Raw Story:
In the wake of the "Bondage-gate" scandal, in which the Republican National Committee paid for wealthy young GOP donors to attend a lesbian-themed Hollywood night club, attention is turning to the National Republican Congressional Committee's own use of Las Vegas burlesque clubs to hold its fundraisers.
"We do a Las Vegas fundraiser every year," NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions (R-AL) told a National Public Radio interviewer in July 2008. But when the interviewer described Forty Deuce, the venue for the most recent event, as a strip club, Sessions demurred.
"I've never seen that," he insisted. "It is what I would call a burlesque show where there's a woman who comes out and has a dress on... Uh, she never gets naked. There's no nudity."
Washington Post gossip columnist Mary Ann Akers quickly picked up on Sessions' admission. "We had never heard of a member of Congress holding a fundraiser at a Las Vegas burlesque nightclub... until now," she wrote. "And the culprit is card-carrying conservative Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.). The same Pete Sessions who scolded Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake for forcing 'their liberal values upon the rest of the country' after their infamous 2004 Super Bowl halftime striptease."
Sessions does appear to have been correct about the lack of nudity. According to the same NPR interview, the women at the club are dancers, not strippers, and they never disrobe further than their underwear. But the burlesque show still appears to fall somewhat short of Republican family values. "It's probably a good thing that Sessions was given his 'true blue' award from the Christian conservative Family Research Council and Focus on the Family organizations before holding his burlesque fundraiser," Akers concluded.
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