The Vitter Truth

It appears that Senator David Vitter (R-LA), an admitted "sinner", has joined the list of prominent officials to be caught seeking female companionship with hookers and call-girl thanks to revelations coming from a woman charged with running a prostitution racket in our nations' capital. He was helped in his path to total transparency by slezebag publisher Larry Flynt of "Hustler" fame. Outed is the operative word here. Here's a bit of background and reaction from the main New Orleans newspaper:

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-8/118430998363640...

The fact that Senator Vitter, a big "family-values" guy, also allegedly used the services of a New Orleans area brothel in a few years ago, puts further blows into the 46-year old Senator's chances of being a national political figure. He endorsed Rudie Giuliani for President and one could be forgiven for thinking he might have thought himself a possible Vice-President. Liberal blogs and "Salon" magazines are apparently jumping all over this guy, just as conservative operatives went into a full Saturnalia of moral pleasure at the news of the Clinton /Lewinsky affair.

This whole revisit of "the politics of personal destruction" reminds me of a brief passage in Philip Roth's excellent novel The Human Stain . At one point, the narrator of the story--which deals with an small-town academic who loses his professorship for a seemingly "racist" remark --comments on that near-endless scandal in Washington in the late 1990's by stating that a giant banner should be placed across the East portico of the White House. The phrase "A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE!" would be emblazoned on the banner, to remind people that we do not elect perfect beings to high office.

Senator Vitter joins a group of powerful elected men caught with pants down, officials going back in my memory to the late Ways and Means Chairman, Rep. Wilbur Mills (D-Ohio), and his paramour, the stripper Fanny Fox, the lady who fell into the tide pool in front of the Washington Monument. I don't say the press shouldn't report these stories, but we have to maintain some perspective. We do elect human beings, yes, and ,no, they don't live up to their rhetoric very often.

So he's a sinner. Welcome to the rest of Washington's human race, Senator. Meet, among many others, President Clinton and all the others like Henry Hyde and Newt Gingrich and Robert Livingston. And we have theives like Dan Rostenkowski to go with the adulterers. Welcome, good sir, it's a list of men whose visages might have graced statues in a more discreet time. Now they are the stuff of late-night comedians to make light of and "the hypocrisy police" in the fourth estate to have fun with.