Tales from the Trail

Eric Massa may soon vanish from the 24-7 news cycle. But the martyred Democrat, who says he fell from grace beneath the naked power of Satan’s spawn, could reappear some day soon as a burr under the saddles of his former congressional colleagues.

Republicans would like Massa to do for them what Mark Foley did for Democrats four years ago: provide a scourge with which to flail the other guy in a mid-term election year.

Foley, a Republican, resigned from Congress in September 2006 amid allegations that he sent sexually explicit emails and instant messages to male congressional pages. As such, he was among the denizens of that swamp of Republican corruption that Nancy Pelosi vowed to drain just before Democrats took control of Congress and gave her the speaker’s gavel.

Massa groped young men. Or didn’t, depending on which talk show footage you watch. Yet he says he was really forced out of office — not by the prospect of ethics charges — but by a White House infuriated by his unwillingness to back President Barack Obama’s healthcare plan.

Republicans tried to make hay of Massa’s conspiracy claims at first. But now House GOP leaders including John Boehner want to hear about what top Democrats didn’t do to Massa, particularly that swamp drainer from San Francisco who’s busy trying to make Obama’s healthcare reform a reality.

House Republican Eric Cantor thinks Congress should get to the bottom of Eric Massa’s bizarre tale of congressional nudity, satanic White House advisers, the groping of men (or not) and a congressional healthcare putsch by Democrats. But House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says the case is over. 
 

“I know that Steny joins me in hoping that the ethics committee in Congress looks into this adequately and can get to the bottom of all of this,” said Cantor, who appeared along with Hoyer on NBC’s Today show. ”The best place for this to be resolved is in the ethics committee and let’s get to the bottom of it.”

Otherwise, the whole thing seems to make Cantor want to hold his nose. And he is not alone. “I’m a little taken aback and stunned,” the Virginia lawmaker confided. “I don’t know the facts of this at all. I know that the American people are sickened.”

One day after resigning as a freshman congressman from Upstate New York, Eric Massa has found his 15 minutes of fame.

He landed on two major talk shows Tuesday — Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck and CNN’s Larry King — and they both wanted to know about allegations of sexual harrassment against male staffers.

Larry King asked him outright if he was gay. Massa, who is married, said it was an insult to every gay American that such a question was being asked in this day and age, and he refused to answer it.

Eric Massa was a little-known freshmen House Democrat only a month ago. Now he’s a political media sensation and a darling of Talk Radio/TV commentators capable of provoking the White House on healthcare reform.

Why the metamorphosis? Massa abruptly resigned from Congress, revealed he had an angry run-in with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel while the two were naked in a congressional gym shower, and now claims he was pushed out of office by the White House to keep him from voting against healthcare reform.

Oh, and he’s come to the conclusion that Emanuel is a “son of the devil’s spawn.”

Eric Massa knows all about awkward. The House Democrat, who leaves Congress today over a sexual harassment complaint by a male staffer, says he’s been up-close, personal and naked with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel — all at the same time.

Emanuel, Massa has decided, is a blood relative of Satan.

“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,” Massa says in a recording from his radio show posted to the RealClearPolitics Web site.

Massa’s close encounter with Emanuel occurred in the showers of a congressional gym about eight weeks after he entered Congress in January 2009.

Congressman Eric Massa (you would be forgiven for asking who?) posted on his web site one of the more “interesting” public resignation letters seen from a government official in some time.

The first-term Democrat from upstate New York starts by talking about a CAT scan that may or may not show scar tissue. In the next breath of his “open letter,” Massa mentions an ethics complaint in which a male staff member had felt “uncomfortable” due to statements made by the congressman.

Massa readily agrees that the ethics issue is “my fault and mine alone” because after 24 years in the Navy he did use language in his home and inner office that “might make a Chief Petty Officer feel uncomfortable.” (Defies the imagination because we have it on good authority that there is no language that would make most Navy Chief Petty Officers uncomfortable).