Opinion: The most vile politicians I've ever met
A few years ago, I was in a hotel bar in midtown Manhattan with a few Fox News colleagues when one eagle-eyed Democratic pundit spotted the married senator at a corner table. And he was sitting so close to an attractive young blonde woman, who wasn't his wife, that their foreheads were practically touching. After the bar closed, Murphy dashed for the elevators, leaving his lady friend to linger on a lobby couch, twiddling her thumbs and staring at her phone. Moments later, her face brightened with the light of her phone screen and she scurried into the elevators, too.
What happened next is anyone's guess. But… Murphy separated from his wife in November. So, what's worse than powerful men behaving badly – or so it seems? Powerful men behaving pathetically – and that's former Republican Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger in a nutshell. When he was in Congress, The Zinger chased multiple women I know at the Fox News Channel. I recently checked in with some of the gals that he squired and, to a lady, they rolled their eyes and described him as a brotastic ladder-climber desperate to have any famous Fox personality on his arm.
One woman remembered him being as boring as a bucket of sand, while another said he was self–obsessed and a bad kisser to boot. She couldn't wait to ghost him. It's ironic that a guy who was apparently so hellbent on fame that he tanked his reputation by betting it all on the Never-Trump bandwagon.
Next up, The Penguin, I mean New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler, who has been waddling around the halls of Congress since 1992. I ran into Jerry and his prickly wife during the COVID pandemic at my local NYC grocery store. They were both wearing 'Trump for Prison' buttons on their geriatric athleisure-wear – and he had a lump in his pants, like he was smuggling a kilo or a fully-loaded adult diaper.
So, I was relieved that when my daughter's class later visited DC, instead of dropping in on their local congressman, another representative stood in and hosted her class because, in this congressman's words, 'Your daughter and her classmates would vomit from the stench in Nadler's office.' Pee-ew! But not all politicians are shameless skirt chasers or stinky pepper pots. Some are just nerds.
An associate of mine who clerked with future Senator Ted Cruz in the office of Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist told me that young Ted was such an obsequious buffoon. Once, when Cruz heard that Justice Rehnquist was an avid squash player, he allegedly went out and bought a bunch of squash gear just to leave it in a bag outside Rehnquist's office. When the big man nearly tripped over it and excitedly asked, 'Who plays squash?!' apple-polisher Ted said, 'I do, sir!'
I hear he pulled the same trick with Trump, except he used a big bag of Big Macs. And here's one you may have heard before: I knew Joe Biden was losing his marbles way back in 2016. I ran into ol' Amtrak Joe in Manhattan's Penn Station in 2016 when he was Vice President. I was with fellow pundit Guy Benson and we had just been on the Fox News show Outnumbered, where we had talked about Biden.
'Mr Vice President, we were just talking about you on Fox News!' I shouted, excited to share that we had all bashed him just as I pulled him in for an uncomfortable selfie. But he tried to pull away. (How dare he!) 'Oh, I can only imagine. I don't even want to hear what you people over there said about me,' he mumbled, then shuffled and almost fell as his handlers interceded before I could twerk all up in his grill.
Finally, this one may surprise you – former comically bad NYC mayor Bill de Blasio is quite the delightful giant. I had recently dined with the 6-foot-5 electoral letdown and his girlfriend. I was expecting him to be as disastrous as his mayoral record. If you ask me, he governed like a shrill, left-wing ideologue who made a once-great city practically unlivable. Though mercifully, the topic didn't come up. He was funny, self-effacing, curious, a surprisingly good listener and an all-around good dude to spend a couple of hours with.
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