The C Street Frat House

[Disco Pickle]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/13/100913fa_fact_boyer?currentPage=all

notable quotes from a very looooooong article:

The men leading this intervention considered themselves Ensign's closest friends in Washington. Four of those who confronted Ensign—Senator Tom Coburn and Representatives Bart Stupak, Mike Doyle, and Zach Wamp—lived with him in an eighteenth-century brick row house on C Street, in southeast Washington, a short walk from the Capitol. The men regarded themselves in part as an accountability group. Despite their political differences—Coburn and Wamp are Republicans, Stupak and Doyle are Democrats—they had pledged to hold one another to a life lived by the principles of Jesus, and they considered the Tuesday supper gatherings at C Street an inviolable ritual.

Coburn, the senior man in the house, enjoyed these sessions, but at dinner that Tuesday night in 2008 he was plainly troubled. Finally, he spoke out. "Guys," he said, "we've got a problem in the house."

The Fellowship avoids publicity for its activities. Heath Shuler, a two-term Democratic representative from North Carolina who lives in the house on C Street and has attended a weekly prayer session sponsored by the Fellowship since he arrived in Washington, recently said, "I've been here the whole time, and there's talk about what the Fellowship is, but I honestly have no idea what they're talking about. I honestly don't know what it is." Tom Coburn acknowledges that influence and secrecy, two of the chief attributes of the Fellowship, make a provocative combination. "Everybody in this town, and probably in the media world, says, Well, if you're not out front, then you obviously have something to hide," Coburn says. One view of the Fellowship, with some popularity on the secular left, is of a sort of theocratic Blackwater, advancing a conservative agenda in the councils of power throughout the world. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a friend of the Fellowship, might dispute that view—if she spoke about the group, which she does not

the article then gets into a bit of the history of Douglas Coe, and if you don't know about him, I suggest doing your own independent research..  think of him as the confessor to Capitol Hill.  That guys probably got secrets that rival the Vatican's

though, even not being a believer in mythical incorpreal beings and usually ridiculing those who are, this section at least made him sound like less of an ass hat than a lot of christians Ive known:

The other change under Coe was a refining of the brand of faith that animated the Fellowship. Coe distilled that faith down to the raw teaching of Jesus, as presented in the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and in the first few chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. This approach conformed with Coe's youthful rebellion against the idea of a God who would condemn all but a particular brand of believer. "They tell Jewish friends, You can't go to Heaven unless you're a Christian," Coe says. "Well, the facts are, if that is true, Isaiah could never go to Heaven, Mary could never go to Heaven, Jesus could never go to Heaven. It's crazy."

then there's this:

"Just talk about the Senate group that you're part of, and how people meeting around Jesus, it helps them work out their differences, and that we're coming in the name of Jesus for friendship," Coe told Grassley. Hotaling says that Grassley said just that, and nothing more. "There was nothing from Doug that instructed him to talk politics. He didn't talk politics." But Hotaling acknowledges that Barre almost certainly inferred a political meaning in the visit. Somalia had been a client state of the Soviet Union, until a Soviet-backed coup in neighboring Ethiopia shifted the East-West balance in the Horn of Africa and left Somalia without a patron. No U.S. senator had ever visited Somalia, and the fact that Grassley had been sent by Doug Coe rather than by Ronald Reagan was a distinction Barre was unlikely to make. History hardly required Doug Coe's intervention—Somalia and the United States believed they needed each other at the time—but Coe cannot be surprised at the accusation of complicity in the devastation that Barre later brought to the country. "Somalia wanted guns," Sharlet wrote, and the Fellowship "helped it get guns."

And, of course, the Clinton's are drawn to power like moths' to a flame:

If international dignitaries view the Prayer Breakfast as a reliable means of unofficial access, some Presidents—most notably, Bill Clinton—have been more accommodating than others. "Bill and Hillary got it," says Doug Burleigh, who is Coe's son-in-law, and a key figure in the Fellowship. "They came early, they'd meet with the groups early and do a photo op with 'em, hug 'em. They got what this was about." George W. Bush, on the other hand, made it clear to Coe and the others from the start that he'd show up at the Prayer Breakfast but not to expect much more. "George came late, and left early—he did every year," Burleigh says. "Now, I appreciate his honesty. He told Doug, 'You know, this isn't my thing.' "After Bush's first, perfunctory appearance, Clinton telephoned Coe to console him. "He didn't badmouth Bush, he gave it the best spin," Burleigh recalls. "He said, 'Hey, Bush'll get it. He doesn't understand what this thing's about.' "

last paragraph of the article.. 

In the meantime, when Congress is in session the Tuesday-night gatherings continue, still attended by members who no longer live in the house. During the supper accountability session, according to Tom Coburn, "a question that'll be asked about every four weeks is, Is anybody here having an affair?"

[LMNO]

If you're interested in how creepy The Family can be, I suggest http://www.harpercollins.com/books/The-Family-Jeff-Sharlet/?isbn=9780060559793