Via This Modern World…  Two Peas In A Pod…

Cardinal Law, meet Speaker Hastert.  You’d think Watergate would have taught at least the republicans that it isn’t the crime, it’s the coverup that kills you.  But then this is the party that wanted to do Vietnam all over again in Iraq.

Joshua Marshall at Talking Points Memo is positively astonished by what he’s seeing now…

I’ve been at this blog racket for almost six years. And usually you’ve got to really pore over the details to find the inconsistencies and contradictions. So I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this big a train wreck where leaders at the highest eschelons of power repeatedly fib, contradict each other and change their stories so quickly. It’s mendacity as performance art; you can see the story unravel in real time.

Just consider, Denny Hastert has repeatedly said he didn’t know anything about the Foley problem until Thursday. But two members of the leadership — Boehner and Reynolds — say no, they warned him about it months ago. Hastert got Boehner to recant; Reynolds is sticking to his guns.

Rodney Alexander brought the matter to the Speaker’s office. And Hastert’s office tonight put out the results of a detailed internal review of what happened in which they revealed that no member of the House leadership — not Hastert or Shimkus or the House Clerk — had actually laid eyes on the emails in question.

…

At present, the Speaker is committed to portraying himself as a sort of Speaker Magoo. We’re supposed to believe that pretty much everyone in the House GOP leadership knew about this but him.

These fibs and turnabouts amount to a whole far larger than the sum of its parts. Even the most cynical politicians carefully vet their stories to assure that they cannot easily be contradicted by other credible personages. When you see Majority Leaders and Speakers and Committee chairs calling each other liars in public you know that the underlying story is very bad, that the system of coordination and hierarchy has broken down and that each player believes he’s in a fight for his life.

Well…they’ve been they’ve been deliberately rousing the passion of the mob against democrats for their support for civil liberties, and women’s and gay rights. And in particular, they’ve been playing the Homosexual Menace card as a way to drive their base to the polls.  This is what they were doing in the swing states last election…

The entire religious right machine has been doing this for decades now, because their polling tells them that anti-gay hate will motivate a certain group of voters more then Any of their other pet causes.  More then abortion.  More then prayer in school.  More then creationism.  

So the religious right has been carefully, meticulously stoking that hatred for decades. It funds anti-gay propaganda mills like Paul Cameron, to churn out one hysterical lie after another about the homosexual menace.  Ex-gay ministries like Exodus and Love In Action would have gone out of business long ago, were it not for the lifesaving injection of funds by religious right powerhouses like James Dobson’s Focus On The Family.  They exist today, not to save homosexuals from The Gay Lifestyle, but to allow heterosexuals to continue denying their gay and lesbian neighbors equal rights without a guilty conscience.  Anti-Gay hate has been a gold mine to them, in terms of money and votes, in a way nothing else ever could be.  And in the process, stoked a terrible hatred and contempt toward a portion of the human family, with utterly no concern whatsoever about the inevitable bloodshed, death and heartbreak.  They would pile our bodies up in stacks like cords of firewood if they had to, so long as it got them votes.  And money.

And now that Frankenstein’s Monster is looking at them.  Well…at the republicans.  In the panic on Capital Hill, it must really gall the republican leadership to watch various religious right figures distancing themselves from All Those Corrupt Politicians, as if they hadn’t all been playing this game of Hate For Power together all these years.  And they know they don’t dare point their fingers back at the ministers of hate for any of this.  But the religious right has it’s own gallery of Mark Foleys to account for.  Just ask Cardinal Bernard Law.

Or…this guy…

At least Swaggart’s prostitutes were of age.  I think.  But the same reckless disregard for human sexuality that drove Mark Foley away from a life as an out and proud gay man, and into the chat rooms of teenaged boys, keeps driving one man of the cloth after another into their local red light districts, year after year after year.  It’s a vicious cycle of teaching people to be ashamed of their sexual nature, and that shame warping their sex lives, making them even more ashamed, and ready to be manipulated.  And thus shame turns into money…and votes.

Mark Foley is not the monster here…let’s get that clear.  He’s a profoundly disturbed man, but he is no monster.  The monsters are the harvesters of shame.  The players who know Exactly what they’re doing when they teach people to fear and loath their sexual nature, coldly unconcerned with the human wreakage it causes so long as there is money to be had, and votes to be counted.  They could teach a healthy respect for human nature, for sexual desire, and how to deal with it responsibly, and honorably, and break the cycle of shame and abuse.  Think of a world where kids didn’t have to be afraid of adults.  Now think of the kind of person who could not survive in a world without shame, who would gladly unleash a hundred Mark Foleys on the teenagers of the world, so long as it meant more shame, more dollars in the collection plate, more votes on election day.  There’s your monster.