Something to Cry About

The Valentine’s Day 2011 issue of the National Enquirer features a story alleging that GOP Speaker John Boehner has had adulterous dalliances “with at least two different women” in Washington.

Frankly, the article, which was leaked by the website Boy Culture, seems pretty thin. There’s a rehash of the story broken by Mike Stark, an openly liberal D.C. journalist, after Labor Day alleging that Boehner, 61, had had an ongoing affair with a printing industry lobbyist, Lisbeth Lyons, who appears to be in her late thirties or early forties.

The second woman mentioned in the Enquirer article is Leigh LaMora, a former press secretary to a Colorado Republican ex-congressman. While Boehner’s alleged dalliance with Lyons was recent, the tabloid says Boehner hooked up with LaMora at a party in 1997, when Boehner was 47 and LaMora was 32.

The speaker and his wife Debbie, a real estate agent in Ohio, have been married for 37 years and have two children. But there may be more here than a politician breaking a pledge to his wife. If the allegations are true, it appears Boehner’s affair smacks of corruption, according to Stark:

Wonder how well Boehner’s zero-tolerance pledge regarding corruption will hold up when it comes out that several hundred paper-making jobs were lost in his district and he refused to do anything about it at the same time he was sleeping with a lobbyist for the printing industry that was very happy to get their cheap paper from China.

The establishment media has been typically reluctant to report on this story. The New York Times was supposedly preparing an expose to be published before the midterms last year, according to a truly dubious source, the GOP-Fox propaganda daily, the New York Post, which reported in September that:

Insiders on Capitol Hill are buzzing about an upcoming New York Times exposé that will detail an alleged Boehner affair. Sources say the Times is looking for the right time to drop the story in October to sway the election, similar to how the Times reported during the 2008 presidential campaign on an alleged John McCain affair that supposedly had taken place many years before and that was flatly denied by the woman in question.

The New York Times never published results of its investigation, if there ever was one.

In January, the New Yorker, which is generally known as a liberal bastion, published a puff piece on Boehner by Republican Peter Boyer, in which Boyer not only failed to mention allegations about Boehner’s alleged affair with Lyons, he also rewrote the history of events leading up to the forced resignation of GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1998. According to Boyer, Gingrich was forced out because younger House Republican colleagues, including Boehner, did not like Gingrich’s constant prattling about the future. Boyer spuriously omitted the real reason, which was that Gingrich had become a liability to Republicans’ control of the House because he had been engaged in an affair with a staffer — his current wife, Callista Bisek — at the same time he had driven the impeachment of Pres. Bill Clinton because Clinton had committed perjury about his affair with a staffer, Monica Lewinsky, in a civil-lawsuit deposition.

So where does Boehner rank on the GOP-adultery hypocrisy meter? Mike Stark recalls that:

It was Minority Leader John Boehner … who told abstinence education advocate Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) that he had to resign from Congress after having an affair with a staffer. It was also Boehner that told members of his caucus that they had to stop using the “party house” to entertain young Republican female lobbyists.

To his credit, Boehner has never made it a habit to pontificate about “family values,” but his voting record on marriage-related social and civil-rights issues is what you might expect from an Ohio good ol’ boy and a Republican politician on the make:

• Voted NO on prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation. (Nov 2007)
• Voted YES on Constitutionally defining marriage as one-man-one-woman. (Jul 2006)
• Voted YES on Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage. (Sep 2004)
• Voted YES on banning gay adoptions in DC. (Jul 1999)
• Rated 7% by the ACLU, indicating an anti-civil rights voting record. (Dec 2002)
• Rated 0% by the HRC, indicating an anti-gay-rights stance. (Dec 2006)

So what comes next? Back in the Clinton era, if the U.S. Treasury could have collected a dollar every time a Republican used the phrase “where there’s smoke there’s fire” in their six year hunt to bring down the president and first lady, there would be no deficit now, and yet Republicans wasted hundreds of hours on hearings and investigations and nearly $100 million taxpayers’ dollars on Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and even Socks-the-Cat-gate before they finally hit paydirt with the Lewinsky matter. On the other hand, the National Enquirer, which scored a coup in its expose of John Edwards’ extramarital affair, certainly has credibility when it comes to rooting out philandering pols.

Right now, however, the question buzzing behind-the-scenes in the capitol is who is feeding information about the alleged affairs to the media.

The number one suspect is Tea Partyist and Christian extremist Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, but last week Stark denied Pence was his source, with a caveat:

[Pence] looked down, pursed his lips and shook his head as if to deny. Most people I know would have taken that as a flat denial, and I’m certain that’s how it was intended.

But here’s another secret… In law school, when you are taking depositions, you are taught that the answers to “yes or no” questions must be spoken … Anyway, Washington has definitely jaded me. I have extreme difficulty accepting anything our elected leaders say as gospel; I’m a natural (extreme) skeptic. So all I can do is report what happened and let y’all make up your own mind.

Earlier this month, Pence announced he is retiring from Congress to run for governor back in his home state.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars suggests it might be one of the “Young Guns” in the House leadership:

From my perspective, this has the signs of a classic hit. We already know the House ideologues weren’t thrilled about having Boehner as Speaker — as conservative as he is, he looks like a flaming liberal compared to some of the new cowboys. It may not have been Pence, but I’ll bet it was coordinated with him — and the nakedly ambitious Eric Cantor, whose relationship with Boehner could be described as “tense.”

One uncertainty about Boehner’s alleged philandering, if it’s true, is how widely known it is among Beltway insiders, including reporters. In its profile of Boehner last fall, what made the New Yorker’s glaring omission of the role Gingrich’s affair played in his ouster in 1998 a journalistic sin was that Gingrich’s affair was common knowledge among journalists and pols in the capitol as early as 1995.

In other words, the DC establishment was complicit in keeping Speaker Gingrich’s affair secret for four years — the affair was not publicly revealed until 1999, after Gingrich was forced out. If past is prologue then there could well be a similar conspiracy of silence among Beltway insiders today about the current speaker’s sex life.