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.
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.
U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, one of Washington’s leading advocates for missing and exploited kids, doesn’t like the idea of a clothes-free camp for teenagers. After reading a story Wednesday in the New York Times, he decided to raise a fuss.
Foley, running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Bob Graham, plans to deliver letters today to Gov. Jeb Bush and Attorney General Charlie Crist, singling out Lake Como nudist resort in Land O’Lakes, which hosted a bare-skinned youth camp that ended last week.
Foley said the camp, sponsored by the American Association for Nude Recreation, appears to exploit children to make money.
The camps operate under a Florida law that allows people to be nude as long as they’re not lewd. Foley wonders if state statutes should change. Thus the letters to Bush and Crist.
"What’s wrong with your kids going to Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls or sports camps?" Foley, the West Palm Beach Republican, said Wednesday from Washington. "It’s beyond the pale that this is a normal way to bring up a 14-year-old child."
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Foley, a fifth term congressman, denies that he’s raising the nude camping issue to bolster his chances for the Republican nomination for Senate.
Well your chances of holding any office at all are pretty slim now aren’t they?
The Representative Foley "scandal" is really worthy of a whole book on hypocrisy…
Deux…
On the one hand, we have a poor misguided Republican man who had a romantic thing for young boys…
Trois…
On the other hand, we have a Democratic party that worships (not likes, WORSHIPS) a man named Bill Clinton who did not send suggestive e-mails as far as we know, but who had a barely legal intern give him oral sex…
Quatre…
We have a Republican man in Congress who sent e-mails to teenage boys asking them what they were wearing…
Cinq…
…and an entire party, the Democrats, whose primary constituency, besides the teachers’ unions, is homosexual men and lesbian women…
Six…
I hope it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that a big part of male homosexual behavior is interest in young boys…
And Speaking Of Closet Cases That Shouldn’t Be Allowed Anywhere Near Kids…
Via Firedoglake…the unsurprises just keep on coming. Here’s another republican operative and closet case, Matt Drudge, on the despicable predatory sexual behavior of…wait for it…teenage boys …
And if anything, these kids are less innocent — these 16 and 17 year-old beasts…and I’ve seen what they’re doing on YouTube and I’ve seen what they’re doing all over the Internet — oh yeah — you just have to tune into any part of their pop culture. You’re not going to tell me these are innocent babies. Have you read the transcripts that ABC posted going into the weekend of these instant messages, back and forth? The kids are egging the Congressman on! The kids are trying to get this out of him. We haven’t got the whole story on this.
Well we’ve got the whole story on you Matt, now don’t we?
You could say "well Drudge, it’s abuse of power, a congressman abusing these impressionable, young 17 year-old beasts, talking about their sex lives with a grown man, on the internet." Because you have to remember, those of us who have seen some of the transcripts of these nasty instant messages. This was two ways, ladies and gentlemen. These kids were playing Foley for everything he was worth. Oh yeah. Oh, I haven’t…they were talking about how many times they’d masturbated, how many times they’d done it with their girlfriends this weekend…all these things and these "innocent children." And this "poor" congressman sitting there typing, "oh am I going to get any," you know?
Well those shameless young hussies. Strutting their stuff in front of that poor closet case of a wack job republican congresscritter. Maybe next congress they’ll put them all in burkas just in case there are any grown adults on capital hill who can’t fucking control their libidos, let alone can’t remember that part of being an adult is Fucking Setting A Goddamn Example!
Obviously the difference between an adolescent and a child is that the teenager is becoming sexually mature. But the operative word there is becoming. At Minimum it is not the prerogative of grown adults to indulge that sexual inexperience and immaturity, to push a kid’s buttons when the kid is only just discovering that the buttons are even there to begin with, for the sake of their own greedy selfish urges…I won’t even dignify it with that beautiful word desire. Jesus Christ Almighty! Adults are supposed to be teaching and encouraging kids at that stage in their lives how to Fucking Manage Their Sexual Nature Responsibly And Honorably not exploiting their inexperience, their naivety, their adolescence, for pleasure, like they’re some kind of sexual junk food.At long last, at long fucking last, is there Anyone left in the republican party that knows how to be an adult?
I can see where a kid would be positively creeped out by what Foley was doing. But I’m 53 years old now, and I can see something else perfectly well: how deliberately, how calculatedly Foley was pushing that kid’s buttons. There is no mistaking it for what it is. Foley was taking sexual advantage of that kid…even if at that point he hadn’t laid a fucking hand on him. I can see how a kid would be creeped out. But as an adult I can see something more. At our age (Foley is a year younger then me it seems) even a guy who has very little life experience knows perfectly well where those buttons are, and just how to push them. That’s what’s so disturbing. Foley is sexually manipulating that kid and the kid sort-of seems to realize it, but he’s still too young to really grasp what’s going on the way a mature adult can.
And the profound embarrassment lurking just behind that kid’s words are palpable to me. Drudge it seems, can only see the surface bravado…but not the heart…of a kid. Why is that not surprising? Are they fucking all a bunch of sociopaths in the republican establishment?
A Republican staff member warned congressional pages five years ago to watch out for Congressman Mark Foley, according to a former page.
Matthew Loraditch, a page in the 2001-2002 class, told ABC News he and other pages were warned about Foley by a supervisor in the House Clerk’s office.
Loraditch, the president of the Page Alumni Association, said the pages were told "don’t get too wrapped up in him being too nice to you and all that kind of stuff."
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Pages report to either Republican or Democratic supervisors, depending on the political party of the member of Congress who nominate them for the page program.
Several Democratic pages tell ABC News they received no such warnings about Foley.
Mark Foley, co-author of the Internet Child Protection Act, supported by the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children, is discovered having Internet Chat Room Sex with a 16 year old former congressional page boy. At one time he had an 84 percent rating from the Christian Coalition. He’d voted for the Defense Of Marriage Act, refused to commit to repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and after being outed by a reporter for the Advocate, offered lukewarm opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment. He consistently refused to acknowledge his sexual orientation, even as it was an open secret on Capital Hill. But in the world of republican virtue and morals, being homosexual is alright, so long as you’re ashamed of it, so long as you keep your sexuality in the shadows, in the gutter, where they think it belongs…
The Open Sewer That Wants To Remake America In Its Image…(Continued)
Via Atrios… The True Blue Patriotic Christian Americans responsible for covering up Mark Foley’s behavior with teenagers (that would be House Majority Leader John Boehner and House Speaker Dennis Hastert) are planning a fundraiser for U.S. Rep. Don Sherwood, who by the way, recently settled a multimillion dollar lawsuit with a young mistress who accused him of abuse. Pam’s House Blend had the details…
Rep. Don Sherwood reached a settlement Tuesday with a former mistress who accused him of abuse in a $5.5 million lawsuit, according to his lawyer.
Terms of the settlement between Sherwood, R-Pa., and Cynthia Ore, with whom he acknowledged a five-year affair, will remain confidential, said Paul Clark, a spokesman for Sherwood’s attorney, Bobby Burchfield.
"Attorneys for Cynthia Ore and Congressman Don Sherwood announced today that their clients have resolved their differences, and the lawsuit will be dismissed," Clark said, reading from a statement.
…Sherwood, a fourth-term congressman, is married with three daughters. He issued a statement this summer apologizing for the affair but denying he physically hurt Ore. He also said she never lived with him, which she had claimed in her lawsuit.
The Open Sewer That Wants To Remake America In Its Image
Pam’s House Blend has a poll up, from the right wing World Net Daily, which asks the question…
What does the Rep. Mark Foley’s resignation mean for the Republican Party?
The highest affirmative response, at 37.66 percent, is…
What Foley did is inexcusable, but if the U.S. is to win the war on terror, republicans must win in November.
Well what a coincidence. As it turns out, 37 percent seems to be about the floor beyond which Bush’s approval ratings never seem to drop any lower, no matter what jackass thing he says or does. Iraq. Katrina. A mountain of debt amid corruption and cronyism that would make Grant blush. None of it seems to matter. Bush never gets below the mid thirties in the polls no matter what.
Well now we now where that 37 percent is coming from don’t we? This is the Bush power base talking. They are the 37 percent of True Blue American Patriots who will vote republican, even if it means putting a grown man who hits on vulnerable teenage boys back into office…for the sake of…what was it again? Oh yes…to bring America back to decent Christian Moral Values.
Remember this the next time some republican starts yapping at you about liberal moral relativism.
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