"First Newt Gingrich quit. Then Robert Livingston quit before he even got started.

This opened the door for Rep. J. Dennis ("Denny") Hastert to become Speaker, and the media has engaged in an absolute fawnfest over the 57-year-old, former wrestling coach from suburban Illinois. "Healer," they call him "consensus builder," "gentle peacemaker," and so forth.

But before we confer sainthood on him let's at least check some of the fine print.

• At bottom, he's just another lobbyist go-fer on the take. Even though he had a non-race for reelection last year, he pocketed more than a million bucks, practically all of it from corporations looking for favors. For example, he chairs a key health subcommittee - and one-out-of-every-five campaign dollars he raised came from health care operators.

• Hastert has been a good investment for them, having led the charge to prevent us patients from being able to sue HMOs that are guilty of malpractice. And he also was Newt's point man trying to kill legislation that would give moms a two-day stay in the maternity ward with their newborn babies, rather than the one day-and-out rule mandated by HMO beancounters.

• Hastert has been a bulwark of the new Globaloney, actively supporting NAFTA in '93, the WTO in '94, Fast Track in '97, and the Caribbean initiative in `97 and '98-all "free trade" giveaways to transnationals.

• He opposed the miserly 90 cents-an-hour increase in minimum wage in 1996, yet he pushed hard that same year to give the Pentagon (and its weapons contractors) $7 billion more than the generals themselves requested.

• Hastert positions himself as a strict moralist in keeping with his evangelical Christianity, yet he opposes restrictions on the liberal flow of corrupt campaign contributions into American politics; he supports letting lobbyists give junkets, gifts, and other freebies to members of Congress; he opposes lobbyist disclosure requirements; and he was eageras-a-beaver to give himself and his colleagues a pay raise in 1997.

• He's also supported cutting Medicare by $270 billion in order to pay for Newt's promised taxbreaks for the wealthy; allowing oil companies to get away with more pollution of our water; denying small shareholders the right to sue Wall Street firms that bilk them; overturning Roe v. Wade; abolishing Title IX which bans discrimination in educational programs including sports; and repealing the law requiring that food processors not put cancer-causing chemicals into their products.

This guy's no saint - he's Dennis the Menace." (Hightower Lowdown, March, 1999)