The Practicing Progressive

I do believe Dan Brown is on to something.

The best-selling author of “Angels and Demons”, “The Da Vinci Code” and the just released, (Already over 2 million copies sold!!!), “The Lost Symbol” has found great success in revealing fictional conspiracies involving non-fictional organizations. “Angels and Demons” went after the secret, allegedly, Catholic society, The Illuminati and “Da Vinci” went after the secret, assuredly, Catholic society, Opus Dei, while “Lost” takes on the decidedly non-Catholic, Freemasons. And while I haven’t read this latest adventure starring the Harvard symbologist, Dr. Robert Langdon, the reviews I’ve read indicate it is as fast paced and filled with heart-stopping, page-turning excitement as his other two.

Since my own royalties are measured in mills rather than millions, I have taken note of this industrious author’s clever and very marketable ability to root out the surreptitious activities of one revered organization after another. Why, I wondered, if it worked so well for this former teacher turned world-renowned novelist, wouldn’t it work for a former pastor turned occasionally irritating local columnist?!!!

My hard-to-put-down, incredibly-conspiratorial, shockingly revelatory, story begins with a little item from the Los Angeles Times a few days back that reported on the mutterings of a certain California Assemblyman named Mike Duvall who was caught bragging to a fellow Assemblyman about his more than friendly relationship with a female lobbyist: "So I am getting into spanking her," Duvall told his colleague, during a break at a hearing in Sacramento. Unfortunately for Assemblyman Duvall, a stalwart advocate of family values, a microphone picked up the entire unsavory conversation. "Yeah, I like it. . . . She goes, 'I know you like spanking me.' I said, 'Yeah, that's 'cause you're such a bad girl.' "

Duvall resigned from office a few days later. One more politician caught not exactly with his pants down but close enough so he would have some serious explaining to do when he got home. And it is his home that provides the first real clue in my already riveting tale!!! You see, Duvall is from that bastion of traditional family-values, Orange County!!! Here is the astounding thing: Orange County is only a 5 hour drive to that bastion of anything but traditional family values, Las Vegas!!! Las Vegas is the home of another family-values politician, Senator John Ensign who, a few months back, admitted to his own fling with the wife of his, once but not anymore, good friend!!!

Now if you drive due north from Las Vegas, and you don’t mind a thousand miles or so of unrelenting barrenness, you will eventually arrive in Boise, Idaho!!! Boise is the home of former family-values senator, Larry Craig, who, you may remember, was just another unknown politician preaching piousness until he got caught, you guessed it, in that proverbial pants-down position, trying to make more than a little contact with an undercover Minneapolis policeman.
This is where it gets really amazing!!! If you go east from Boise and then a little south but not too far, you will come to South Carolina, home of a family-values governor who isn’t living with his family any longer after his wife and the rest of the state found out about the state of their marriage.

I didn’t know this until I looked at my map but if you go straight north from Governor Sanford’s former home in Raleigh and don’t mind driving some two-lane roads, you will wind up in the keystone state of Pennsylvania!!! Pennsylvania is the home to former Congressman Don Sherwood, a politician strikingly similar to the aforementioned others in his commitment to family values. Now there are some who still deny that his involvement in an extra-marital affair was the cause of his electoral defeat in 2006 but I think the pieces to this shockingly suspenseful puzzle are really falling into place!!!

Do you get it yet? OK. Here’s my final clue that will unlock for you this incredibly astonishing secret. Pennsylvania butts (!!!) up to New York where one-time Governor Elliot Spitzer, (a Democrat!!!), did you-know-what with a you-know-who. Now, New York isn’t all that far from North Carolina, if you don’t count New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia, where John Edwards, (another Democrat!!!), behaved most unhusbandly to his wife Elizabeth. On the way, you may have passed through Washington D.C. where a former president (Yes! Yes! A Democrat!!!) claimed he didn’t do anything with a woman named Monica!!!

So there you have it!!! Connect the dots and you’ll get a kind of really neat geometric design but what’s more you’ll discover that each and every one of these politicians is… (Quick! Turn the page!!!)

… a member of the human race!!!