Quotes of the Morning: Wild, Wild West

“Vice President Dick Cheney helped raise an estimated $200,000 Monday for the campaign of Republican Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, who is considered one of the most vulnerable incumbents in Congress.
Musgrave, one of the original sponsors of a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, has proved ‘to be exactly the right person for the job,’ Cheney told a crowd about 200 people who paid $500 to $4,000 to attend the luncheon in downtown Denver.”
-Associated Press, May 9, 2005

“Man, I bet it’s uncomfortable around the house when Dick’s daughter comes over and finds out that dad’s been supporting gay-bashers again. And now for some more news on the same theme.”
-Skippy

“Over the last three months, Mayor James E. West of Spokane, one of the most powerful politicians in this state, carried on an online exchange - full of mutual compliments and often overtly sexual - with someone who said he was a 17-year-old high school senior. In time, the mayor, 54, revealed his identity, and said he had lots of sports memorabilia he could give the boy from his office. As they prepared to meet for the first time, the mayor professed his nervousness, and his caution.
‘Guys like you don't come along very often and I want it to last,’ the mayor wrote. ‘Am I crazy here?’
The two never met. The high school senior was a fiction, created by The Spokesman-Review, a Spokane newspaper, as part of a three-year investigation into whether Mayor West, a Republican, used his authority to have sex with boys and young men.”
-Associated Press

“Brad Crelia told The Spokesman-Review he was a 15-year-old student at Spokane's Lewis and Clark High School in 2001 when he was approached by West. West, then state Senate minority leader, had an office on the sixth floor of the building adjacent to the Local Planet, a weekly newspaper run by Crelia's parents, Connye Miller and Matt Spaur.
First, West asked Crelia out for coffee. The boy declined.
‘He then asked, ‘Would you want to do anything else?’ And that's what kind of weirded me out. It was definitely an awkward feeling, because I knew who he was. I don't know what his intentions were, but I definitely felt they were sexual,’ Crelia told the newspaper for an article published Saturday.”
-New York Times, May 8, 2005

“Ryan M. Oelrich, a 24-year-old openly gay man, said he was appointed by West to the city Human Rights Commission in April 2004, but didn't know at the time that West was the same man he'd met earlier in Gay.com using the screen aliases ‘Cobra82nd’ and ‘RightBi-Guy.’ Sometime after the appointment, Oelrich said he realized the mayor was the same person he'd been talking to online beginning in 2003. While on the commission, Oelrich said he rebuffed a series of sexually explicit online advances from West.
After appointing Oelrich to the policy-making Human Rights Commission, West ‘offered me $300 cash if I'd swim naked with him in my swimming pool,’ Oelrich said.
He declined West's offer as ‘being totally inappropriate,' said the 2004 graduate of Gonzaga University.
Oelrich, who heads a gay youth organization in Spokane, said he knows of five or six other young gay men in the city who received ‘inappropriate sexual advances’ from West. Of that group, two have been offered City Hall jobs by the mayor, Oelrich said.”
-Spokesman-Review, May 9, 2005

“Mayor West is the mayor of Spokane, Washington. He is, by all accounts, a gay pedophile. Now the first part I have no problem with (though apparently he does), but the second part? Ew.. Now, of course, is the part that you have been waiting for..”
-Skippy

“People in the state were shocked, in part because Mayor West is a staunch opponent of gay rights, and recently threatened to veto a measure passed by the City Council that would grant benefits to domestic partners. He once promoted a bill in the Legislature to outlaw teenage sex, gay or straight.”
-New York Times, May 8, 2005

“I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning. Let’s be perfectly clear.. Gay or straight, hitting on underage children is not allowed.. Dang it, if he was just a closeted gay gay-bashing Republican there would be ways around that for them. They call that way ‘Jeff Gannon’.”
-Skippy

"Three victims of Mayor Jim West's predatory and appalling behavior have already come forward and, based on what we know about pedophiles, it's almost certain there are many more. Some media reports quote people as saying this is a 'tragic' situation for West and imply that his conduct showed he was 'uncomfortable with his identity.' Nonsense. Pedophilic behavior is always wrong and has nothing do with sexual orientation. This man - whether he's straight, bisexual, or gay - deserves nothing but scorn. He needs to resign immediately."
-National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, May 9, 2005