The Washington Post reports new revelations about Rep. Eric Massa and his serial “grope-age” of staff and interns.

Just three months after Eric Massa was elected to Congress, his young male employees on Capitol Hill began complaining to supervisors that the lawmaker was making aggressive, sexual overtures toward them, according to new interviews and internal documents.

And the timeline seems to suggest that, contrary to public statements, Speaker Pelosi’s office was notified of issues pertaining to Massa’s questionable living arrangements last year.

Racalto said he called a former co-worker then in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to report remarks Massa had made about the sex life of a female staffer and discuss his concern about Massa living with male staffers.

(Massa Chief of Staff Joe) Racalto said he told the Pelosi aide that he would demand that Massa move out of the townhouse. Within a day, Racalto also sent out a staff memo instructing employees to stop the sexual talk, and report to him when that rule was broken.

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The stage is being set for another round of media examinations of “military culture” thanks to the ever weirder and more sordid saga of former Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY).   For the uninitiated or those awakening from a deep coma, Massa is the recently resigned congressman who is coming under microscopic media scrutiny for alleged acts of inappropriate behavior, some of it allegedly constituting sexual harassment. In recent days, the media have been drilling down into his 24-year career as a naval officer and in the process, some pretty disturbing tales have been percolating to the surface.

During Lawrence O’Donnell’s March 10 guest hosting gig on MSNBC’s Countdown show, he wondered aloud, “Who has done more damage to the image of the Navy, Congressman Massa or the Village People?” a reference to the disco group and its 1979 hit In the Navy.

The blog at The Economist goes even farther, stating that Massa’s tales of high jinks on the high seas  is entirely plausible:

Eric Massa, who is resigning from Congress over the possibility of a male staffer raising allegations of sexual harassment, has been explaining a series of jokes and misunderstandings over the years involving gay sex. Mr. Massa, who served in the Navy, says he’s a “salty old sailor.” I find this explanation entirely convincing. (more…)

Two clips, one comment.  Up to you to find the common thread.  First, Glenn Beck today:

Now, everybody’s favorite gangster movie. For copyright reasons, we can’t show you the scene in which Frankie Five Angels recants his testimony before the congressional committee, but you know the one we mean:

Compare, contrast, discuss, enjoy.

As everyone knows – everyone, that is, excepting those sophisticates who revere The New York Times – the former “paper of record” routinely plays fast and loose with news that bears on its ideological agenda, both by how (and whether) such stories are reported and, more subtly, by the emphasis they’re given (or not given) by their placement in the paper. Thus it was, for instance, most infamously, that Abu Grahaib was on the paper’s front page for an astonishing 32 straight days; while The Times somehow managed to report on Barack Obama’s dropping a certain Reverend Jeremiah Wright from the ceremony announcing his candidacy for the presidency without getting into the ugly details of precisely what it was that made his self-identified mentor so embarrassing. And, by the way, even then, burying the story on page 19.  The Wright story was there for the taking – he’d already been quoted in all his inflammatory viciousness by Rolling Stone – but, given The Times’s outsized influence with the lemmings of the mainstream media, the practical effect of its indulgent coverage was to bury for a full year the story that would  have surely derailed the freshman senator’s candidacy before it got started.

Then, again, sometimes ideologically difficult stories never get run at all. Which brings us to the curious case of Eric Massa, the upstate New York Democratic congressman who’s just resigned in the face of an ethics investigation for having allegedly harassed an aide. Last Thursday, the Times covered the story the same way as everyone else – okay, they stuck it on page 28, and they didn’t specify the aide was male, (except via a single reference to the aide as “him”), the same way males and females are interchangeable in their wedding announcements, but that sort of lunatic p.c. is pro forma. So, for that matter, was that Massa’s resignation seemed as much a concern for Timesmen David Halbfinger and Raymond Hernandez as for “blindsided Democratic leaders in Washington, who are already facing a brutal political climate as they try to defend the party’s majority in the midterm elections in November.”

Nor was the paper’s Saturday follow-up story on Massa’s mea culpa – “there is no doubt that this ethics issue is my fault and mine alone” –  problematic. Indeed, for Times readers that seemed the end of the story. As usual, they dwell in smug ignorance. (more…)

Don’t blame us: Renegade Democrat, health-care “no” vote and therefore soon-to-be-ex-Congressman from upstate New York Eric Massa said it:

Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil’s spawn. He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive.

Then there’s this piquant detail:

I am showering, naked as a jaybird, and here comes Rahm Emanuel, not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me.

TMI! The floor is now open for comments, observations and theories about the latest flap to involve the Ballerina and his amazing Dead Fish act. Just keep this in mind before you opine:

Chicago ain’t ready for reform.

Remember when Florida Congressman Mark Foley was outed for sexual misconduct with male pages in the House of Representatives in 2006? You’ll recall that the Democrats and the Old Media and the left were in some high dudgeon over the claim that Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert knew all about it before the scandal erupted and played the story endlessly for months on end.

Well, with Congressman Eric Massa from New York we have a Democrat also accused of sexual misconduct with a male staffer and we similarly find out that the Democratic leadership knew all about it. Will the Old Media make as much about Dem. Majority Leader Stenny Hoyer’s knowledge of Massa’s sexual misconduct as it did about the Republican leadership’s supposed knowledge of Foley’s?

Here is a small sampling of the treatment of the story by the New York Times as an example: (more…)