Keep It Zipped, OK?

It's been said that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. There must be some truth to that, or else I’m at a loss to explain why Henry Kissinger kept showing up at all those social events in the 70s with gorgeous women on his arm. It certainly appears that the halls of power, both in Washington DC and in state capitols, seem to cause a disproportionately high number of zipper failures.

So I have a message I’d like to send out to all Republican office-holders, and I really think that I speak for a majority of Republicans when I say this:

If you are not single, and you are porking an intern or campaign worker, or indeed anyone other than your wife; if you have a financial scandal or a drug problem that you’ve been concealing; if you like to play footsie in public rest rooms; in fact, if there’s anything going on that you would feel embarrassed about standing in front of the TV cameras and explaining to your constituents, then please do us all a favor: Come clean about it sometime in the next six months, so we can cross you off our list and figure out who we’re going to run against you in the next Republican primary.

If, for some reason, you are incapable of doing this, then please consider changing your party affiliation. Democrats apparently are much more tolerant about this kind of behavior (see Barney Frank, William Jefferson, Ted Kennedy, Marion Barry, or Roland Burris). On this side of the aisle, however, we tend to have certain values that we expect our elected representatives to live up to as we sit here bitterly clinging to our guns and religion.

Frankly, we’re getting tired of this kind of crap screwing up our party’s chances of recapturing some Congressional seats in the 2010 election so we can put some brakes on Obama’s out-of-control spending frenzy and government power grab. We’re also getting tired of you giving the media an excuse to paint all of us with the “sanctimonious hypocrite” brush.

So just stop it. OK? Thanks.