More from the annals of "You can’t make it up"
When you've been
around as long as I have, you have seen a scandal or two.
My favorite was the time in 1974, that Wilbur Mills, the powerful Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was stopped for driving with his lights off at 2 a.m.
As police approached his car, a woman passenger later identified as Fannie Foxe, a stripteaser known as the Argentine Firecracker, jumped out of the car and into the Washington Tidal Basin.
Mills jumped in after her and lost his glasses.
Remarkably he was re-elected! But when he held a news conference at a Boston burlesque house where the Firecracker was performing, it proved too much and he resigned.
For all its charm, I'm moving that story aside and topping my "You Can't Make It Up" list with the New Jersey fiasco.
In no way am I playing down the inconveniences forced on innocent taxpayers there. But I did like a letter to the editor of the Washington Post from a man named Per Kurowski who wrote:
"In case anyone needs reminding, many of us come from countries where it would be pure bliss to have political malfeasance on the level of creating traffic jams deemed newsworthy. Just think of the payback one nephew recently provided his uncle."
Come to think of it, the North Koreans probably don't even have traffic bulletins.
