The single most shocking thing about the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal is, of course, his party affiliation. The GOP has such a notorious losing streak when it comes to this stuff that when a Democrat finally falls it's kinda like when Somalia beats Austria in the luge.
So Spitzer spent $80,000 over a period of a few years on prostitutes? Pfft. Who hasn't? Anyway, at least so far, the Spitzer story hasn't been embroidered with the sort of weird and kinky details you get with most conservative scandals--details that have increasingly come to sound like the solution to a game of Porno Clue (it was the Reverend in the choirboy with the canola oil and Alpine ibex horn).
Seriously, did Spitzer fuck even one mule? Well, if he did, he seriously overpaid.
In our recent book The Brotherhood of the Disappearing Pants: A Field Guide to Conservative Sex Scandals, we listed more than 70 Republicans and conservatives who have perved out in truly spectacular ways. Believe us, spending eighty-large on high-class whores would barely register among this crowd.
Here's just a small sampling:
1. Galen Fox
The preflight instructions on domestic airliners can be an interminable ordeal. Indeed, most of us zone out somewhere between the part about the oxygen masks dropping down in the event of a sudden change in cabin pressure and the part about not rubbing the vagina of the person sitting next to you. Former Hawaii legislator Galen Fox is unlikely to ever make that mistake again. The Republican was convicted in 2005 of abusive sexual contact for rubbing the crotch of a sleeping stranger on a pre-Christmas flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles.
2. Neal Horsley
No doubt there's a lot of subtle context to this case that we're missing that would put the whole thing in a much more wholesome light, but the long and short of it is he fucked a mule. In 2005, the notorious far-right antiabortion activist had this exchange on Alan Colmes' radio show:
Colmes: You had sex with animals?
Horsley: Absolutely. I was a fool. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule.
Colmes: I'm not so sure that that is so.
Horsley: You didn't grow up on a farm in Georgia, did you?
3. Neil Bush
In 2003, the president's brother claimed in a deposition that, on several occasions, women unexpectedly showed up at the door of his hotel room to have sex with him while he was visiting Hong Kong and Thailand on business. Now, there are some people who go their entire lives without having a Hong Kong prostitute unexpectedly show up at their door even once, so it would be pretty remarkable if there weren't more to this story. It's difficult to speculate, but it very well could have to do with his status, and with the company he was representing on these trips--a firm that paid him $2 million in stock over five years for attending board meetings and discussing business strategies.
4. Jack Ryan
According to his divorce records, the former U.S. Senate candidate (and Barack Obama's original opponent in the last Illinois Senate race) needed a little extra somethin'-somethin' to get turned on by the sight of wife (and Star Trek: Voyager star) Jeri Ryan's naked body. In the divorce records, Jeri talked about a "bizarre club" the couple visited in New York where Jack "wanted me to have sex with him...with another couple watching."
5. Bill O'Reilly
Suffice to say, if you do a Google search on "falafel," the ancient, world-famous Middle Eastern food staple comes up on the first four hits. O'Reilly's name comes up on the fifth.
6. David Hager
Hager was a devout Christian, respected OB/GYN and a member of Focus on the Family's Physician Resource Council when George W. Bush appointed him to the FDA's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs. He was also a vocal opponent of the morning-after pill. Apparently it was a drug he saw little need for. In a May 2005 interview with The Nation, Hager's ex-wife, Linda, claimed Hager had been anally sodomizing her in her sleep for seven years of their marriage. "My sense is that he saw (my narcolepsy) as an opportunity," she told the magazine.
7. Mark Foley
In Foley's defense, "well I have a totally stiff wood now," "how my favorite young stud doing," and "get a ruler and measure it for me" could refer to any number of things. Unfortunately, "grab the one-eyed snake" is fairly unambiguous.
8. Ted Haggard
Apparently, Haggard would have us believe that buying crystal meth is like buying Girl Scout cookies when you're on a diet. Unfortunately, it's a little harder to give away at your weekly Oprah Book Club meeting. Luckily, after his scandal broke, Haggard completed an intensive counseling program and was happy to report he is now "completely heterosexual."
9. Duke Cunningham
In April of 2006, the Wall Street Journal reported that federal investigators were looking into whether prostitutes were among the items Cunningham received in his congressional graft goodie bag. Now, while imagining Duke Cunningham (who on a good day looks like a bowl of Quaker oatmeal and on a bad day looks like Duke Cunningham) in any manner of sexual clinch with a vertebrate of any stripe may tax even the most mentally spry among us, it did at least make the story more interesting.
10. Beverly Russell
In 1994, after Susan Smith famously drowned her two children in a local lake, Newt Gingrich was sure why it happened: "I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things," Gingrich said. "The only way you get change is to vote Republican. Unfortunately, it would later be revealed that Smith had been molested by her stepfather, Beverly Russell, a staunch Christian conservative, from the age of 15. She even claimed her stepfather once molested her after he'd been out putting up Pat Robertson for President signs (which, to be honest, is a lateral move at best).