If your son went into a drunken rage, grabbed his girlfriend by the back of the neck and slammed her head into a rock-solid metal outdoor city trash can, fractured her skull, eye socket, and nose, would you simply call it “an embarrassing situation”?
Washington City Paper, 12/12/12, 12:42 pm:
“In a statement to Washington City Paper, Rep. Moran described his son and his girlfriend as ‘good kids.’
‘I hope their privacy will be respected,’ the congressman said. ‘They look forward to putting this embarrassing situation behind them.’
Washington City Paper, 12/12/12, 2:37 pm:
‘The situation was an accident,’ Moran spokeswoman Anne Hughes writes in an email, adding that both Moran and his girlfriend testified to that in court. ‘Patrick didn’t hit or shove her.’
Hughes claims that only Patrick Moran and his girlfriend were around to see the alleged attack. ‘They were the only two people who witnessed the scene,’ writes Hughes. “In that sense, their statements are the only ones that matter.”
That would contradict the police report, which describes both a Metropolitan Police Department sergeant and an Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration investigator seeing Moran slam his girlfriend’s head into a trash can cage outside the Getaway, a 14th Street NW bar.
‘They are both very embarrassed by the situation, which involved drinking,’ Hughes continues. ‘And they are looking to move past it, and ask for their privacy to be respected.’
If you have violent, misogynist tendencies similar to those exhibited by the Morans over the years, you might also be quick to dismiss domestic violence. But any decent parent – heck, any decent person, especially a public figure who is supposed to represent the values of hundreds of thousands of people, would not treat an episode like this as an “embarrassing” “accident” by a “good kid”. “Embarrassing” doesn’t even scratch the surface; “accident” is an insult to the intelligence of the public (the police report is abundantly clear that this was no accident). The best of us make mistakes, but “good kids” do not commit such violent, vile, inhuman acts.
We repeat our call: It is time for Jim Moran to resign. It’s obvious that Jim doesn’t care about embarrassing his constituents, but perhaps the fact that he and his son are so out of control in their personal lives so as to attract so much attention over the years (#MoranFamilyValues is going around on Twitter), will convince him that it’s time to pack it up and focus on getting his own life back together so we can focus on getting the country back together.