Along with a boosted Buick LeSabre, another incident listed on a crime report Sunday in Arlington County, Va., was a creepy attack by a man on a woman.
"On May 5 at 12:35 a.m., a drunken male subject approached a female victim in a parking lot and grabbed her breasts and buttocks," the report read. "The victim fought the suspect off as he attempted to touch her again and alerted police. Jeffrey Krusinski, 41, of Arlington, Va., was arrested and charged with sexual battery."
Krusinski's mug shot is a portrait in misery. He knew his arrest on charges of groping a stranger would send the capital reeling and his career at the Pentagon spiraling. The Air Force lieutenant colonel charged with sexual battery was the officer in charge of sexual assault prevention programs for the Air Force.
There was a fox-in-the-henhouse echo of Clarence Thomas, who Anita Hill said sexually harassed her when he was the nation's top enforcer of laws against workplace sexual harassment.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller issued a white-hot statement, calling Krusinski's arrest "further evidence that the military isn't taking the issue of sexual assault seriously."
It has been a bad week for the defenders of a military justice system that views prosecution decisions in all cases, including rape and sexual assault, as the private preserve of commanders and not lawyers.
During the Thomas-Hill hearings, many powerful men here — even ones defending Hill publicly — privately assumed that she was somehow complicit in encouraging Thomas' vulgar behavior. Feminists ranted "they just don't get it" so often that it became a grating cliche.
Yet, 22 years later, during another Senate hearing Tuesday where the topic of sexual transgression flared, it became clear that, as California congresswoman Jackie Speier told me afterward, "people in authority just don't get it."
Gen. Mark Welsh, the chief of staff for the Air Force, shocked the women on the Senate Armed Services Committee when he testified that part of the problem in combatting "The Invisible War," as the Oscar-nominated documentary feature on the epidemic of rape in the military was titled, is that young women who enter the military have been raised in a society with a "hook-up mentality."
Hook-ups might be stupid, but they are consensual.
"To dismiss violent rapes as part of the hook-up culture shows a complete lack of understanding," a fiery Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand told me. "We're not talking about a date gone badly. We're talking about criminal behavior by predators who often stalk their victims in advance."
The hook-up comparison was especially jarring in light of the release of a Pentagon study estimating that 26,000 men and women in the military were sexually assaulted in the 2012 fiscal year, a 37 percent increase from the same period the year before.
Wired.com reported that troops at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina were issued a brochure advising potential victims of sexual assault that it might be more "advisable to submit than resist."
It was the sort of rare confluence of events that can actually lead to change here, because it's a nonpartisan issue and because the Senate looks very different than it did during the Thomas-Hill hearings. Three of the six Senate Armed Services subcommittees are now led by women.
"You've got to put systems in place where you catch these cowards committing crimes and you put them in prison," said Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri.
The military brass cossetting predators are on notice. The women of Congress are on the case.
Maureen Dowd writes for The New York Times.