When the sun came up on Tuesday, ex-Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) was getting lots of attention as he blamed Democratic leaders for pushing him out of office because of his opposition to health care reform. By sundown, that storyline was hard to find, thanks to Massa himself.
"America, I'm gonna shoot straight with you," said Fox News talk host Glenn Beck after his interview with the former Congressman.
"I have wasted your time," Beck said flatly about his interview with Massa, which didn't exactly produce spine-tingling revelations about dark political machinations on health care.
Instead it made a lot of people shake their heads about the now ex-Congressman, as we learned more than we wanted to know about the former head of the Congressional Tickling Caucus.
Okay that's a joke. There is no Tickling Caucus, but it seems that tickling was involved when it came to Massa and one of his aides.
"I tickled him until he couldn't breathe," Massa told Beck about one incident at his 50th birthday.
The stories leaking out about Massa though will not inspire tickle-type-laughter, as they raised questions about groping of male aides and even interns.
"He acknowledges groping but denies it was sexual," was the lead-in to Massa's interview on Larry King.
"The best/worst televised political implosion ever?" wrote Chris Cilizza of the Washington Post.
Regardless of those reviews, the Massa story isn't going to go away without at least another round or two of questioning for top Democratic lawmakers in the House on what they knew of any misconduct involving staffers and especially interns.
We will certainly have more questions about when top Democrats found out about these matters and what they did about it.
One thing is for sure, no matter what you think of Massa, he has certainly kept his personal flameout going for a full week now, forcing Democrats off message on a number of fronts.
And it also gives some great material to late night TV, talk radio and just about anyone who stands around the water cooler at the office.
None of it though changed one basic fact - that is that Massa has the final call on whether to resign. No ethics investigation could ever move that fast.
If Massa wanted to stay in the House of Representatives, he could have - probably for months - before any ethics probe was final.
If sex with House of Representatives Pages in the early 1980's (back when I was a Page) wasn't enough to get two members expelled then, this tickling and groping probably would not have been enough for expulsion either.
When the sun came up on Tuesday, ex-Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) was getting lots of attention as he blamed Democratic leaders for pushing him out of office because of his opposition to health care reform. By sundown, that storyline was hard to find, thanks to Massa himself. "America, I'm gonna ...
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