Career-ending scandal could be on the way for local GOPer

This is exactly the sort of scandal I've been longing to see for many years.

It would appear that a certain Republican member of the Kentucky House from northern Kentucky may be about to find himself at the center of a gay prostitution scandal - despite his own antigay fascism. The incident in question hasn't been confirmed, and I don't know all the details, so I'm not naming the lawmaker in this entry. But if it turns out to be true, that would be HIIIIIIIIII-LARIOUS!

It seems that the lawmaker - who is married - was caught hiring a male prostitute late Christmas night at a park not too far from his home. An undercover police car then followed the legislator home and confronted him. The lawmaker made a big scene in front of his house and appeared somewhat drug-addled. He reportedly sat down in a patio chair on his lawn, held a broom across his lap and claimed it was a rifle, and dared police to shoot him. Then he held the broom up and tried to challenge the officer to shoot it out of his hand. He launched a predictable "Do you know who I am?" speech and accused the officer of trying to "hump the goddamn phone pole."

This stupid standoff reportedly ended in the legislator's arrest on charges related to prostitution and terroristic threatening.

I believe the incident happened, but some of the details appear unlikely. For instance, the police following him home like that just seems somewhat weird. I would have thought they'd arrest him at the park. But maybe the cops recognized him and just didn't want a big scene there.

I also can't find any record of the arrest or pending charges. That's easy to explain though: Some right-wing officials probably got the whole case dropped. They seem to be doing that a lot lately if they know their cronies are in trouble.

Frankly, I wouldn't care if a politician is gay. This is 2016, and I'm a progressive. We should all be decades past this. I wouldn't even care very much if a politician hired a hooker. It's not a felony, and if they're willing to admit they made a mistake and vowed to learn from it, I'd let it go. But it's a whole different story when the politician is expressly antigay and builds his whole platform on trying to run everyone else's lives. The big problem isn't that he hired a gay prostitute, but that he's so hypocritical about it. The policy of the Far Right seems to be, "Do as we say, not as we do."

And you know damn well that if a solidly liberal public official was caught in something like this, it would be all over the papers by now. I can almost guarantee it. If it wasn't, it would somehow come out right at the time to inflict maximum political damage on their allies.

My job is to find facts, and if this scandal ends up being stretched out long enough to inflict serious damage on Kentucky Republicans, tough toilets.