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
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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.