Apples Don't Fall Far From The PotatoE - Meet Ben Quayle

Former Vice President Dan Quayle's son, Ben, is running for Congress in Arizona.  Remember Dan Quayle?  Remember June 15, 1992.  That’s the day, you probably recall, a Trenton sixth grader had to teach the Vice President of the United States that potato is not spelled with an "e" on the end.  Ooops!


So now, Ben Quayle, the son of Vice President Dan Quayle, is running for Congress in Arizona. In a campaign photo, he announces that he and his wife Tiffany "are going to raise our family here." Awww. Those are his daughters, right? No? Wait, what?

Ben Quayle, as the Arizona Capitol Times realized, doesn't actually have any kids. So who are those two cherubs? Well, originally the campaign said they were "relatives of a staff member and happened to be at a campaign event," which would have been pretty funny. As it turns out, they're his nieces, so the graphic is only sort of misleading instead of totally weird.

But Ben it turns out may just be more interesting than his brain-dead dad.  Ben Quayle's been the subject of a bizarre mini-scandal for the past couple of days, after gossip/sex site TheDirty.com revealed that he'd been a "contributor" in the site's early days as DirtyScottsdale.com, about trashy Scottsdale nightlife. Site founder Nik Richie claimed that Quayle had written under the pseudonym "Brock Landers," which he used to "document his quest to find the 'hottest chick in Scottsdale.'" (Landers is the name of one of the characters from the movie Boogie Nights.)

Quayle, at first, denied all of this. Then he backtracked a little bit, admitting that he'd met Richie and introduced him to an intellectual property lawyer, but nothing else. Then — and this is all in one day — he admitted, okay, he'd been a regular "commenter" at the site.

But Quayle, a self-described conservative and one of 10 candidates seeking the Republican nomination for the 3rd Congressional District, admitted to contributing to the site, contradicting his earlier comments.

"I just posted comments to try to drive some traffic," he said.

"What kind of comments?" the reporter asked.

"This is four years ago," Quayle replied. "This is hilarious this is being brought up. … This is a smear. This is a smear on me from a smear website being pushed by a smear campaign."

The good news (for his family) is that there wasn't a milkman involved. He is most definitely his father's son.


The bad news (for America) is that he's most definitely his father's son.