A lot of crazy sex stories lately:

1. Last January, it came out that the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, had gotten the female dental hygenist who fixed his teeth (after they were chipped by a man punching him through his car window at a rally) to throw him a sex party. The girls, who were dressed as cops and nurses, gave him a lesbian show, and the 74-year-old managed to convince the dental hygenist to join the party. But that’s just par for the course for Berlusconi.

2. Ted Haggard came back to the spotlight last January to say: “I think that probably, if I were 21 in this society, I would identify myself as a bisexual.” Good to know. He also wanted to clear up that he didn’t have “sex sex” with the male prostitute he bought drugs for; he just got a hand job. He also says he would have come out with all of this earlier but was afraid of becoming konwn as the “masturbation guy.”

3. Around the same time it came out that a Vatican department advised Ireland’s Catholic bishops in 1997 not to report priests suspected of child abuse to the police

4. An Indonesian Member of Parliament who helped pass a tough anti-pornography law has resigned after being caught watching sexually explicit videos on his computer during a parliamentary debate.

5. Wisconsin state Republican Senator Randy Hopper, while claiming to still live with his wife, was actually living outside the district he represents with a much younger 25-year-old mistress since May 2010. Hopper claimed to maintain an “apartment” in the district but the address he gave turned out to be $600,000 home owned by a high-ranking employee of his media company. She was then given a job with Governor Scott Walker’s administration with a 35% wage increase, despite the fact the administration was cutting wages and that she never actually turned in a job application. He filed for divorce last August.

6. Republican House Representative Christopher Lee resigned last April after a report emerged that he had tried to pick up a woman on Craigslist. He sent a bare-chested photo of himself to the woman, lying about his age, his marriage status, and his occupation (claiming he was a lobbyist), but for some strange reason used his real name.

7. New information also came out regarding the Ensign sex scandal. In November 2007, the Hamptons, old high school friends of Republican Senator John Ensign who worked for him and lived in the same gated community, had their house robbed. The robbery greatly shook up Cynthia Hampton, so Ensign convinced them both to move in with him, and soon afterwards began an affair with Cynthia. According to her, she at first asked if he had lost his mind, to which he said he had, then after being “very persistent and relentless,” and continuously calling, and never taking no for an answer, she gave in to him. Hampton, says the report, “was in a vulnerable emotional state and a mess at the time Senator Ensign was pursuing her, as her home had been burglarized, a family member was undergoing medical treatment, and Mr. Hampton’s travel schedule back and forth to Washington gave them little time to be together.”

Doug Hampton found out about it next month when he saw a message from Ensign come to his wife’s cell phone saying “How wonderful it is. … Scared, but excited,” just as Ensign was coming to the airport where they were to pick up the Hampton’s son. When Ensign got there, Hampton jumped out of the chased him. Cynthia stayed in the airport for hours and took a taxi home. The two families had a discussion on Christmas Eve, Ensign wept and promised to end the affair, and the two celebrated Christmas together.

The affair started again a month later and when Hampton found out again by seeing a call going to Cynthia on Ensign’s cell phone labelled “Aunt Judy,” he asked Ensign’s long-time spiritual adviser Tim Coe to help end the affair. Coe brought in his brother, as well as Marty Sherman (the founder of the secretive Fellowship Foundation) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK). The group confronted Ensign about the affair at the infamous C Street house on Valentine’s Day, and Coburn convinced Hampton to forgive his wife again, but the affair continued. At one point, Coe saw both cars pakred at a hotel near their community and called Ensign saying, “I know exactly where you are. I know exactly what you are doing. Put your pants on and go home.” But Ensign replied, “I can’t. I love her.” The Hamptons went to Ensign to talk about the affair the next day, but he told them he was in love with Cynthia and wanted to marry her and that Doug couldn’t work for him anymore, after which Ensign called his wife to tell her about his feelings and moved out of the family home to live with his parents.

Mrs. Hampton and Ensign continued their affair, with the senator buying two new cell phones to allow them to talk without being detected, but Ensign’s wife found out about the phones and they were disconnected. Cynthia asked him to stop contacing her and other congressmen confronted Ensign, but the affair continued until Mrs. Hampton sent him an email in August 2008 imploring him to stop contacting her because her life and family is in shambles.

Ensign also had his parents pay the Hamptons $96,000, which Hampton admits was “severance,” even though severance pay is illegal. Ensign tried to claim his parents paid them this money “out of concern of the well-being of the longtime family friends during a difficult time,” but once the Ethics Committee started investigating, Ensign’s parents turned on their son and denied giving it.

At this point I should probably mention that Ensign is a Pentacostal and a member of the Promise Keepers. This is what Ensign had to say in one of his own speeches against gay marriage:

Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded. For those who say that the Constitution is so sacred that we cannot or should not adopt the Federal Marriage Amendment, I would simply point out that marriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation.

So does homosexuality…. and divorce and remarriage, which is what Ensign was planning.

Ensign is also a member of the Christian evangelical group, “The Family,” located at the tax-payer-funded C Street House. The same C Street House where Governor Mark Sanford brought his mistress to have sex with so that his “Christan friends” there could help cover it up. The same C Street House where Mississippi Represntative Chip Pickering had sex with his mistress according to the “Alienation of Affection” lawsuit brought on by Pickering’s now x-wife and mother of his five sons against his girlfriend. The same C Street House connected to Laurent Gbagbo, the Christian African president who planned to enact Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” law (reportedly, the death penalty has been removed in subsequent negotiations). Senator Inhofe was so upset that Gbagdo lost in the last UN-sanctioned election against his Muslim opponent, he actually called on Hillary Clinton to demand a new election!

Hampton, now bitter at the Evangelical group, said that the people at C Street “think the consequences don’t apply. Those need to be dealt with differently. Because of the responsibility. Because of pressure. Because of the work that needs to be done… This is about preserving John, preserving the Republican party, this is about preserving C Street. These men care about themselves and their own political careers, period.”

8. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Director of the IMF and member of the French Socialist Party was arrested while boarding a New York flight back to Paris on charges he had forced the African American maid at his hotel to perform oral sex on him and then attempted to rape her. His lawyer has indicated he is going to allege the sex was consensual, but he apparently has a history of sexual aggression since in February 2007, a French journalist alleged that he had sexually assaulted her in 2002 during the course of an interview for a book, saying: “It ended really badly. We ended up fighting. It finished really violently … I said the word ‘rape’ to scare him but it didn’t seem to scare him much … “ Two weeks after the arrest, two female staff members brought charges against a junior minister, one of whom said the case encouraged her to come forward. Prosecutors also opened an inquiry after former education Minister Luc Ferry accused another unnamed ex-minister of being engaged in acts of pedophilia in Morocco. Following the Strauss-Kahn affair, Sunday’s Journal du Dimanche published an outpouring of allegations by female members of parliament about crude remarks by male legislators to their women colleagues and staff under the headline: “Routine sexism in parliament.” Ben Stein defended Strauss-Kahn by saying he never heard of an economist committing rape. Jon Stewart listed a litany of economists who had been charged with sexual assault and concluded that by Stein’s logic, economists are the “rape-ist profession going.”

9. There’s also Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose father-of-the-year award for hiding a now 13-year-old son makes John Edwards’ disowning his newborn daughter look almost whimsically slimy.

10. Anthony Weiner, Democratic Representative of New York, has been doing a lot of sexting and phone sex over the years, but he screwed up when he sent a picture of his hardon on Twitter. Someone who hated Weiner was able to download the pic before Weiner deleted it, and it eventually got sent to Brietbart. At first he tried to claim he was hacked and the pic was meant as a slight against his name. Jon Stewart, who happens to be an old college buddy of his, waxed conflicted over bashing an old friend and taking advantage of a golden comedic moment, but jokingly concluded that the boner was way too large to be his. When Weiner tried to dodge answering whether the pic was of him, he tried to claim that it didn’t look familiar but he didn’t want to say outright that it wasn’t him because…. Someone might have altered another Weiner pic. This obviously made it worse because it insinuated there are so many boner pics of him, he couldn’t even recognize it. Weiner even went on Rachael Maddow, saying: “Stuff gets manipulated. Maybe it started out as being a photograph of mine” that had been “taken out of context.” Cue laugh track. He even tried to cite Jon Stewart’s “that bulge is too large to be his dick” joke for support, as if Jon Stewart had a better idea of what his penis looked like than he did!

Republicans like Ann Coulter mocked him for getting a lawyer without involving the police. Bill O’Reilly tried to claim the possibility that the boner pic came from terrorists was too great to chance and that it was Weiner’s patriotic duty to involve the police. Brietbart and liberal bloggers began to tangle over the validity of the pics until finally, after Brietbart was able to get his hands on some other – far more embarrassing – pics, as well as some steamy sex-chat sessions, Weiner came out and admitted he was the one who sent the pic. Brietbart promised not to publish the new photos, saying “it’s better for him and his family.” Naturally, that lasted a day. He showed them to the radio jocks Opie and Anthony using his cell phone; the radio hosts took a pic of the unrestrained boner and posted it online.

If Weiner had just been honest in the first place, then the general populace would never have been able to see his dick and read these hilarious chats with Las Vegas blackjack dealer, Lisa Weiss:

Lisa Weiss: “To get us in the mood, first we watch back-to-back episodes of ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘Colbert Report’, Or if this is not your thing, we can just get drunk and have mad, passionate sex!”

Anthony Weiner: “Why choose? With me behind you can’t we both watch ‘Daily Show’?”

Lisa Weiss: “..couldn’t love you more than when you were on Bill Maher…”

Anthony Weiner: “Maybe Maher will let me do you on his desk…”

This turned out to be great schadenfreude for Matt Taibbi since Weiner led a media campaign against him, calling on everyone to trash their copy of the New York Press because Taibbi had written a tragically unfunny article making fun of the death of Pope John Paul. At the time, Taibbi thought it was an “odd take on the First Amendment, coming from an ostensibly left-leaning New York liberal Democrat,” but then Weiner called the police on a WCBS reporter just for asking him questions! “I love how all of these ACLU all-stars turn into little Pinochets the instant the heat on their beloved careers moves up past room temperature,” he writes. Taibbi was also “fascinated by the editorials blaming the media for their unjust treatment of Weiner – like it’s none of our business whether or not this guy is sending pictures of his boner to young women around the country.”

In contrast, Glenn Greenwald claimed just that journalists condemning Weiner like Megan McArdle, have “absolutely no idea what vows Weiner and his wife have made to each other, and she shouldn’t know, because it’s none of her business, despite her eagerness to learn about it and publicly condemn it.” Unlike other sex scandals, which typically have some pretense on politics, either because of illegal activity or gross hypocrisy, there is nothing to tie it to news other than pure muckraking. And although Greenwald has a point, it seems to me if only sex scandals based on hypocrisy were reported, it would generally be perceived as bias against Republicans. But as Greenwald points out, he’s not a fan of Weiner since the congressman is rabidly pro-Israel (even criticizing Obama stance), despite the fact that his pregnant wife is an Arab Muslim.

Jon Stewart was actually tougher on Weiner than Greenwald, saying that if Weiner was picking up women with boner pics, he had to go, but if he was just afraid to admit that he had pictures of his weiner on the computer, then, “welcome to the club.” Taibbi was even tougher, saying , “The truth is, if you’re worth the congressional office at all, your automatic answer to any question about pictures like that has to be, “No, that can’t be me in that picture, because I’m a United States Congressman and I don’t take digital pictures of my hard-ons.” Bill Maher went even further, treating the practice like a taboo, saying it was even creepier to have pictures like that on his hard drive than it was to actually send them, before lamenting that Weiner got all of the scandal with none of the sex. My own feelings can best be described by the line given by Bryan Lambert at YouAreDumb.org: “I don’t give a shit that he lied. I don’t give a shit that he Tweeted cock pictures to ladies on the Internet… But I cannot forgive him for letting Andrew Breitbart get something right for the first time in his life.”

11. John Edwards has been charged with using campaign money to pay for the concealment and generous lifestyle of his mistress, Rielle Hunter, and unborn child. Edwards now admits that he financed her with generous funds given by banker heir, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, an elderly philanthropist who agreed to pay for all of John Edwards’ haircuts personally when the media started hammering him on his $400 haircuts, but denies this was improper because the money was used for personal reasons, not political ones. Money was also provided for Andrew Young, the married staffer who originally took the bullet for Edwards and claimed he had knocked up Hunter. Edwards’ campaign finance chairman, Fred Baron, claimed that he had been providing financial assistance to both Hunter and Young “without Edwards’ knowledge.”

Bonus: If you need an inspiring story to wash the sex out, here’s a story about two long lost siblings that found each other through an internet dating service after 30 years. They say they figured it out before they…

Although Wiener’s sex scandal is by far the least offensive, it has gotten the most press, which goes to show that if you’re a politician involved in a sex scandal, and your name is synonymous with a sexual organ, do not allow Twitter to be involved with your sex life in any way.