Representative Chris Lee (R-N.Y.) resigned from the House of Representatives this week following an email flirtation with a woman he met after responding to an ad in the “Women Seeking Men” section of Craigslist. Sadly for him, the woman also knows how to use Google to look up people’s names, and how to send emails to Gawker.
See the Gawker reporter who broke the story.
And while it’s remarkable what 24 hours can do to damage the life of a politician with high libido, low impulse control and a camera phone, I want to – instead – look at one particular sentence that the Washington Post wrote in their article covering the incident:
“The familiar cycles of a Washington sex scandal were compressed into a blur of tweets and news alerts.”
One of the big political stories on this weekend before the election is the anonymously written piece in Gawker by a guy who said he had a “one-night stand” with Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell.
There’s a lot of outrage about it. There is definitely a mean, misogynistic streak in the story. “But there were signs that she wasn’t very experienced sexually,” the author wrote, along with details about her pubic hair. It seemed the story was out to hurt her personally and not just tell the facts of the evening in question. The story is written anonymously. The writer should have the courage to stand behind his story.
Christine O’Donnell is seeking federal office based in part on her self-generated, and carefully tended, image as a sexually chaste woman. She lies about who she is; she tells that lie in service of an attempt to impose her private sexual values on her fellow citizens; and she’s running for Senate. We thought information documenting that lie—that O’Donnell does not live a chaste life as she defines the word, and in fact hops into bed, naked and drunk, with men that she’s just met—was of interest to our readers.
If the story is true, O’Donnell is sexual hypocrite (not the first in politics) and Gawker badly executed the revelation (anonymous writer, mean-spirited and misogynistic).