David vitter scandal diaper

American politician (born 1961)

Not to be confused with David Vetter.

"Senator Vitter" redirects here. For the South Dakota state senate member, see Drue Vitter.

David Bruce Vitter (born May 3, 1961) is an American politician who served as a United States Senator from Louisiana from 2005 to 2017. A member of the Republican Party, Vitter served in the Louisiana House of Representatives from 1992 to 1999 and in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1999 to 2005.

Vitter was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004. He was the first Republican to represent Louisiana in the Senate since the Reconstruction Era, and the first ever Republican to be popularly elected. In 2007, Vitter admitted to and apologized for past involvement with prostitution as part of a Washington, D.C. escort service which gained much notoriety and while not affecting his 2010 election, is believed to have played a part in his loss of the 2015 gubernatorial election. In 2010, Vitter won a second Senate term by defeating DemocraticU.S. RepresentativeCharlie Melançon.

Vitter unsuccessfully ran for governor to succeed the term-limitedBobby Jindal in the 2015 gubernatorial electio

Louisiana state Rep. John Bel Edwards soundly defeated David Vitter in yesterday’s gubernatorial election. Not only that, but in his concession speech, Vitter announced that he won’t seek reelection to the U.S. Senate next year. In other words, David Vitter is finished as a consequential politician, done in mainly by an eight year old prostitution scandal, but also by the immense unpopularity of the sitting Republican governor Bobby Jindal.

The Democratic Party is encouraged to see a flicker of life in the Deep South, although progressives need to keep things in perspective.

From the start of his run, Edwards knew any chance of victory hinged on distinguishing himself from the prevailing image of Democrats among voters. In meetings with small groups in rural parishes, he touted his opposition to abortion and strong support for gun ownership.

The devil is in the details when it comes to opposing abortion and supporting gun ownership. What kinds of bills would be radical enough that Edwards would veto them? Is there a different line than there would be for a Republican governor?

In some ways, it’s already a defeat if Democratic candidates feel that they need to concede the Republican position on these two very important issues in order to get a hearing on other policies. And there’s a price they have to pay when their party is more divided on issues than the Republicans. It waters down the message.

On the other hand, more than anything else, it was the Democrats’ ability to unite around one candidate while the Republicans were slugging it out in a nasty primary that brought them success. “Edwards” is a big name in Louisiana politics, but John Bel Edwards’s clan is not related to former Governor Edwin Edwards. In a pre-election analysis, The Daily Beast‘s Jason Berry did a comprehensive examination of the new Edwards family power in the Bayou State. Here’s part of that:

It also helps Edwards, 49, that his brother, Daniel, 47, is Tangipahoa Parish she

Less than 24 hours from election day, the Louisiana governor’s race has devolved into a tangled back and forth over whether a sitting US senator had a love child with a purported prostitute.

It started on Saturday, when Jason Berry, an independent journalist who writes about Louisiana politics for a website called American Zombie, posted portions of an on-camera interview he’d conducted with a woman named Wendy Ellis, who alleged that Republican Sen. David Vitter—the Republican front-runner in the governor’s race—had paid her for sex in New Orleans in the late 1990s. Ellis had alleged as much in Hustler in 2007, after Vitter’s name was found in the phone logs of the so-called “DC Madam,” and she’d taken a polygraph test to support her claim. Vitter apologized for an unspecified “very serious sin” in connection with the DC Madam scandal, but he has long denied the “New Orleans stories,” while declining to answer specific questions. But now she is charging something new: that Vitter paid her for services for three years (not the four months she initially claimed), and that he pressured her to get an abortion—to no avail—after she revealed she was carrying his child.

His top opponents in Saturday’s election (the top two vote-getters go to a November runoff if no one gets a majority) weighed in almost immediately with cautious statements about the latest allegations, and at a debate on Wednesday, Republican public service commissioner Scott Angelle asked Louisianans to watch Ellis’ videos before casting their votes. As he put it, “We have a stench that is getting ready to come over Louisiana.”

But in the days since Berry’s story first published, some of Vitter’s loudest critics distanced themselves from the allegations. Clancy DuBos, politics editor of the New Orleans alt-weekly The Gambit, took down his site’s article on the videos, citing 

When the “family values”-loving Mark Sanford (R-SC) won back his former seat in the House of Representatives after lying to his constituents, betraying his wife and then trespassing on that now-ex-wife’s home, many observers reminded us that evangelical Christians love a redemption narrative.

A core part of the fiery breed of God-fearingness shared by many on the far right is a belief in a “repentance for sin, being able to start anew, start afresh,” said Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

And as we debate whether now-New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner — who never actually left his wife — will be forgiven by Big Apple voters the way Mark Sanford was forgiven by South Carolina’s 1st district, we often forget to include in the discussion American’s foremost forgiven sinner — a man who cast aside all aspersions of scandal and continues to serve in the Senate as if he had never besmirched his own name: David Vitter (R-LA).

In 2007, Vitter — a leading advocate of banning same-sex marriage and opening public meetings with prayers — admitted that he was a client of  D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfre. But he denied — nay, rebutted! — allegations that he’d also visited prostitutes in New Orleans. Then he said he was going to continue doing his important work in the Senate, despite the fact that much of America now knew that this law-breaking, cheating husband probably had a diaper fetish.

Vitter was easily re-elected in 2010 after running a campaign typified by what may be the most blatantly racist ad ever run by a member of the U.S. Congress:

(Who would dare welcome and feed the brown-skinned poor? You could get crucified for that.)

Since his re-election, the senator has mostly kept his head down except to verbally defecate on immigration reform, continue his generally corrupt ways and to take on the big banks — an issue so desperately