Winston Churchill scowling. Barack Obama sitting in the situation room. Rep. Blake Farenthold wearing an oversized rubber-ducky onesie, rubbing against a voluptuous and nameless underwear model. Some photographs capture the essence of a politician.
Eight years ago, the director and in-house photographer of Crush Modeling Agency, Tony Martinez, took the infamous pajama picture. A viral image of a creep, it defines the disgraced Texas Republican.
If Farenthold looks sleazy, it’s because Farenthold absolutely is sleazy. He looks exactly like the kind of congressman who would share his sexual fantasies with his office, who would talk about “wet dreams” while standing around the water cooler, and who would tell a female staffer she could “show her nipples whenever she wanted.” And so when Farenthold was unmasked as the politician hiding behind a $84,000 sexual harassment lawsuit, no one was surprised.
Farenthold announced his resignation effective Friday, after trying to fight off that inevitability for months. Everyone was relieved. Even the photographer. “Yeah, he should resign. He actually knows that I’m not a big fan of him politically speaking,” Martinez says over the phone Saturday. “He should resign.”
Now that he’s resigned from the House, Blake Farenthold’s an obvious candidate for White House director of communications. Or of course EPA head. pic.twitter.com/jSaOqm60uz
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 7, 2018
The photo was taken at a 2009 “Lingerie/Pajama Party Birthday Bash” thrown in honor of some local businessman. A flyer for the event says the dress code would be “strictly enforced,” and Farenthold, a married father of two daughters and an aspiring politician at the time, obliged. The now famous photo shows him sweating through blue pajamas, flashing his gap-toothed grin, and standing next to a lissome and ruddy bleach blonde in little clothing.
The half-naked woman wasn’t one of Martinez’s paid employees, but he still thinks the image won Farenthold the election. “I think Blake owes me a car for getting him elected,” he says. The picture definitely put Farenthold on the map. When incumbent Rep. Solomon Ortiz ran it in an ad, it went viral, and the rest is embarrassing history.
The Texas Democrat accused his “family values” opponent of hanging around “semi-nude women, one of whom was a minor, at a S&M party.” The photographer challenged Ortiz to a fistfight for presumably besmirching the honor of one of his so-called Crush Girls (he insists, he protects “my girls”). And Farenthold won by 799 votes.
A Tea Party wave elected the pervert politician in 2010 because they hated Democrats. Voters hated the Obama administration so much, they ignored the carousing and elected him thrice more in 2012, 2014, and 2016. That’s how the good old boy was allowed to come to Congress, an institution not unlike a college campus. That’s how he was allowed to turn a congressional office into a frat house. And that story ends like everyone expected because, big surprise, people who act sleazy in public are even more creepy in private.
The cliché about picture being worth a thousand words is true. Maybe next time, voters will avoid sexual deviants who don’t even care about hiding their sexual deviancy. Oh wait.
