From USA Today’s list of the 101 most influential people who never actually lived…

20. Prince Charming

Great.  Just great…

Frank Rich in the New York Times the other day, gave the Mark Foley scandal some much needed, if incomplete perspective.  I’d link to it but they have it behind their subscriber only firewall…

If anything good has come out of the Foley scandal, it is surely this: The revelation that the political party fond of demonizing homosexuals each election year is as well-stocked with trusted and accomplished gay leaders as virtually every other power center in America. "What you’re really seeing is the Republican Party on the Hill," says Rich Tafel, the former leader of the gay Log Cabin Republicans whom George W. Bush refused to meet with during the 2000 campaign. "Across the board gay people are in leadership positions." Yet it is this same party’s Congressional leadership that in 2006 did almost nothing about government spending, Iraq, immigration or ethics reform, but did drop everything to focus on a doomed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

The split between the Republicans’ outward homophobia and inner gayness isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s pathology. Take the bizarre case of Karl Rove. Every one of his Bush campaigns has been marked by a dirty dealing of the gay card, dating back to the lesbian whispers that pursued Ann Richards when Mr. Bush ousted her as Texas governor in 1994. Yet we now learn from "The Architect," the recent book by the Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater, that Mr. Rove’s own (and beloved) adoptive father, Louis Rove, was openly gay in the years before his death in 2004. This will be a future case study for psychiatric clinicians as well as historians.

So will Kirk Fordham, the former Congressional aide who worked not only for Mark Foley but also for such gay-baiters as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma (who gratuitously bragged this year that no one in his family’s "recorded history" was gay) and Senator Mel Martinez of Florida (who vilified his 2004 Republican primary opponent, a fellow conservative, as a tool of the "radical homosexual agenda"). Then again, even Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania senator who brought up incest and "man-on-dog" sex while decrying same-sex marriage, has employed a gay director of communications. In the G.O.P. such switch-hitting is as second nature as cutting taxes.

Just so.  When the Log Cabin republicans start yapping that the republican party isn’t as homophobic as the democrats paint it, they’re right as far as it goes.  In much of the party machine, the gay bashing is purely opportunistic.  But that doesn’t make it better.  It makes it worse.  They know gay people…they work with gay people every day.  They know what contributions we make to our country, to our communities, to our neighbors.  They know from first hand day to day experience the humanity of the people they are throwing to the wolves every election cycle for votes.  Yet they do it anyway.

And now the story in the news media is about how the republicans have been playing the religious right for votes all along.  Well imagine that…

“Tempting Faith’s” author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative Christian, Kuo’s previous experience includes work for prominent conservatives including former Education Secretary and federal drug czar Bill Bennett and former Attorney General John Ashcroft….

He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.”

“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.

But the hypocrisy doesn’t stop there, or rather, it doesn’t Begin there.  On a Sixty Minutes interview the other day, Kuo delicately as possible for someone in his position, cast a glance at it…

Part of the problem, he says, was indifference from "the base," the religious right. He took 60 Minutes to a convention of evangelical groups – his old stomping ground – and walked around the display booths, looking for any reference to the poor.

"You’ve got homosexuality in your kid’s school, and you’ve got human cloning, and partial birth abortion and divorce and stem cell," Kuo remarked. "Not a mention of the poor."

"This message that has been sent out to Christians for a long time now: that Jesus came primarily for a political agenda, and recently primarily a right-wing political agenda – as if this culture war is a war for God. And it’s not a war for God, it’s a war for politics. And that’s a huge difference," says Kuo

Via Pam’s House Blend, you can get an even better look.  Condi Rice recently swore in openly gay Mark Dybul as Global AIDS Coordinator.  What was all the more remarkable, coming from an administration that has cynically perfected the art of gay bashing for votes, the ceremony was conducted with Mark’s partner Jason right there next to him, and Jason’s mother in the audience, who Rice referred to in her remarks as Mark’s mother-in-law.

Pam gives us a link to the fit Donald Wildmon’s Agape Press had over it.  Hypocrisy anyone?

A spokesman for a family-advocacy group in Washington, DC, is expressing disgust with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s swearing in of an openly homosexual man as global AIDS coordinator 

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…

The ceremony involved Secretary of State Rice and the swearing in of Mark Dybul, an open homosexual, as the nation’s new global AIDS coordinator…

Blessed are they that morn: for they shall be comforted…

An Associated Press photo of the ceremony also shows a smiling First Lady Laura Bush and Dybul’s homosexual "partner," Jason Claire. During her comments, Rice referred to the presence of Claire’s mother and called her Dybul’s "mother-in-law," a term normally reserved for the heterosexuals who have been legally married.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth…

We have to face the fact that putting a homosexual in charge of AIDS policy is a bit like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse…

Bless them that curse you…

…for her to treat his partner like a spouse and treat the partner’s mother as a mother-in-law, which implies a marriage between the two partners, is a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Defense of Marriage Act…

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself…

According to news reports, in all three cases the men’s homosexual partners held the Bible on which the oath of office was sworn.

And by chance there came a certain priest that same way, and when he saw him, he passed by.  And likewise a Levite…Then a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came nigh unto him, and when he saw him, had compassion on him…

The hypocrisy of the republican party angers me greatly.  But it doesn’t disgust me half as much as the braying herd in America’s suburban tract cathedrals, who would gladly have nailed the one who preached love and peace and concern for the poor and powerless hard to the cross themselves, if they had to spit the nails out of their mouths to do it.

Well I’m glad to see the United States isn’t the only non-Muslim country with a jittery religious kook bin.  They’ve got it bad in Norway too, of all places.  First it was the zoo.  No…not the kook zoo…the one in Oslo…

‘Gay Animals’ Exhibit Angers Conservative Christians

(Oslo) Oslo’s internationally acclaimed Natural History Museum is being assailed by Norwegian church groups over an exhibit called "Against Nature" which shows same-sex animal pairs.

The exhibit documents homosexuality among penguins, parrots, giraffes, whales and other animals and insects. A translation from Norwegian into English of a statement at the exhibit says   

"We may have opinions on a lot of things, but one thing is clear — homosexuality is found throughout the animal kingdom, it is not against nature."

The exhibit opened Thursday features a photograph that attracted considerable attention of two sexually aroused whales rubbing together. Another shows two male giraffe’s engaged in sex.

"The sexual urge is strong in all animals. … It’s a part of life, it’s fun to have sex," exhibit organizer Geir Soeli told the Reuters news agency.

But conservative Christian groups are accusing the museum of displaying pornography.  One evangelical pastor said museum directors should burn in hell.

The exhibit was partially funded by the government and church groups are demanding an investigation into how the grant was made.

Next thing you know they’ll be picketing the natural history museums that dare to tell their visitors that the earth isn’t really flat…right?  

Wrong…

Aimless youth embroiled in lav affair

NORWAY has become embroiled in a dispute over toilets and the nature of masculinity.

The matter blew up because a primary school headmistress tried to ban boys from urinating while standing up.

Anne Lise Gjul, the head of a mixed primary school in the southern Norwegian city of Kristiansand, wanted to introduce the ban after complaints from cleaners that many boys could not aim properly.

The measure has upset right-wing Norwegian politicians, however, who say it blurs a God-given distinction between the sexes.

"If boys are not allowed to pee in the natural way that they have done for generations, then it amounts to an assault on God’s creations," thundered Vidar Kleppe, the head of Norway’s Justice and Order party.

Happy Monday.  There isn’t a crazier thing you’ll see all week then a bunch of Norwegians thumping the bible for the god given right to pee standing up.  And you thought they were bad here in America.

Via Steve Gilliard…  If the Russian mob joined in the fight against gay rights, Randy Thomasson would applaud them as "shining models for the rest of us in terms of faith, family, work ethic, patriotism and community" too…

For Gays, a Loud New Foe

Sacramento’s large enclave of immigrant Slavic evangelicals is becoming a force on social issues. Their actions shock many.

SACRAMENTO — Organizers of the annual Rainbow Festival were prepared for trouble.

The Q Crew, a local "queer/straight alliance," distributed cards telling people what to do if approached by hostile demonstrators. Sympathetic local church groups formed a protective buffer along the festival ground’s cyclone fence. Mounted police were on patrol.

Jerry Sloan manned a table for Stand Up for Sacramento, a recently formed gay self-defense organization.

"So far, so good," he said. "No Russians."

The festival, held last month amid the gay bars, restaurants and shops of midtown’s "Lavender Heights" neighborhood, went off without conflict. But the elaborate security preparations reflected growing tensions between Sacramento gays and the city’s large and vociferous community of fundamentalist Christians from the former Soviet Union.

Over the last 18 months, Sacramento Russian-language church members have picketed gay pride events, jammed into legislative committee meetings when gay issues were on the agenda and demonstrated at school board meetings.

Incited by firebrand Russian Pentacostal pastors and polemical Russian-language newspapers, the fundamentalists turn out en masse for state Capitol protest rallies.

Last June, urging readers to attend a massive rally, the Russian newspaper the Speaker told them:

"Make a choice. It’s your decision. Homosexuality is knocking on your doors and asking: ‘Can I make your son gay and your daughter lesbian?’ "

In most instances, the Russian-speaking demonstrators far outnumber representatives from all other anti-gay groups combined. Anti-homosexual rallies that a few years ago attracted a few dozen participants now regularly draw hundreds and sometimes thousands, many with a heavy Russian accent.

It’s worth noting, and the L.A. Times article does note, that not all Russian communities in this country are as crazy bigoted as the one in Sacramento.  But this one community is different.  How?

The Sacramento community, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly evangelical — Baptist and Pentecostalist. The charismatic Pentacostal church, introduced in the Ukraine in the 1920s by missionary and martyr Ivan Efimovich Vornaev, includes speaking in tongues and washing of feet. The churches’ social views are based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

And I’ll just bet, relentlessly antisemite too.  Russia has had a problem with that for untold generations…the Protocols of the Elders of Zion originated in Russia…and my understanding is that it is among precicely these fervent religious types in Russia, the kind that like their Christianity loud and gilded and glittering and all controlling, that the hatred of jews is the most vehement. 

Well…hating jews doesn’t gain you a lot of traction here in the United States, no matter how proudly you wear Christ around your neck…just ask Mel Gibson.  But you can still hate homosexuals and demand respect for your sincere religiosity…

Many credit the Slavic Christian immigrant community with filling a void left by the traditional American church and providing reinforcements in the ongoing culture wars over what should define family, acceptable sexual relationships and marriage.

"Russian Christians bring a fresh faith and uncorrupted family values to this country. They are a shining model for the rest of us in terms of faith, family, work ethic, patriotism and community," said Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families.

Behold a shining model…

Gay civil rights activists, meanwhile, accuse the demonstrators of hateful and aggressive tactics that they say sometimes lean dangerously toward violence.

Signs displayed by the demonstrators often equate homosexuality with pedophilia and describe the AIDS epidemic as a message from God. One of the common tactics of the demonstrators is to tap gays forcefully on the head and announce that they have been "saved."

"They’ve declared war on us for some reason," said Stand Up for Sacramento founder Nathan Feldman, a jewelry store clerk. "They got it into their heads that California is the land of sin and that it is their duty to cleanse the state, starting with homosexuals."

What Thomasson means is that they are more aggressive and willing to physically attack gay people then even Fred Phelps’ group.  Thomasson is a well known opponent of gay rights in California.  What he sees and values in the ethnic Russian community around Sacramento isn’t faith, it’s their willingness to bring fear into the lives of gay people.  Because of his new allies in the war on homosexuals, Sacramento Pride Days now require heightened security.  This is what brings Randy hope.  Or at least, satisfaction.

I like Coca Cola and I like deep fried food.  I don’t do very much of either anymore because at my age I have to watch my weight a tad more carefully then I did when I was a wirey little twenty-something.  But I have a nice Waring deep fryer here at Casa del Garrett and it gets used at least once a month, either for a fish fry or Maryland crab cakes, and maybe a tad more then once a month for a random side of french fries.  All of which are positively decadent when you use peanut oil in the fryer.  Trust me.  A deep fryer can be addictive.

Perhaps…a tad too much…

NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART

How to make Coke better? Fry it

It must be time again for the N.C. State Fair

RALEIGH – It has come to this at the N.C. State Fair: Deep fried Coca-Cola.

Each year, some carnival culinary innovator with a flair for foods bound to lead to congestive heart failure offers a new foodstuff bathed in gooey dough and dropped in a vat of boiling vegetable oil.

Past fairs have seen candy bars, Twinkies, Moonpies, Oreos, cheeseburgers, sweet potatoes and even green beans fried up and, in most cases, impaled on a stick. South Carolina’s state fair even added crispy Ho-hos.

Perhaps the concession operators, these Emerils of the french fry basket, simply ran out of solid foods.

The solution? Mix funnel-cake batter with Coke instead of water. Pour batter into the fryer and cook up a mass of doughy strands. Stuff into a Coca Cola cup, sprinkle with powdered sugar and douse with pure Coke syrup. Top it with whipped cream and a cherry.

Solution to what…that heart attack you’ve always wanted?  Why not just top it with a slice of bacon too while you’re at it?

Which brings me to another puzzlement.  County fairs and seashore boardwalks both have one thing in common besides Ferris wheels, bumper cars, and other assorted cheap thrills and that’s the quality of the junk food.  Funnel Cakes.  Cotton Candy.  Fries.  Pizza.  Fudge.  Ice cream cones dipped in hot chocolate.  Salt Water Taffy.  Think about it.  On the one hand you have the beach, and all the people frolicking in the surf and sand in their bathing suits mostly, and up there on the boardwalk we’re eating stuff that will eventually make us so overweight we’ll never want to put on our bathing suits ever again. 

So I’m walking to work, as I usually do when the weather is nice like this.  During spring and fall here in the Mid-Atlantic states it’s usually neither too hot nor too cold, but just right for a good brisk walk in the morning and evening.  My path takes me through mostly residential neighborhoods, first my own, then after a small patch of strip shopping centers, Roland Park.  I turn a corner on University Parkway, and I’m on San Martin Drive, where the Space Telescope Science Institute is located.

San Martin Drive winds crookedly along the parameter of Wyman Park, which is just behind Johns Hopkins University.  The road itself is park like, with a mostly forested scenery all around it.  I walk down a tree shaded winding road, until I get to the Muller Building, where the Institute is located.  There is one final sharp bend in the road.   As I walk I suddenly find myself stepping over broken glass.  At some point in over the weekend, there was a bad accident there.

I walk through the debris field, looking around.  The point of impact is on my side of the road, near the curb.  There are tire marks gouging the grass.  It looks like the person coming the other way tried to go up onto the grass to avoid an oncoming car that had taken the curve way too fast and drifted over into their lane.  But tire marks gouging the grass from the other direction tell me that the avoidance maneuver was to no avail.  The oncoming car went up over the sidewalk too.  It would have been close to a direct head-on collision.

Glass is scattered all around the debris field.  There are bits and pieces of car here and there.  Parts of a headlight.  Parts of a bumper.  A bit of sideview mirror.  I look down and see a car’s horn sitting uselessly in the grass.  Ironic.  Next to it I see a little plastic part of a child’s toy.  A little red fireman’s helmet.

It’s easy to visualize the act of driving as an exclusively adult situation.  Children don’t get driver’s licenses.  You look around in traffic and you see only adults behind the wheel.  Oh, the occasional teen maybe.  But that’s a kid making the transition to adult.  And so you’re out there on the road and you’re seeing it as being you and all the other adults there on the road with you and it isn’t.  There are kids out there on the road with you.  Passengers in other people’s cars you mostly either can’t see or don’t notice because they’re not behind the wheel.  But they’re there.  You teach them not to play in the street.  The sight of a group of children playing games in the middle of a freeway would horrify an adult.  But the highways are full of children at any given time.  In the cars.  Blithely trusting the adults to take care of them as children will do.

Visualize yourself driving down a highway with children scattered around everywhere on it.  And they aren’t paying attention to what you’re doing.

To whomever sent me that box of…er…protection…your optimism regarding my sex life is greatly appreciated. 

Just so my friends know… I got a response to one of my messages in a bottle this afternoon. Finally. After so long…

You walk in an empty landscape under an endless sky. The earth under your feet is flat, hard, solid rock. Ahead of you is cliff, overlooking a great valley. There are mountains on the horizon. So far away. And…what looks like, perhaps, a city in the distance. Just at your feet is a pool of water, in a small hollow in the rock. Its surface is unnaturally calm.

Look down into it. You see your reflection. It is deceptively clear. You see yourself, here, now. As you are. Right this moment. You see every detail of your face, sharp and crystal clear, looking back at you. But unlike most people who come this way, to look into this pool, you know that this is not all there is to you. There is more. The rest of you is there, in the darkness below the surface. You know this.

Reach a hand into the water. Did you slack through most of your life? Did you walk it with your eyes closed? Your mind blissfully content with the moment? Never questioning. Never doubting. Never wondering? Then the pool is quite shallow. Your hand reaches the bottom soon, and encounters only the same hard smooth rock you have just walked across. But if you kept your eyes open, and your mind active, and your heart engaged, then it is quite deep. Your hand does not touch bottom no matter how far into it you reach. The water is cold. It is dark. It is deathly still.

Reach down as far as you can. Then stir the water. Just a little. Careful. The reflection of you, here, now, ripples away. Watch. Something else, something from deep down in the pool, shimmers up to take its place.

Be ready for what you see.

It comes to this: The republican machine is going after the teenagers Mark Foley was sexually exploiting.  That’s right.  Not the leadership that did nothing.  Not the people who tried to cover it all up.  They’re going on the offensive against the kids, as though all of this is their fault. 

Well I guess we can put a fork in the republican party now…because it’s done.  For decades they waged a long bitter battle to gain total control of the federal government.  They told us the liberals were wicked, immoral, godless, anti-American, anti-family.  They said democrats were corrupt tax and spend big government pigs, lining their pockets with money taken from hard working people.  They waged a scorched earth campaign for power.  And then they got it.  And look at them now.

What most of us with a functional conscience and a sense of basic human decency see as the sexual exploitation of teenage congressional pages, the republicans now see only in terms of political warfare.  Their pathological hatred of anyone outside of the tribe has so completely gutted them of any sense of decency and humanity, of anything at all beyond the reflexive need to attack liberals and democrats, that they are utterly incapable of seeing the sexual exploitation of teenagers for what it is.  They cannot see, cannot even grasp, Mark Foley’s actions apart from the political war. 

And in the blogosphere, all those fine honorable men who once upon a time fancied themselves liberals, but then supposedly 9-11 changed everything, and who keep on yap, yap, yapping that they didn’t leave the democratic party, it left them…all those fine honorable men with all their ostentatious regard for America and virtue and civilized behavior.  What do they do when confronted with a man in their own party who regarded the congressional page pool as his own little sexual buffet?  What do they do when confronted with evidence that their party leadership covered up that man’s behavior so as not to rouse the ire of the voters? 

Well of course…they start attacking the teenagers Foley was hitting on…

Pajamas Media, Instapundit Facilitate Outing Of Foley Victim

An obscure right-wing blogger, Wild Bill, has outed one of Mark Foley’s victims, a former Congressional page. It is a despicable act. Wild Bill however, gets almost no traffic, so the damage done to the victim’s life could have been minimal.

All that ended, however, when some of the most highly-trafficked right-wing bloggers decided to direct their readers to Wild Bill’s site. First, Roger L. Simon, co-founder and CEO of Pajamas Media – a portal and advertising broker for nearly every major right-wing blog – posted a link to Wild Bill on his personal site. (The Pajamas Media portal also linked to Wild Bill.) Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit – probably the most highly-trafficked right-wing blog – followed suit by linking to Simon’s post and the Pajamas Media post.  

You may recall this is generally how the right wing smear machine works.  First the smear appears in some obscure nutcase’s blog.  Then someone like Drudge picks up on it.  Then Instapundit links to it.  Then it starts appearing in a few right wing tabloids and magazines.  Then the more respectable conservative press gets into it.  Then it goes mainstream.  Instapundit has been facilitating smear campaigns now for years, and it’s given him a high place in the right wing honor roll.  Recently the hack novelist Roger L. (I didn’t leave the democratic party, it left me) Simon formed Pajamas Media to share in some of that glory.  It now comes to this: Glenn Reynolds and Roger L. Simon are facilitating child sexual predators, if that’s what it takes to keep the republican party in power.

They both know perfectly well that outing this one teenager, will make other teens who have been victimized by congressmen, or anyone else holding a position of authority on Capital Hill think twice before coming forward.  It increases the pressure on the entire family to keep the kid’s mouth shut.  It Is Supposed To.

Atrios sums it all up…

The complete shitheads that are the leading lights of the conservative blogosphere.

No ethics, no scruples, no morals, no compassion, no sense. Just really bad people.

Brad DeLong likes to say that the Bush administration is worse then you think, even accounting for the fact that it is worse then you think.  But that’s true of all of them…every…single…one of them…in the Bush base. That 35 percent who will support the republican party no matter what.  Because there is nothing worse then the prospect of a democratic congress…not even the sexual exploitation of minors.  Not even covering up the sexual exploitation of minors.  Garrison Keiller was right…they are republicans first, and Americans second.  Every time you think you’ve found the bottom of that cesspool you soon realize that…no…there is no bottom.

Via Joshua Marshall…  Ah…remember the day when Americans could simply speak their mind to government officals without fear of arrest…?

Arrest over Cheney barb triggers lawsuit

A Denver-area man filed a lawsuit today against a member of the Secret Service for causing him to be arrested after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney in Beaver Creek this summer and criticized him for his policies concerning Iraq.

Attorney David Lane said that on June 16, Steve Howards was walking his 7-year-old son to a piano practice, when he saw Cheney surrounded by a group of people in an outdoor mall area, shaking hands and posing for pictures with several people.

According to the lawsuit filed at U.S. District Court in Denver, Howards and his son walked to about two-to-three feet from where Cheney was standing, and said to the vice president, "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible," or words to that effect, then walked on.

Ten minutes later, according to Howards’ lawsuit, he and his son were walking back through the same area, when they were approached by Secret Service agent Virgil D. "Gus" Reichle Jr., who asked Howards if he had "assaulted" the vice president. Howards denied doing so, but was nonetheless placed in handcuffs and taken to the Eagle County Jail.

This being the same vice president (and president) who insist that the president of the United States simply must have the power to arrest, imprison and torture even American citizens, without due process, without any recourse to the courts, on their say-so that they’re suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.  The man is lucky he’s not in Gitmo now, and that anyone even knows what happened.

Via Atrios…  Mission Accomplished Part Deux…

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — Even as the Bush administration urges Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Republicans in Congress have put down a quiet marker in the apparent hope that V-I Day might be only months away.

Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, the money was not spent.

Now Congressional Republicans are saying, in effect, maybe next year. A paragraph written into spending legislation and approved by the Senate and House allows the $20 million to be rolled over into 2007.

The original legislation empowered the president to designate “a day of celebration” to commemorate the success of the armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to “issue a proclamation calling on the people of the United States to observe that day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.

Actually…I am kinda surprised the money was not spent and the celebrations not held.  The republicans (and Joe Lieberman…but then, I repeat myself…) seem to think that things are going swimmingly over there and no amount of bloodshed can seem to convince them otherwise.

Via Firedoglake…  Behold the open sewer that is the republican party today…

I…words simply fail me.

In the fine tradition of George W. Bush standing under the "Mission Accomplished" sign, or any one of the Katrina backdrops (where no expense was spared to bring power to an area for a photo op, and then just as quickly cut off), we now have the head of the NRCC, Tom Reynolds, using small prop children as set decoration in a press conference devoted to the topic of…yes, predatory online sexual solicitation of minors.

Even the reporters present could not contain themselves: 

Reporter:  Congressman, do you mind asking the children to leave the room so we can have a frank discussion of this, because it’s an adult topic.  It just doesn’t seem appropriate to me.

Reynolds:  I’ll take your questions, but I’m not going to ask any of my supporters to leave.

[]

Reporter:  Who are the children, Congressman?  Who are these children?

Reynolds:  Pardon me?

Reporter:  Who are these children? 

Reynolds:   Well, a number of them are from the community.  There are several of the "thirtysomething" set that are here and uh I’ve known them and I’ve known their children as they were born. 

Reporter:  Do you think it’s appropriate for them to be listening to the subject matter though?

Reynolds:  Sir, I’ll be happy to answer your questions, I’m still, uh…

Swell.  Just swell.  They have a uTube up of the press conference at Firedoglake, and the still clearly shows Reynolds surrounded by a room full of very small children and a few other adults.  So.  We have one congressional republican using kids for Internet sex, and another one using them as literally human shields to deflect hard questions from the press.  I don’t think America can take much more of all this Family Values stuff.

Years from now…when hopefully this episode in American history is just a bad dream…take this one thing away from it if you take away nothing else:  It isn’t the quest for virtue and morality and values that turns people into this.  It’s the belief that you embody those things.   It isn’t power that corrupts absolutely…it’s arrogance.

Via AmericaBlog…  Mark Foley, Congressman…

Former Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) interrupted a vote on the floor of the House in 2003 to engage in Internet sex with a high school student who had served as a congressional page, according to new Internet instant messages provided to ABC News by former pages.

ABC News now has obtained 52 separate instant message exchanges, which former pages say were sent by Foley, using the screen name Maf54, to two different boys under the age of 18.

This message was dated April 2003, at approximately 7 p.m., according to the message time stamp.

Maf54: I miss you
Teen: ya me too
Maf54: we are still voting
Maf54: you miss me too

The exchange continues in which Foley and the teen both appear to describe having sexual orgasms.

Maf54: ok..i better go vote..did you know you would have this effect on me
Teen: lol I guessed
Teen: ya go vote…I don’t want to keep you from doing our job
Maf54: can I have a good kiss goodnight
Teen: :-*
Teen:

The House voted that evening on HR 1559, Emergency War Time supplemental appropriations.

According to another message, Foley also invites the teen and a friend to come to his house near Capitol Hill so they can drink alcohol.

Teen: are you going to be in town over the veterans day weekend
Maf54: I may be now that your coming
Maf54: who you coming to visit
Teen: haha good stuff
Teen: umm no one really

Maf54: we will be adjourned ny then
Teen: oh good
Maf54: by
Maf54: then we can have a few drinks
Maf54: lol
Teen: yes yes ;-)
Maf54: your not old enough to drink
Teen: shhh…
Maf54: ok
Teen: that’s not what my ID says
Teen: lol
Maf54: ok
Teen: I probably shouldn’t be telling you that huh
Maf54: we may need to drink at my house so we don’t get busted 

Uhm…Mark…  You’re a Lawmaker…

Okay…at least one of these teens wasn’t nearly as embarrassed by this as the other one was.  But there is still no excuse.  What a kid may want to do with an adult is one thing.  But part of being an adult is you know what your responsibility to kids is.  And Foley was a lawmaker.  That’s (if you’ve read your Constitution lately) what congress does.  So…to recap…Foley walks away from a vote in progress, to have IM sex with a teenager, and then in another message suggests they all get together at his house for a little underage drinking where they might not get busted for it.  Sweet.  If either one of those kids grows up to be a responsible adult they won’t have Mark Foley to thank for setting an example.

And…not anyone in the republican leadership either.  So remind me again, what is the value to young Americans to serve as congressional pages?  I can see the value to the republican congress easy enough.  Free labor…a handy pool of awe stricken kids who are easily manipulated into having sex… 

And the unsurprises just keep on coming…  Another cog in the republican Mighty Wurlitzer, The Wall Street Journal, says the blame for the Foley scandal rests squarely with all this PC tolerance of homosexuality crap republicans are having to put up with these days…

What next was Mr. Hastert supposed to do with an elected Congressman? Assume that Mr. Foley was a potential sexual predator and bar him from having any private communication with pages? Refer him to the Ethics Committee? In retrospect, barring contact with pages would have been wise.

But in today’s politically correct culture, it’s easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert’s head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts’ decision to ban gay scoutmasters? Where’s Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on that one?

So is the Wall Street Journal calling for a ban on gay congressmen then, on those same grounds?  That was a rhetorical question.  Without a doubt they would if they thought they could get away with it. 

As if this was rocket science.   All you have to do to grasp the magnitude of the failure on the part of the republican leadership is ask yourself if any warning flags should have been raised if a heterosexual  congressman made comments about a female page’s body, and asked for pictures of her friend.  I’ll bet most parents of teenage daughters would instantly pick up on the subtext of that kind of email.  You don’t need to set different standards of behavior for gay adults.  Just treat them the same as any heterosexual in a similar context. 

I know…I know…it’s Capital Hill.  Maybe they just need to set a minimum age of 70 to be a congressional page, or at least to be a republican page. 

Joshua Marshall has this from a reader… 

There’s a weak excuse emerging from Republicans for Foleygate – they might have known about the e-mails to Rep. Alexander’s page, but they never knew about the explicit IMs. Too much of the media coverage right now is centering on that question, as if knowledge of the IMs is the only way to show the leadership was remiss.

But that’s irrelevant, and here’s why: Once ABC got hold of the e-mails, it took them one day to flush out the IMs. That’s what an actual investigation looks like. The Republican leadership simply didn’t want to know how bad the Foley situation was. That’s just as morally negligent as if they had started digging and found the IMs.

[Emphasis mine]  All these fuckers had to do was look into the matter.  That’s fucking all.  Didn’t matter if it was a heterosexual congressman or a gay one.  If it looked even vaguely inappropriate all they fucking had to do was look into it.  Maybe it amounts to nothing and then they just quietly drop it.  But all they fucking had to do was lift their little finger and look into it and they didn’t.  It took ABC one day, just one fucking day, to get to the rest of the horrid story.  To blame all this on PC coddling of homosexuals is grotesque.  But then the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is pretty much the same kind of creeps that are in the republican leadership. 

That Wall Street Journal editorial fairly drips with longing for the old days.  Back in the 1950s a scandal like this would have resulted in gay purges and witch hunts from one end of the country to the other, and these right wing louts are probably crying in their beer right this moment that it isn’t happening now, that America has matured enough regarding homosexuality that it isn’t going to go into wholesale convulsions of anti-gay hate for what one pathetic closet case republican did.  Now all the old guard can do is piss and moan about political correctness while the rest of the nation looks on appalled at this complete failure of oversight on the part of a party that’s made Family Values its pet issue, and wonders, rightly, just how safe their children are from heterosexual republicans.  There’s not a single person in the republican leadership who signed on to the Adam Walsh Act who isn’t involved somehow in this coverup.