Sex Scandal Retrospective

Eliot Spitzer . . .

and the diamond rated girls of Emporer Club VIP . . .



have swallowed the news cycle, as Don Surber wryly puts it. You can find much more here and here. There is nothing I can add to it, really, beyond putting it in some perspective.

With his pants around his knees, Eliot joins the club of recent and not so recent politicians in America who have made the scandal sheets and provided untold fodder for our nation's stand up comedians. And in appreciation for the sheer entertainment value, today we induct NY Governor Eliot Spitzer into America's well catlogued pantheon of politicians whose biggest crime was thinking with the little guy . . .
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Republican Senator Larry Craig, convicted of propositioning an undercover officer in a men's room, is refusing to leave the Senate. He stands (so to speak) accused of practicing stall tactics.




2004: NJ Governor Jim McGreevey earned his 15 minutes of fame and ridicule when he hired his unqualified gay lover, Israeli Golan Cipel, as New Jersey's Homeland Security Advisor.



2004: When someone on then Senatorial candidate Obama's side got the divorce records of Republican candidate Jack Ryan made public, the "swinging" sex scandal therein catapaulted Obama to the spot of odds on favorite to win the Illinois Senate race, seven to nine.








1998: President Bill Clinton and the world's most famous man gobbler.











1995: The National Organization of Women claimed their first and only high profile victim when that got Oregon Sen. and notoious womanizer Bob Pack'n wood (R-OR) to resign over a sexual harassment scandal involving allegations from 29 different women - all former campaign workers or employees.



NOW would begin and end their concern for sexual harassment victims with Packwood, studiously ignoring serial womanizer Bill Clinton four years later. As to Senator Packwood, the joke at the time was that his favorite pick-up line was: "Wan'na help me make a motion on the floor?"


1990: The uncloseted Barney Frank (D-MA) was not above ordering up some take-out in the person of male prostitute Steve Gobie. Then Frank let him move in. Gobie not only moved in, but started a gay prostitution ring from Frank's apartment when Frank was not at home. Frank probably saved his career by reporting it to the Ethics Committee before the scandal broke publicly.


1988: Presidential candidate Gary Hart (D-CO) dared the press to find out anything about his alledged womenizing. They caught him with the lovely Donna Rice on a yacht called The Monkey Business. You can't make this stuff up. At least his taste in women was first class . . . or in today's lingo, seven diamonds.


1983: Gerry Studds (D-MA) and Dan Crane (R-IL) suffered a literary-esque punishment, censured for bending over a few paiges.



1981: Jon Hinson (R-MS) blew several things in 1981, his political career being one of them.





1980: Rep. Robert Bauman (R-MD) - was busted while soliciting sex from a 16-year-old male prostitute. He actually stood for reelection. I remember listening to local D.J. Johnnie Walker at the time who claimed that when Bauman was told on election day that he was behind his challenger several points, his response was "No problem. I love to come from behind."






1976: Wayne Hays (D-OH) hired Elizabeth Ray as his secretary. She later admitted that "I can't type. I can't file. I can't even answer the phone.'"






1974: Wilbur Mills (D-AR), the powerful House Ways and Means Committee Chairman and a 38 year member of the House, lost it between the bottle and Argentinian stripper Fanne Foxe.

1969 - Teddy Kennedy driving back from a party with Mary Jo Kopechne takes a turn into literary history with:




President Lyndon Johnson - no, he didn't have a sex scandal. But this is a photo of him on the first day after taking over the presidency, calling the White House janitorial staff to come up to the Oval Office and do something about the unusual stains on his desk.