Crack That Whip!

I’m usually not a big fan of irrelevant gossip, which means I don’t watch much Fox News or Oprah, but the story that was first reported by the Daily Caller this morning is just too good not to demand my prurient interest. Just for information, the Daily Caller is a website (dailycaller.com) recently founded by Tucker Carlson, he of the bowtie fame, which focuses on Washington related political news. I was not even aware of the Daily Caller’s existence prior to about 5:00 this afternoon, so I don’t really know what they are all about, but Tucker Carlson is not generally known for his liberal sentiments.

Anyway, the Daily Caller published a report about spending by the Republican National Committee (RNC) in the first quarter of this year. Now, the RNC is a private organization which receives their funding from the voluntary contributions of people concerned about things like what language you speak in your grocery store and who you have sex with, and they can spend their money on whatever strikes their fancy as far as I am concerned, but because of their political function they are required to file Federal disclosure reports for contributions and expenses on a quarterly basis. The report obtained by the Daily Caller shows thousands of dollars of Republican contributor’s money being spent on private jets and luxury hotels. The leadership at the RNC has been so successful promoting the Republican brand recently, I can understand why they should be rewarded with up-scale travel and lodging. What the RNC itself says is that they need to present the appropriate image to high-end donors in order to attract their donations. I certainly know that I would be inclined to fork over my hard-earned dough if I knew that the people hassling me for it would spend a lot of it on caviar and masseuses for themselves, but I’m a pretty understanding fellow. $43,000 for a RNC trip to Hawaii (not including airfare) makes complete sense to me, as Hawaii is known to be a Republican stronghold. All in all, the RNC has spent just under $110 million dollars during the tenure of its impressive Chairman, Michael Steele. How much of this was spent on wardrobe is unknown.

However, the most interesting expense reported was $1,946.25 paid out at the Voyeur West Hollywood, a “bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex”. I am hardly in a position to be critical of this type of recreation and I applaud the Republicans for being so open minded. Hopefully none of the simulated lesbians were in any simulated marriages. Actually, the money could have been for milk and cookies for all I know, and the RNC personnel spending it might have been there for Bible study with the Sapphic dominatrixes, but the report doesn’t go into that type of detail. Certainly the staunchly family-values oriented Republicans would not be providing kinky entertainment to naughty potential donors, since they probably wouldn’t want money from people like that.

Who knows what sort of stuff the Democratic National Committee spends its money on, but the Daily Caller isn’t making an issue of it, so I am presuming that, at least for the first quarter of 2010, it wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy. This is really the point that strikes me; the Democratic Party is full of gays and alcoholics and people who have filed bankruptcy and may even have used some sort of illegal drugs at some point; in other words, the Democratic Party is more like a group of actual Americans you might meet at a truck stop off the Interstate in Maryland, and the Republican Party is more like what you might see if the Stepford Wives had 41 seats in the Senate. Actually the whole thing really makes sense; keeping lesbians in bondage is certainly at least part of the Republican fantasy life.