Walking on Broken Glass

Today, columnist Robert Novak revealed that House Speaker Dennis Hastert was alerted as early as last November about Rep, Mark Foley's homosexual stalking of a 16-year-old male page at the U.S. House of Representatives.

This story continues to grow. For the Republican Party, it's what singer Annie Lennox crooned in "Walking on Broken Glass."

Just remember, though, it was 30 years ago that Bob Novak and company were in a lather over charges that President George Bush I's nominee for defense secretary, Sen. John Tower of Texas, was a womanizer and alcoholic, not fit for office. At the time, I did what we call in the trade a "clip-job story" for The Washington Times about the sexual pecadillos of Washington's high and mighty, going back almost to the hot affair between Thomas Jefferson and his beautiful slave girl Sally Hemmings, mother of their love-child.

The anchor revelation of the front-page story in summer 1989 was that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachussetts Democrat, took a female lobbyist for the textile industry - her name was Elaine -- to La Brasserie restaurant on Capitol Hill near Union Station - and climbed upon her in an upstairs private dining room after a sumptuous lunch of New England crab cakes and several expensive bottles of white wine, panting like a horny dog with his trousers down around his ankles, going for the eight-furlong post as the waitress came into the room to see if the lovely couple wanted more coffee.

This public show of affection by the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts was three decades after his drunken plunge into Dykes Pond with Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick. And is Teddy Kennedy among today's complainers about Rep. Mark Foley, insisting that everyone in the Republican leadership resign as Democrats grab any straw available to win a majority in Congress?

I doubt it. With Kennedy's history, after defending his nephew who raped a woman in Florida, I doubt he's going to join this fight over a hapless Republican homosexual congressman who stalked teen male pages in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This institutional congressional sex scandal goes back decades and is a pox on both political houses. When will it stop, we ask? Probably not in our lifetimes. It's gone on for too long, and members of Congress from both parties perpetuate this shame on our country's coat of arms.

The problem is political power run amok. It's our fault as voters because we continue to elect morally - Hide quoted text - repugnant people who ceaselessly brag that they bring home the bacon, make Smithville the center of the universe in Washington, save the military base that should be closed because it's outmoded and redundant, kiss the president's arse no matter what in order to get a photo op in the Arizona desert or anywhere Air Force One can fly. Do we get the message?

Politics in our age is all about protecting those in power, regardless of their ability, and regardless of their perfidy.

We're walking on broken glass. The sex stories about members of Congress go back as far as the country's beginning. Thirty years ago, to begin the litany fairly recently, Rep. Wilbur Mills, drunken chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, jumped into the Tidal Basin with bar stripper Fanny Fox just a shadow away from Thomas Jefferson's statue.

Maryland Rep. Robert Bauman, previously a Republican telephone page in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1960s and a leading advocate of conservative causes for morality and limited, leaner government, regularly went to male strip clubs in downtown Washington to pick up teen prostitutes and was convicted in 1980 of oral sodomy with a minor boy.

Also in 1980, South Carolina congressman John Jenrette and his girlfriend, Rita Carpenter, went to the U.S. Capitol steps, stripped naked, and fornicated throughout the night under a full moon.

During the 1980s, Rep. John Young of Texas had a young female aide on his payroll for constant sex. Reps. Joe Waggoner, Jr. of Louisiana and Allan Howe of Utah both had female prostitutes serving them and fell prey to police decoys and were convicted of sex crimes. House Speaker Newt Gingring had his own continuing extra-marital affair with a lovely female aide on the House Agriculture Committee staff and divorced his second wife to marry the aide who he got pregnant.

Rep. Jon Hinson, Mississippi Republican, resigned from the House in 1981 after being arrested in a Cannon House Office Building men's room for performing oral sodomy on a policeman decoy.

Rep. Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, had a male prostitute lover with whom he lived in his Capitol Hill apartment. The prostitute, Steve Gobie, told my reporting partner Paul Rodriguez and I that he ran a prostitution ring simultaneously out of Frank's apartment and a Chevy Chase elementary school, whose principal was another homosexual client. Rodriguez and I broke that story on Aug. 25, 1989.

Rep. Buz Lukens, Illinois Republican, had a black prostitute fetish, and was defeated after being slammed with House ethics violations. Rep. Daniel Crane, another Illinois Republican, was bounced for having sex with a female Republican page.

Rep. Gerry Studds, Massachusetts Democrat, was censured for having sexual relations around the world over a long period of time at taxpayers' expense with a male teenage page. Rep. Jim Kolbe, Arizona Republican and powerful member of the House Appropriations Committee, left his wife for sex with men and became a major advocate of homosexual rights.

The House was equal opportunity as congressmen of both parties had sex with adults and minors of both sexes, proving they didn't need Cialis or Viagra to be horny and abuse people of either sex regardless of age. Washington, D.C. was scandal city for decades. The politicians didn't blink an eye so long as contributors ponied up the money they needed for their re-election campaigns and voters put them back in office.

The list of politicians who committed sexual crimes and cheated on their spouses goes on and on: Former Sens. Brock Adams of Washington state and Charles S. Robb of Virginia; Reps. Gus Savage of Illinois, Donald E. "Buz" Lukens of Ohio, Fred W. Richmond of New York, and Jim Bates of California.

Walking on broken glass.

The Washington Times had its own long list of sexual deviance and harassment cases over the years that were mostly settled at high cost to the company.

Randall Casseday, the newspaper's human resources director, was recently caught propositioning an undercover policeman he thought to be a horny 13-year-old girl he went after on the Internet.

Casseday earlier helped cover up the predatory sexual antics of Washington Times Managing Editor Francis B. Coombs Jr., who tried to seduce and sexually abuse public relations contractor Melissa Hopkins at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City.

Hopkins filed a formal sexual harassment complaint against Coombs, which Casseday thwarted in behalf of editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden Jr. and Coombs. This is a continuing issue at the newspaper, a major cover-up, and belittles the newspaper's recent editorial insistence that House Speaker Dennis Hastert resign in the wake of the Rep. Mark Foley scandal. Why should Hastert resign? He hasn't committed any sins that we know of.

How about needed resignations by all the sexual perverts in Congress named above, and the editor-in-chief and managing editor of The Washington Times in the wake of their own complicity and cover-up of major sexual abuse at the newspaper?

Walking on broken glass.