only problem was that Christina's story could not be true. The basement door that she claimed her attackers had used to exit the house was blocked by dusty boxes that clearly hadn't been moved in months. The police report stated: "This door is the door supposedly used by the burglars in the exit. However, this would be impossible." The police also observed that the kitchen stove was so caked with dirt it would be nearly impossible for the gas pilot light to be turned off and then relit. Furthermore, in the bedroom, there were no signs of a struggle, nor a single drop of blood in the rooms where she had supposedly been tortured. However, in the bedroom, the police did find some pornographic magazines that depicted acts very similar to those allegedly performed by the purported rapists. Including similar uses of bottles and cans. The condom supposedly used in the assault had been carefully removed from it's package which had not been carelessly ripped open. The children had heard nothing of what should have been a noisy assault. No neighbors reported any strangers in the area eventhough some had been out in their nearby yards doing chores at the time. Furthermore, according to the neighbor to whom she had gone to for help, Christina had been more concerned about drugs in the house than any supposed assault.
The police were highly suspicious and confronted Al Regnery noting that Christina's behavior was bizarre. "It appears entirely possible that Mrs. Regnery had in fact been the victim of self-inflicted injuries," the report notes. When police brought this to his attention Al Regnery admitted to the police that he had suspected as much. He stated that he had "given serious thought to it" himself; that his wife had been faking the obscene calls and vandalism as well. Despite Regnery's own suspicions he had felt free to later blame his political opponent James Doyle and his supporters. Using his wife's diseased mind and her stories of harassment for his own political gains. But Al Regnery wasn't finished.
A reporter from The Capital Times of Madison was waiting when Al came out of the room where the police had been interviewing him. Al, seeing an opportunity, immediately declared to the reporter that this assault was aimed at getting him to withdraw his candidacy. The headline the next day, just days before the election, read: "Two Attack Wife of D.A. Candidate." But it didn't do any good, Al Regnery, the law-and-order candidate, lost the election to James Doyle.
Christina was right to be concerned about pills. She had, with the knowledge of Al, become addicted to painkillers and sedatives, taking a grand total of 2,256 various pills during her pregnancy, including Percodan, Doriden, Empirin No. 4 and Dalmane, topping it all off with 75 Valiums. The Regnery's had been spreading these prescriptions around among several pharmacies to disguise the extent of her problem. When the police brought this issue forward to Al Regnery he acknowledged that she had become similarly addicted during her two prior pregnancies and that they had decided to let the fetus withdraw from the drugs rather than try to get Christina off the medication.
After the election the Regnery's asked that no further investigation be conducted and the police stopped looking for the "rapists." But the police noted that "The infliction of wounds on Mrs. Regnery are still questionable and may have been self-inflicted or done by other subjects known to her. There is no indication that any unknown subjects inflicted any of the injuries." The police timed Al Regnery's distance from the scene at about 22 minutes driving time. An indication that they considered him a possible suspect. Although the possible prosecution for filing a false police report was raised, Doyle, as the new D.A., decided it would look vindictive and the matter was dropped. But, Governor Doyle continues to recall the incident with disdain. "He [Al Regnery] used it for his own political purposes. If he had some involvement himself, then his behavior is obviously inexcusable."
But involvement in such scandalous conduct and hypocrisy didn't stop the rising young conservative. He moved to Washington and came under the wing of Sen. Paul Laxalt who was lobbying for the Family Protection Act. In 1980 he came to the attention of Ronald Reagan, through the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, when he urged that the Legal Services Corporation, which handles legal matters for the impoverished, be eliminated. Laxalt suggested that Al would be a good candidate to head the dismantling of the LSC. However, the American Bar Association blocked that move, and instead Al found a position in the Justice Department heading the Office of Juvenile Justice. That post required Senate confirmation. And then the ghosts of Madison came back to haunt Al Regnery. At least temporarily.
After all, a parent who allows his own infant to become addicted to painkillers during pregnancy might be considered a poor choice for handling juvenile affairs. In addition, it didn't help that his car displayed a bumper sticker reading "Have You Slugged Your Kid Today?" Nonetheless, a compliant Senate approved his appointment in 1983 even though that appointment was opposed by both Wisconsin Senators.
Despite the Regnery's obvious interest in hard-core pornography Al soon championed an antiporn crusade calling for an $8 million study of its impact on society. His first grants were so outlandish they even attracted the attention of Congress. One of these grants was an $800,000 award to Judith Reisman, whose main claim to fame was as a songwriter for Captain Kangaroo, and who once wrote an article claiming that "freedom of speech does not exist." Given his predilections for such matters mentioned above it's probably not surprising that he is also a close friend of Ken Starr; who seems to have strong prurient interests of his own.
Not having succeeded in dismantling the LSC Regnery was called upon in 1986 to eliminate his Office of Juvenile Justice. Al needed to find a new place to roost. Fortunately for him his father Henry Regnery owned a publishing business. Henry Regnery had started printing books for the right-wing lunatic fringe John Birch Society in 1947. The first three volumes printed by Regnery Publishing were tomes critical of the Nuremberg war crime trials and openly sympathetic to the Nazis. Subsidized by the CIA, Regnery Publishing had become, if not successful, at least profitable throughout the Cold War era.
But the collapse of the USSR just gave a new direction to the family's endeavors. Under Al Regnery's guidance Regnery Publishing has been reshaped into a veritable arm of the GOP dirty tricks machine. Regularly publishing allegations of Bill Clinton's reputed womanizing and cocaine use without any particular regard for truth. The smears and slime continue to this day. And considering the character of the president of Regnery Publishing it's not surprising that he is the very same publisher who now stands behind John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi's best-selling book "Unfit for Command" and Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment"; which argues on behalf of racial profiling and internment during war - as a solution - if not the Final Solution.
[Much of the above information, including the police report quotations, from "The Truth and Alfred Regnery" by Larry Bush, originally published in Penthouse magazine, November 1985] link
*****
Thanks Aaargh. I'd also like to thank reader/commentor "WH'ho" who sent me this previously published Newsweek item:
So there ya go. Alfred S. Regnery, "family values" drummer boy, law and order conservative, and publisher of "Unfit for Command" [irony intended].
Vote Kerry/Edwards. Do it for the children and the farm animals and the fried balls of ground spiced chickpeas and fava beans lobby and....
8 more days.
*
Anyway, let me pull my pants back up here :-) ...ok!... some time back I managed to bang out a post about Al Regnery (of Regnery Publishing) which mentioned a Penthouse magazine article from November, 1985 titled "The Truth and Alfred Regnery", by Larry Bush [no pun intended]. I'd remarked at the time that I'd like to look at the pict..., I mean read, read this article - and - if anyone out there had some time and could dig it up by all means let me know. Well, as fortune would have it, someone did find that old article and has written a summary of what is contained therein. Reader Aaargh was nice enough to write this one up for us and I've posted the entire submission below. So, here's Aaargh:
Behind the Facade of Al Regnery
Contributed by Aaaargh
Regnery Publishing is well known for it's publication of conservative smear jobs such as Unfit for Command and Michelle Malkin's bizarre fear-mongering demand for institutionalized racism, In Defense of Internment. But little is publicly known about the sordid personal past of Al Regnery, the President of Regnery Publishing, Inc. and publisher of right-wing magazine The American Spectator. It turns out that proffering lies in an attempt to influence elections are nothing new in the Regnery family.
The public face of Al Regnery on the Regnery Publishing website is fairly inoffensive and nondescript:
"Alfred is also a practicing attorney and is Of Counsel to the Washington Law firm of Keller and Heckman. He served as Administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and as Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Land and Natural Resources Division, both at the U.S. Department of Justice, between 1981 and 1986. Previously he served as Minority Counsel, Senate Judiciary Committee and Chief Minority Counsel, Administrative Practice and Procedure Subcommittee. Prior to government service he practiced law for six years in Madison, Wisconsin."
Madison, Wisconsin, 1976.
What isn't mentioned in that summary above turns on events that took place in Madison, Wisconsin in 1976 while Regnery was practicing law with an old line conservative Madison firm. He decided to run for district attorney; against the urging of his employers. He would have been wise to heed their advice. Campaigning as a law-and-order hardliner - get tough bringer of justice to the lawless dopeheads and sex fiends of Madison - he opposed rehabilitation in favor of one week maximum security prison time for juvenile offenders.
When things started going badly for his campaign things also started to get a little strange around the Regnery household. Regnery's wife Christina, eight-months-pregnant, reported obscene phone calls that demanded that her husband drop out of the race. He claimed harassment and vandalism by supporters of his opponent James E. Doyle (now governor of Wisconsin), but, by the end of October the stakes got much higher.
According to Christina's story, as recorded in the police report, she was standing nude in the bathroom of her home on Halloween afternoon, with her children asleep in their bedrooms, when she suddenly saw "two men standing there," one white and one black. She reached for a towel but they told her to leave it behind and to step into the bedroom and smell something. She claimed that they told her that they had turned off the pilot light on the kitchen stove, turned up the burners, and would open the doors to the children's rooms if she did not cooperate. According to Christina they told her that Al should have taken their advice and quit the campaign. They then produced a paring knife, she continued, but decided it was too dull, and instead attempted to cut her breasts with embroidery scissors. Dissatisfied with that, she said, they found a razor blade and started cutting her very-pregnant stomach. According to her they raped her with a can of hairspray tucked inside a condom and then with a can of feminine deodorant spray. After that the two men took her, she claimed, into the bathroom where they forced her to perform fellatio on them. She stated that the men eventually left through a door in the basement. At least that's the story Christian Regnery gave to the police.
Christina is known to have awakened the children and gone to a neighbor claiming to have been cut with a razor and raped. Her neighbor urged her to call the police but she refused. She wanted to talk to Al first. Al states that he arrived home, found no one, and called the police himself. The officer took Christina's statement then took her to Madison General Hospital. She was found to have 73 slash marks, numerous scratches, 17 lacerations around her nipples, with 15 punctures on the left breast.
A shocking story indeed. The only problem was that Christina's story could not be true. The basement door that she claimed her attackers had used to exit the house was blocked by dusty boxes that clearly hadn't been moved in months. The police report stated: "This door is the door supposedly used by the burglars in the exit. However, this would be impossible." The police also observed that the kitchen stove was so caked with dirt it would be nearly impossible for the gas pilot light to be turned off and then relit. Furthermore, in the bedroom, there were no signs of a struggle, nor a single drop of blood in the rooms where she had supposedly been tortured. However, in the bedroom, the police did find some pornographic magazines that depicted acts very similar to those allegedly performed by the purported rapists. Including similar uses of bottles and cans. The condom supposedly used in the assault had been carefully removed from it's package which had not been carelessly ripped open. The children had heard nothing of what should have been a noisy assault. No neighbors reported any strangers in the area eventhough some had been out in their nearby yards doing chores at the time. Furthermore, according to the neighbor to whom she had gone to for help, Christina had been more concerned about drugs in the house than any supposed assault.
The police were highly suspicious and confronted Al Regnery noting that Christina's behavior was bizarre. "It appears entirely possible that Mrs. Regnery had in fact been the victim of self-inflicted injuries," the report notes. When police brought this to his attention Al Regnery admitted to the police that he had suspected as much. He stated that he had "given serious thought to it" himself; that his wife had been faking the obscene calls and vandalism as well. Despite Regnery's own suspicions he had felt free to later blame his political opponent James Doyle and his supporters. Using his wife's diseased mind and her stories of harassment for his own political gains. But Al Regnery wasn't finished.
A reporter from The Capital Times of Madison was waiting when Al came out of the room where the police had been interviewing him. Al, seeing an opportunity, immediately declared to the reporter that this assault was aimed at getting him to withdraw his candidacy. The headline the next day, just days before the election, read: "Two Attack Wife of D.A. Candidate." But it didn't do any good, Al Regnery, the law-and-order candidate, lost the election to James Doyle.
Christina was right to be concerned about pills. She had, with the knowledge of Al, become addicted to painkillers and sedatives, taking a grand total of 2,256 various pills during her pregnancy, including Percodan, Doriden, Empirin No. 4 and Dalmane, topping it all off with 75 Valiums. The Regnery's had been spreading these prescriptions around among several pharmacies to disguise the extent of her problem. When the police brought this issue forward to Al Regnery he acknowledged that she had become similarly addicted during her two prior pregnancies and that they had decided to let the fetus withdraw from the drugs rather than try to get Christina off the medication.
After the election the Regnery's asked that no further investigation be conducted and the police stopped looking for the "rapists." But the police noted that "The infliction of wounds on Mrs. Regnery are still questionable and may have been self-inflicted or done by other subjects known to her. There is no indication that any unknown subjects inflicted any of the injuries." The police timed Al Regnery's distance from the scene at about 22 minutes driving time. An indication that they considered him a possible suspect. Although the possible prosecution for filing a false police report was raised, Doyle, as the new D.A., decided it would look vindictive and the matter was dropped. But, Governor Doyle continues to recall the incident with disdain. "He [Al Regnery] used it for his own political purposes. If he had some involvement himself, then his behavior is obviously inexcusable."
But involvement in such scandalous conduct and hypocrisy didn't stop the rising young conservative. He moved to Washington and came under the wing of Sen. Paul Laxalt who was lobbying for the Family Protection Act. In 1980 he came to the attention of Ronald Reagan, through the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, when he urged that the Legal Services Corporation, which handles legal matters for the impoverished, be eliminated. Laxalt suggested that Al would be a good candidate to head the dismantling of the LSC. However, the American Bar Association blocked that move, and instead Al found a position in the Justice Department heading the Office of Juvenile Justice. That post required Senate confirmation. And then the ghosts of Madison came back to haunt Al Regnery. At least temporarily.
After all, a parent who allows his own infant to become addicted to painkillers during pregnancy might be considered a poor choice for handling juvenile affairs. In addition, it didn't help that his car displayed a bumper sticker reading "Have You Slugged Your Kid Today?" Nonetheless, a compliant Senate approved his appointment in 1983 even though that appointment was opposed by both Wisconsin Senators.
Despite the Regnery's obvious interest in hard-core pornography Al soon championed an antiporn crusade calling for an $8 million study of its impact on society. His first grants were so outlandish they even attracted the attention of Congress. One of these grants was an $800,000 award to Judith Reisman, whose main claim to fame was as a songwriter for Captain Kangaroo, and who once wrote an article claiming that "freedom of speech does not exist." Given his predilections for such matters mentioned above it's probably not surprising that he is also a close friend of Ken Starr; who seems to have strong prurient interests of his own.
Not having succeeded in dismantling the LSC Regnery was called upon in 1986 to eliminate his Office of Juvenile Justice. Al needed to find a new place to roost. Fortunately for him his father Henry Regnery owned a publishing business. Henry Regnery had started printing books for the right-wing lunatic fringe John Birch Society in 1947. The first three volumes printed by Regnery Publishing were tomes critical of the Nuremberg war crime trials and openly sympathetic to the Nazis. Subsidized by the CIA, Regnery Publishing had become, if not successful, at least profitable throughout the Cold War era.
But the collapse of the USSR just gave a new direction to the family's endeavors. Under Al Regnery's guidance Regnery Publishing has been reshaped into a veritable arm of the GOP dirty tricks machine. Regularly publishing allegations of Bill Clinton's reputed womanizing and cocaine use without any particular regard for truth. The smears and slime continue to this day. And considering the character of the president of Regnery Publishing it's not surprising that he is the very same publisher who now stands behind John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi's best-selling book "Unfit for Command" and Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment"; which argues on behalf of racial profiling and internment during war - as a solution - if not the Final Solution.
[Much of the above information, including the police report quotations, from "The Truth and Alfred Regnery" by Larry Bush, originally published in Penthouse magazine, November 1985] link
Thanks Aaargh. I'd also like to thank reader/commentor "WH'ho" who sent me this previously published Newsweek item:
From the start Alfred S. Regnery was a controversial choice to head the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. For one thing the 40-year-old Wisconsin lawyer had few relevant credentials -- apart from having been a Young Americans for Freedom official in 1965 and enjoying close ties to Ronald Reagan's Senate friend Paul Laxalt. At recent hearings, Regnery could not define delinquency or name a single one of the books he claimed to be studying on the problem of juvenile crime. Even more damning to some senators was the bumper sticker discovered on Regnery's car: "Have you slugged your kid today?" (Regnery said it was a joke.) And last week it was disclosed that a renowned Wisconsin pediatrician had warned three Washington legislators the nominee was emotionally unqualified for the job and in a subsequent interview, called Regnery "a danger to the health of our children."
Dr. William Ylitalo refused to elaborate, but newspaper reports in Wisconsin suggested that the pediatrician's objection stemmed from something Regnery said or did during the birth of his son in January 1975. There are also questions about his connection with a federal grant application for a book contract. The Senate vote on Regnery's nomination has been delayed until the FBI can investigate the various charges." (Newsweek)
So there ya go. Alfred S. Regnery, "family values" drummer boy, law and order conservative, and publisher of "Unfit for Command" [irony intended].
Vote Kerry/Edwards. Do it for the children and the farm animals and the fried balls of ground spiced chickpeas and fava beans lobby and....
8 more days.
*
