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Sex, Hypocrisy and the GOP |
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Next month, delegates attending the Republican Party convention in New York City will have the opportunity to get up close and personal with sex and sex workers. According to published reports, thousands of escorts, prostitutes, strippers and their posses are headed for New York City in time for the GOP's late-August/early-September convention in Madison Square Garden. "Agencies are flying in extra call girls from around the globe to meet the expected demand," the New York Daily News reported. A madam at a midtown Manhattan escort service told the newspaper that "girls" were coming in "from London, Seattle, California...for that week." With fees ranging from $300 to $1,000, it's no wonder that "everyone wants to work," the madam pointed out. Sex workers at conventions are nothing new. According to the New York Daily News, "At the 1992 Democratic convention in New York, bikini-clad female oil wrestlers dropped their tops on a flatbed truck in front of Madison Square Garden," and "at the 1996 Republican convention in San Diego, an escort service in search of delegate dollars changed its name to GOP: Good Old-Fashioned Pleasure." Workers in the world's oldest profession -- as some have called it -- don't discriminate on the basis of political affiliation, as Robyn Few, a $500-an-hour California call girl who now runs the advocacy group, Sex Workers Outreach Project, told the Daily News. No matter what you believe in, she says, "When you want to buy sex, you will." There is nothing new about sex, hypocrisy and the "family values" GOP. Remember Congressman Bob Livingston. Back in the mid-nineties, the Louisiana good old boy was poised to succeed the troubled Newt (I've never been in a marriage I couldn't get out of) Gingrich as Speaker of the House of Representatives, but he got waylaid by rumors of a major league sexual outing by Hustler magazine's Larry Flynt. Livingston "volunteered" to go into retirement. Well, he's not really retired; he became a top-notch Washington, D.C. lobbyist and has, I assume, been living happily ever after. And who can forget former Senate Majority Leader and failed presidential candidate Bob Dole? His post-defeat Viagra and Pepsi commercials from a few years back were memorable. Remember the one he did with Britney Spears? Here's how journalist Gene Lyons described it: "...the nubile Miss Spears -- Louisiana jailbait if we've ever seen it -- cavorts through a Pepsi warehouse with a team of male dancer rams, shaking her booty and pulling off clothing. Near the end, she strikes a pouty, provocative pose. "Cut to the Bobster sitting in front of his TV wearing a cardigan and patting a golden retriever. The dog woofs. 'Easy, boy,' says Viagra spokesman Dole with a rueful headshake. Maybe he's talking to the dog, maybe not. The girl is 18; Dole will be 80 on his next birthday." "When Dole ran for president in 1996," Lyons wrote, "he backed the same religious-right, 'abstinence-only' sex education nostrums Bush II recommends. Last week, The New York Times reported that some health experts believe the administration is suppressing a report from the surgeon general concluding that the most effective way to prevent teen pregnancies, abortions and sexually transmitted diseases is sex education containing frank, factual information while promoting 'responsible sexual behavior' in part by providing improved access to contraception. Can't have that. Got to have more Viagra, more Britney Spears. It's the American way."
Leave it to Jon Stewart, the host of the Comedy Channel's The Daily Show, to offer a theory as to why Cheney dropped the F-Bomb. According to Rich, Stewart hypothesized that "The vice president's demand that Senator Leahy commit an act of auto-eroticism, he reasoned, may be a signal that the Republicans are belatedly endorsing the gay-friendly ethos of the Clinton administration. 'I think it's them opening up their hearts to a different lifestyle,' Mr. Stewart said to Larry King." Then there's the recent case of Jack Ryan, the Republican senatorial candidate from Illinois, who was forced to drop out of the race after unsealed court documents revealed that the "family values" (his words) candidate had tried to force his former wife, actress Jeri Ryan, to engage in public sex at a New York club equipped with "cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling." Right wing columnist George Will, who had previously praised Ryan as being so squeaky clean that he made "the rest of us seem like moral slackers," was notably silent on the matter. Even the Monica Lewinsky scandal "seems so last century," right wing radio talk show host Laura Ingraham told Fox News recently. New century, new scandals. Same old GOP-ocrisy. |
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Whoopi Goldberg took the heat -- and lost an endorsement deal -- for comments she made at a John Kerry fund-raiser in New York City 
Dick Cheney let the expletive fly against Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy on the floor of the Senate