Sex, Lies and Republicans

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 12, 2007 7:28 AM

Does the Republican Party have a zipper problem?

And if so, how much will voters care?

Now that Larry Flynt has claimed David Vitter as his latest quarry, there's plenty of chatter about whether one too many family-values champions of the GOP has been caught not quite walking the walk.

Let's stipulate right up front: There's been no shortage of Democratic politicians caught doing something with women not their wives. Bill Clinton, ah, comes to mind. So does his HUD secretary, former San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros. So does the former West Virginia governor, Bob Wise, and the former Kentucky governor, Paul Patton, whose gal pal was cited for nursing home violations after they broke up. And Gary Hart. And Jesse Jackson. And on and on, back to Jack Kennedy.

But the Mark Foley scandal put the hypocrisy question on full display. The ex-congressman was, you may recall, co-chair of the caucus on exploited children even as he was sending nasty IMs to young men in the House page program. Newt, of course, was doing it with a House aide while demanding Clinton's impeachment over Monica. And the reason that Hustler was happy to out Vitter for playing speed-dial with the D.C. Madam's operation is that the Republican senator from Louisiana was an outspoken proponent of the sanctity of marriage and other moral causes. (Mrs. Vitter's seven-year-old promise to turn into Lorena Bobbitt if her husband strayed adding a certain cutting edge to the tale.)

But does Flynt's goal of exposing political hypocrites--along the way, back in '99, he cost speaker-to-be Bob Livingston his House seat--mean that only conservative Republicans are targeted, and liberal Democrats get a pass?

As we ponder that question, Vitter's problems may go beyond Deborah Jeane Palfrey. The New Orleans Times Picayune has this:

"Senator David Vitter visited a Canal Street brothel several times beginning in the mid-1990s, paying $300 per hour for services at the bordello after he met the madam at a fishing rodeo that included prostitutes and other politicians, according to Jeanette Maier, the 'Canal Street Madam' whose operation was shut down by a federal investigators in 2001.

"After they met, Maier said Vitter became a customer at the Mid-City brothel. He made several visits, she said, but had stopped coming before federal agents raided the brothel.

"Maier's attorney, Vinny Mosca, upon learning of his client's allegation on Tuesday, said he had never known Vitter to visit the brothel or heard Maier mention his name."

By the way, Hustler now says Vitter called the escort service three times in 2000 and 2001.

At the Politico, David Paul Kuhn and John Harris connect the dots to the GOP's White House field:

"The agony of Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) -- a self-proclaimed social conservative exposed Monday night as a customer of an escort service -- is one more float in a long and flamboyant parade of sexual follies and scandals served up by his generation of congressional Republicans. Previous attractions include former House members Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, Bob Barr, Bob Livingston and Mark Foley . . .

"The modern social conservative movement grew in large measure as a reaction against the dominant cultural developments of the 1960s and 1970s. Traditional values advocates opposed casual sex, divorce, tolerance of alternative lifestyles and the supposed liberal mind-set that dictated (in the famous phrase), 'If it feels good, do it.'

"Many of this year's crop of candidates, however, have been enthusiastic beneficiaries of the sexual revolution and the more lenient cultural mores it ushered in.

"Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), former Sen. Fred Thompson and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani have all been divorced -- twice in the case of Giuliani. All have gone through phases in their lives in which they were known for fast-lane social lives."

Andrew Sullivan finds the revelation unsurprising:

"Why is one not exactly gob-smacked to find that a leading Republican Christianist was once a client of the DC Madam? I mean, a leading evangelical opponent of gay equality, Ted Haggard, was hiring a male hooker. We had the leading Republican campaigner against hooking up with minors online . . . hassling adolescent pages with IMs. We had Newt Gingrich committing adultery while impeaching Clinton. Why should we expect anything different from senator David Vitter?"

Oh, and David Corn discovers a 1998 op-ed in which Vitter asked "whether President Clinton should be impeached and removed from office because he is morally unfit to govern." Sheesh.

Mitt Romney would seem to get a pass on this issue, having been married to his high school sweetheart for a long time. But American Prospect's Paul Waldman finds fault with Romney anyway:

"In the past week, two of the leading GOP candidates for president found themselves in hot water with the Republican base over their connections to what we might call the other team in the culture war. Both Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson were left to explain (in Romney's case) or deny (in Thompson's) that their obeisance to the 'traditional family' -- and all the necessary beliefs that go along with it -- is anything less than complete and abject. For neither the first time nor the last, it all comes down to sex.

"Romney's problem is about what goes on in hotel rooms when the blinds are closed. The former Massachusetts governor served on the board of the Marriott hotel chain from 1992 to 2001 (the Romney family and the Marriott family are extremely close; Romney's first name is Willard, after J. Willard Marriott, the company founder). As at most large hotel chains, guests at Marriott can sample from a variety of adult offerings on their televisions, whether their preference is for naughty co-eds, naughty housewives, or naughty nurses.

"Hotel room porn is one of the primary foci of the anti-pornography movement, which by going after Romney can earn some priceless publicity.

"When the attacks came last week, Romney's statement in response argued that the issue is All About The Children. 'I am not pursuing an effort to try and stop adults from being able to acquire or see things that I find objectionable; that's their right,' he told the Associated Press. 'But I do vehemently oppose practices or business procedures that will allow kids to be exposed to obscenity.'

"Wrong answer, Governor. First off, your service on the board would seem to be all about business practices. What about that enterprising young teenager flipping through the televised offerings in his hotel room while the parents are down at the pool?"

I'm sorry, that is a huuuuge stretch. (The Thompson part has to do with his lack of recollection of consulting with a pro-choice group in the early 1990s.)

Hmmm . . . I wonder how Supreme Court Justice Harriet Miers would have ruled in the case of Harriet Miers defying a congressional subpoena to testify in the fired prosecutors case.

The McCain post-mortems are flying everywhere in the wake of his staff shakeup. Time's Jay Carney says it was unrealistic for McCain to think he'd get good press this time around:

"A frequent complaint one heard from the McCain campaign in recent months was that the national press had turned against them, that the coverage of their guy had become hostile, unfair and unbalanced. Putting aside the irony of that charge (in 2000 McCain and his aides used to say, only half in jest, that 'the press is our base'), there was at least some truth underlying it. The tone of McCain's press did change -- but not because he made peace with Jerry Falwell or voted in favor of extending tax cuts that he'd previously voted against or because of any of the other midsize transgressions cited in all the stories documenting McCain's rough transition from insurgent candidate to establishment frontrunner. The coverage changed, I think, almost entirely because of Iraq.

"The campaign thought the Senator's stand on Iraq would be an asset in his bid for the GOP nomination. It would reassure conservatives by showing McCain to be President Bush's closest ally on the most important issue of the day, and it would demonstrate yet again that McCain was a politician of high principle, willing to take a stand for what he believed to be right in the face of stark opposition. Sure the war was increasingly unpopular with the general public, the thinking went, but that only proved their point that McCain was just being McCain, the principled maverick.

"Such was the campaign's wishful thinking. It's one thing to take an unpopular stand on an issue of moderate importance. The press often -- and the public occasionally -- rewards politicians who go against the grain. But Iraq is not just any issue. There is a serious national debate over whether Bush's invasion of Iraq is the biggest foreign policy fiasco in more than a generation, if not since the dawn of the Republic. At the moment, Bush (and, by extension, McCain) are on the losing side of that debate. The expectation that the press would acclaim McCain's steadfastness on Iraq and leave it at that was misguided. The issue is simply too monumental, especially for a candidate basing his campaign in large part on his national security credentials."

In other words, journalists only reward a maverick when he agrees with their positions?

Now the New York Times is questioning whether McCain broke the law by making a fundraising call just off the Senate floor. Talk about a bad week.

Bush didn't break much ground with his war speech Tuesday, and Slate's Fred Kaplan is distinctly unimpressed:

"It was, even by his standards, an unusually rambling speech, alternately folksy and haranguing, most of it about the virtues of tax cuts and private health care. A half-hour passed--and the cable news channels cut away to an incident at the Oakland airport a couple of times--before he came to the main point, the reason they were carrying the speech live: to articulate his latest views on Iraq.

"And the startling thing about these views is that they haven't changed a bit.

"This is the case, despite the serious Republican defections--and the urgings by the most senior of these Republicans that the president shift his strategy and draw down some U.S. troops or see Congress cut off funds and end the war altogether.

"This is the case, despite news of a forthcoming administration report--to be delivered to Congress this week--that concludes the Iraqi government has met none of the political or security 'benchmarks' that Bush himself once urged them to meet in exchange for continued U.S. support.

"This is the case, despite the fact that nearly everyone around him is at least very skeptical of the surge's prospects. (One must assume that Dick Cheney is an exception, and perhaps the only exception necessary.)

"Unlike earlier talks of this sort, in which Bush's speechwriters at least assembled some stray facts and passed them off as evidence of progress, this speech--which seemed entirely improvised--was founded on nothing but faith."

But Power Line's John Hinderaker applauds the president's stance:

"I've been struck many times over the past several years by how clear and candid President Bush is in describing and explaining his policies. He said again that he welcomes 'a good, honest debate' about the war. Unfortunately, however, there is no honest debate going on. Most Democrats want to lose in Iraq so they can blame the Republicans and gain political advantage. Some Republicans care less about whether we win or lose than about their re-election next year. Neither group is in a position to tell the American people, honestly, what it wants. So President Bush is pretty much alone as a voice of reason and candor on the war."

I'm still stunned by the politicization described by the former surgeon general, who says he was required to mention Bush three times on every page of his speeches. TPM's Spencer Ackerman can hardly believe it:

"Admit it: when George W. Bush is gone, you're going to miss him. Who else would politicize the surgeon general's office? Who else would embed junk science into a mostly ceremonial post? And who else could turn a congressional hearing into strengthening that sinecure into an exploration of political corruption?

"Richard H. Carmona, U.S. surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about the Bush-inflicted horrors he experienced during his tenure. Some of Carmona's experience will be familiar to administration-watchers, like a dismissal of global warming as 'a liberal cause' by senior officials. Health and Human Services cronies struck references to stem-cell research from his speeches while instructing him to mention President Bush three times on every page. Come election time, the nation's doctor was to prescribe voting for the GOP ticket . . .

"Carmona is hardly the first, or even the fifteenth example of the administration's politically motivated suppression of science. For instance, James Hansen, muzzled from speaking about climate change. Susan Wood, restricted from approving an over-the-counter contraceptive."

Even the conservative Captain Ed cannot abide this:

"There is one facet of the Bush Presidency that historians will universally and roundly condemn; the politicization of governance that, top to bottom, has interfered with many of the vital functions we expect the government to carry out . . .

"Just because the Surgeon General is nominally a political appointment in that the post is filled by someone nominated by the President doesn't mean that the job itself should be politicized. And to believe that reports and studies that would have an immediate impact on the health of American citizens should be held hostage to some myopic political views promoted by the White House is outrageous."

Finally, another president agonizing about his image:

"President Nixon and his 1972 re-election campaign tried to tie Democrats to the mob, gay liberation and even slavery, according to newly released papers and tapes betraying bare-knuckle tactics from the dawn of the Watergate scandal.

"Still, even as Nixon's lieutenants explored every avenue for defeating Democrat George McGovern and nullifying critics of all stripes -- 'hit them' was a favorite phrase -- the president brooded over his reputation as a hard man whose gentle side was not being seen by the public. Nixon called that side of him 'the whole warmth business.'

"In 1970, he wrote an 11-page, single-spaced memo detailing his acts of kindness to staff and strangers and expressing regret that he was getting no credit for being 'nicey-nice.' "

Maybe the whole warmth business was undermined by the whole enemies list business.