The movement in the Republican party to sack its chairman over a $1,946 tab at a bondage bar in North Hollywood and $17,000 spent on private jets in one month reminds me of the time bandits raided the poker game in Swisher, Iowa and got away with $300. The players were no doubt torn between 1) minimizing their account of what was on the table, knowing their wives would see the story, and 2) appearing as pikers who were running a middle-of-the-night game for penny-ante stakes.
My lifelong experience as a Democrat is somewhat like that described by the late, great Molly Ivins, the Texas populist writer who before she died of breast cancer laid down quite a record of success in afflicting the rich and powerful with the humor-weapon.
- Molly Ivins
Ivins said she’d always thought the two parties had their own special genius, that history would show that Democrats were on the right side of social issues like civil rights, education, extending the promise of America to everybody—and the Republicans really did know more about managing money and running the institutions that powered the economy. Then she stood amazed as the economy unraveled, as the rich and powerful, embracing deregulation and the further growth of the “rights” of corporations to do as they will, seemed to tolerate, or actually ignore, the depredations all around them.
Now the Swisher-size proportions of these expense-account scandals in the GOP suggests just how frantic and confused the party must be. In a time when an Iowa clerk can embezzle half a million from a school district, the tab for the trip to Voyeur—its owner describes it as a place of “provocative revelry,” if you’re provoked to revelry by simulated lesbian sex acts—seems strangely puny. Even a wholesome West Hollywood family outing for an extended family, such as dinner and a show, could add up to two grand pretty fast. And our guess is that seventeen grand doesn’t begin to light the fires of a private jet for a trip of any length. We suggest these amounts are simply not real, or that if they are, they serve as strange examples of excess on a cheapskate budget.
I would say the whole thing would be great fodder for Molly if she were alive, but who can keep up with the rate at which these stories (a mistress in Argentina, or having your aide claim your mistress’ child) come at us?
Perhaps the bottom line for this one has to do with the Voyeur thing itself: somewhere in all this is a joke about whether the Republican revelers could have had real sex for their two grand.
