Robert Menendez, Dominican Hookers, The Caller, and Oops

There is an abject ugliness and a craven depravity that accompanies all things right wing in this nation of ours. The republican party sold its soul to the Tea Party loons a few years back and now for the life of them they can't unhook that wagon. The GOP has lost the last two presidential elections and honestly has no one on tap who can handle Hillary Rodham Clinton in four years. In fact they might not even have a candidate who can defeat Jumpin' Joe Biden and if you've sunk that low you might as well fold your cards and call it a century.

This growing horror seems to have dawned on them a while back. Luckily for their candidates the conservative base and its media outlets have absolutely no moral underpinnings, so there is no depths to which they won't sink, there is no God awful scheme so criminal, so corrupt in nature they won't attempt. The ghettoizing of democratic voters when congress was redistricted started this long terrible slide into political strategies that aren't usually seen outside of third world dictatorships. The attempt to disenfranchise millions of minority and democratic voters last November was the latest and most public attempt to steal an election.

However there are other offenses both unseemly and lewd that have slipped under most of the nation's radar.

Enter New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Menendez. Last year two hookers in the Dominican Republic alleged he and a supporter, Solomon Melgen were paying them to have sex. In addition they accused Melgen of arraigning for underage prostitutes to be available for the Senator's pleasure.There were emails sent to the FBI and web cam interviews cut with the two women.

ABC was contacted, but unfortunately for the shadowy figures behind all this ABC still has a semblance of journalistic integrity. After checking the story and being unable to substantiate it, after watching the separate interviews and noting that the women were repeating each other nearly word for word, as if both were reading from the same script, they passed on the story.

Never fear though. Thanks to the World Wide Web there is now a whole dark underbelly of journalism which isn't nearly as picky and is unabashedly partisan when it comes to its version of the news.

The ultra right wing internet publication, The Caller picked up the story and ran with it. Menendez denied it. The right wing press howled about liberal bias when the major media honchos yawned and turned their backs on the scandal.

Menendez was re-elected because as try as they might internet news outlets still aren't the average American's main source of information. Well that and New Jersey voters have yet to fall for all that conservative bull shit floating around  twitterville and the like.

A few hours ago, The Washington Post obtained an affidavit signed by one of the women, Nexis de los Santos Santana. In it she swears she has never met Senator Robert Menendez, has never had sex with him, or procured anyone underage or otherwise for him to have sex with. She also says she was paid to do the interview that The Caller's story depended so heavily on.

Oops.

Yahoo News is reporting The Caller's executive director is "rebutting" the Post story. Slate goes even further, saying The Caller is claiming the woman who the Post is talking about isn't even the same one they interviewed. Well you have to say something. You know something along the lines of, "Those precincts in Cincinnati are still uncounted, Chris." Unfortunately for The Caller, the FBI dropped the whole thing a bit ago, because they couldn't find any evidence the sordid story was true either.

It is a sad fact of life that these things happen in the rock 'em sock 'em world of internet journalism every so often. Some days you not only can't beat them, but you can't even frame them either. To paraphrase a line from a movie, "Used to be when you bought a hooker, the whore stayed bought!"

The conservative movement, barring some unforeseen disaster, is dying. They aren't going to go quietly though. Look for more of this sort of crude propaganda, blackmail, perjury and legal shenanigans in the future.

As my old grandmother used to say, "Be careful of a scorpion, it can still sting you even after its dead."

Indeed.


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