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In This Issue

• The Colombia Daily Spectador Front Page
• Spec: Cabinet Secretaries Disappointed With Their Careers
• Spec: Hugs for the Homeless Hopes To Be A Success
• Spec: Unrecommended Student Requests Letters of Recommendation
• Grilled Cheese Honored
• Elliot Spitzer = Sex Machine
• Here's a Fairy Tale That Cracks Us Up
• The Colombia Spec Op-Ed Section
• Spec Op-Ed: Juicy Campus is seriously the Best Thing Ev-ar!
• Spec Op-Ed: I Don't Care About Manhattanville
• Spec Op-Ed: Staff Editorial -- We Have Opinions
• Spec Op-Ed: Letters to the Editor
• They Watch
• The Staff of 23.6

Andres Vedova

Hot damn! What a good time to start reading the news again! NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s recent bombshell so clogged the national media circuit with a nice steaming wad of overprivileged spunk that, if only for a few days, we Holier-Than-Thou, Godfearing citizens forgot all about our voyeuristic obsession with Britney Spears or that ever growing wildfire of a presidential campaign between the first legitimaate black and female candidates. But lest a bi-polar tramp, a self-proclaimed bullet dodger, or a brother who hates whitey distract us from the real news, let’s get to the point.

Spitzer, the once hailed “Sheriff of Wall Street,” got nailed paying for some high-class snatch. Guess he didn’t have the luxury of a gullible 19-year-old intern to coerce into swallowing some state executive sword. I mean, hell, the easiest thing for a man in power to do is root some starry-eyed subordinate looking with bedroom eyes to get to the top. Apparently just not in New York. Four Gs and Amtrak fair to DC later, Spitzy stoically says I’m sorry and resigns. The only thing missing from the most disappointing media event of the year was a Bud Dwyer exit. Wouldn’t that have been precious.

But golly, government just isn’t wholesome anymore. We can’t trust our officials. Could we ever, though? The media has switched directions from protecting the images of those in high places to looking for any excuse to destroy them. Sexual escapades in politics are nothing new. Now they’re media fodder. Why cover the real news, and protect local concerns, when we can always get our trembling fingers to stroke our pens and ejaculate pages and pages of political smut? Its masturbation-byproxy, and it never felt so good.

Yet before the media’s change of heart, politicos were busier than ever making sweet, sweet love to ladies that weren’t their wives. The media let the big guys slide (literally and figuratively). Let’s take a look at some of the juicier stories of yore:

Ben Franklin toiled to spread the seed of the American Dream as a diplomat to France, and tried even harder to spread his own in the wilderness of Paris’ unshaven beauties. Two (of the many) Jeune-Filles Franklin is said to have wooed with his troll-like charms were Madam Brillon and Madame Helvetius. Brillon was a close forty years his junior at the time. What a guy!

Thomas Jefferson had a lil’ somethin’- somethin’ goin’ on with Sally Hemmings. That lil’ somethin’ was off spring. What’s even better is that Jeff erson OWNED Sally. You got it, kids, Sally Hemmings was a slave, and, surely, so were the two kids that resulted from Uncle Tom’s frolicking. Friends, meet the original “Jeffersons.”

Grover Cleveland endured many taunting late night telegram from his previously-concieved illegitimate son during his two terms in office. One can only speculate that they featured chants from the era such as “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha!” The son’s mother, Maria Halpin, was a quaint Buff alo widow, who, while nursing the little presidential bastard, turned to alcohol for solace and was subsequently institutionalized as a result of Cleve’s not marrying her. She disappeared following her release.

Warren G. Harding is the only President to father a love child (that we definitely know of) while in the White House. It’s a nice little tidbit of information that usually doesn’t make it into the history books. Nan Britton, the lucky lass’s mother, wrote a book which detailed the affair entitled, The President’s Daughter. A young Nan developed her crush on Harding while he was porking the married Carrie Fulton Phillips. He’s a true American hero.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t let the polio stop him. He still had at least one working leg while governor of New York and President of the United States. Seeing as his lovely womyn, Eleanor, cut him off after child number six, America’s longest- termed President made his own New Deal, involving himself in two known aff airs, and surely, countless others. The two lucky ladies we know about were Lucy Mercer and the aptly named Missy LeHand. On the day that he died, Lucy Mercer was with him, but only until Eleanor was set to arrive.

Eleanor Roosevelt apparently wasn’t as asexual as we all thought. Although still a mystery, a correspondence between this First Lady and Associated Press writer Lorena Hickock seems to open the legs of this supposed affair a little wider. “I can’t kiss you in person, so I kiss your picture!” and “I ache to hold you close!” are only some of the telling lines that leads us to believe that FDR wasn’t the only Roosevelt with an appetite for the poon.

John F. Kennedy fucked everything that moved. Arguably the best looking President in history, he certainly didn’t suffer from the Irish curse. Jesus Christ, he and his brother Bobby used to take turns scaling Marilyn Monroe’s Hollywood Hills. Back then, everyone knew and just thought it was awesome. We have to stop and think: Why do we care so much now?

I don’t have to talk about McGreevy, Paterson, Clinton, Ted Kennedy, or Dwight Eisenhower (should I keep going?) to illustrate that the world of politics has always been a glorified Cheating Hearts Club. It’s time to smack the whores off the front page and get back to real, gritty investigative reporting. We’ve got a recession on our hands, 4,000 dead in Iraq, a ground-breaking presidential election, and all we can bring ourselves to do is sniff someone else’s dirty drawers. The first ten pages of the newspaper have never been so goddamned immaterial. Its time to cap the Vaseline and start paying-thefuck- attention to what really matters.