Boys Being Bad?

Check out that former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz Cheney, will join former George W. Bush administration memoirists Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Henry Paulson, Karl Rove and both the former president and the former first lady, in writing his own history after his well-shopped book proposal got him a $2 million book advance. Simon & Schuster will publish under its conservative imprint run by Mary Matalin.

Speaking of former chief executives, although Richard Nixon's idea to place recording equipment in his own office backfired on him personally (the 37^th president might never have had to admit "mistakes were made" in the 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel had it not been for his audio recording system), the historic record continues to benefit. Tuesday, the Richard Nixon Library and Museum released more Oval Office tapes of the paranoid president salted with anti-Semitism ("It's going to happen in America if these people don't start behaving") and sexism. After he noticed "a couple of very attractive women, both of them Republicans," in the South Carolina legislature, the first-term president thought one might help the ticket. "I don't do it because I'm for women" Nixon explained on the phone to then-RNC Chairman George H.W. Bush, but he wondered if a woman might " win someplace where a man might not."

The non-political story that really caught my attention today involves the 71-year-old composer and academy award winner Joseph Brooks, who directed the 1977 film "You Light Up My Life" (plot summary here). He is charged with the rapes of at least 11 young female actors, using the sleazy casting couch manner of holding out a part in his, possibly imaginary, movie to gain a sexual advantage. The hopeful young women who responded to the director's Craigslist ads believed they had a shot at an acting role and were flown in to audition from around the country, prosecutors said. (Sorry Mary, another bad mark for Craigslist.) According to the 91-count indictment, when the women arrived at his New York apartment for their auditions, Brooks intoxicated them with wine. By "incapacitating" his victims and "intimidating them," he forced them to have sex, prosecutors said. The New York Times says he used his Oscar statue to lend credibility to his act. Brooks pleaded not guilty. His assistant, 42-year-old Shawni Lucier, is charged with facilitating the attacks. Here is Debby Boone singing his award-winning song.