Chances are, most Americans have never heard of Dr. [tag]K.A. Paul[/tag], leader of a group called the Global Peace Initiative, but he’s an entertaining character. It was Paul, for example, who told an audience in Cleveland on Monday that voters should oust Republicans from the congressional majority because, as he sees it, the GOP is “delaying the second coming of Jesus Christ.”
Paul also bills himself as a “spiritual adviser” to some of the planet’s most despicable people, including Liberia’s Charles Taylor, Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic, and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
With this in mind, it came as a bit of a surprise yesterday when embattled House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) decided to give Paul a private audience.
On Tuesday morning, an unusual guest emerged from House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s home in Plano, Ill.: Globetrotting evangelical minister K.A. Paul, who proceeded to tell the Associated Press that he’d talked and prayed with the speaker about the Foley affair…. But reached at his home Tuesday evening, Paul told Mother Jones an even more peculiar story: that he’d convinced the Speaker to resign.
“God convinced him through me in prayer,” said Paul, who knows a few things about scandals, having faced controversy for allegedly claiming another minister’s work as his own, neglecting orphans in the United States, and interfering with a murder investigation in India. “God gave me this position that I don’t deserve,” he claims Speaker Hastert told him. “For the good of the people, I will do it.”
Hastert’s office couldn’t be reached Tuesday evening; the speaker’s staff confirmed to the AP that the meeting took place, but wouldn’t comment on what transpired.
Now, just to be completely clear, I sincerely doubt that Hastert actually told Paul that he’d resign. But why on earth did the Speaker of the House actually sit down with this guy? It’s a funny story, actually.
The Chicago Sun-Times has the lowdown:
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, with his job on the line because of the spiraling Mark Foley cyberspace page sex scandal, was duped Tuesday into letting a stranger into his Plano home — a serious security breach.
Hastert literally let his guard down and allowed in his house a hustling, self-promoting evangelist little known in this country, the Houston-based K.A. Paul, who at 7:30 a.m. arrived at the speaker’s home with a camera-wielding associate.
How Paul and his aide, Dennis Ryan, got to Hastert’s door is a tale of apparent chance. How the publicity-hungry Paul and Ryan walked through it was a matter of a “frank discussion” later in the day with the federal security detail assigned to Hastert around the clock.
I bet it was. Hastert, two heartbeats from the presidency, has quite a bit of security. And yet, Paul and his cameraman walked right in and a 40-minute chat with House Speaker.
Better yet, the Sun-Times also reported that [tag]Hastert[/tag] and [tag]Paul[/tag] prayed together ad that Paul “laid hands” on Hastert.
Far be it for me to offer the GOP leadership advice, but in light of the [tag]Foley[/tag] scandal, there’s considerable doubt about the Speaker’s judgment and competence. Does anyone suppose yesterday’s Hastert-Foley confab assuages those qualms or reinforces them?
