Trust Katha Pollitt from The Nation to have a different angle on the Foley Follies

1. Foley's IMbroglio -- by Katha Pollitt

I know the election is just a month away and the Democrats need every vote, but... Did Mark Foley really deserve to be drawn and quartered for engaging in lubricious instant messaging with male former Congressional pages? Foley's advances were creepy and disturbing and bordered on sexual harassment, to say nothing of bad taste--I'd definitely put "I always use lotion and the hand" in the Too Much Information category. But given that by law Senate pages must be 16 years old or more, and that 16 is the legal age of consent in Washington (and most states), to call him a "child molester" (Tucker Carlson on MSNBC) and "child predator" (various pundits) seems rather severe. Almost as severe as, um, calling Bill Clinton's affair with the 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky "vile" and voting to impeach him. Which, as it happens, Representative Foley did. "It's more sad than anything else," Foley went on, prophetically, "to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain."

Foley has resigned and entered rehab: According to him, it was the drink typing, or maybe the results of having been molested by a clergyman in his youth. His fellow Republicans prefer their usual suspect: liberals. Denny Hastert claims the revelations are a Democratic dirty trick. Rush Limbaugh says liberals are the real hypocrites ("In their hearts and minds and their crotches, they don't have any problem with what Foley did, they've defended it over the years"). Which seems ungrateful, given how many liberals wrote compassionately about Rush's addiction to illegally obtained Oxycontin, despite Rush himself having urged draconian punishments for drug addicts. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council blames "pro-homosexual political correctness." Matt Drudge indicts the teenage "beasts" themselves: "The kids are egging the Congressman on!" They're probably liberals, too.

Unlike White House press secretary Tony Snow ("naughty e-mails"), I don't minimize Foley's behavior. It's wrong for middle-aged men to come on to teenagers, even if they're of legal age and even if, as some of the IM exchanges suggest, the young person seems willing to play ("with a towel you can just wipe off and go"). Let the kids fool around with each other. But there's something unseemly about the festival of ritual humiliation: You'd think he was raping 5-year-olds, not exchanging dirty IMs with high school seniors who could, after all, just log off or not reply. The blasts of indignation sweeping the blogosphere seem awfully opportunistic: "deranged pedophile," "sicko," "children at risk." As the Republicans are eager to remind us, Dems are no angels: Gerry Studds slept with a page in 1973, ignored the censure of his colleagues and kept his seat until he retired in 1997; Mel Reynolds had sex with an underage female campaign worker, went to prison and was pardoned by President Clinton; Barney Frank--and we love Barney Frank--unknowingly housed his boyfriend's prostitution service in his apartment and was re-elected all the same. And don't forget former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy, the proud gay American, now promoting his tell-all as part of his healing process. Men with power: It's not a pretty sight.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, they are ill positioned to make the everybody-does-it defense. Their whole shtick is that they're the community pillars, and the Dems are tramps and perverts. Now the image is blowing up in their faces, and too bad for them. Nobody forced them to get in bed with the Christian fundamentalists, who think homosexuality is evil and disgusting and sex outside marriage God's biggest preoccupation. If the family-values right wants Hastert's head on a platter, it serves him right. Live by Jesus, die by Jesus.

The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum thinks Foley will sweep the Dems back into power: Financial corruption like the Abramoff affair is complicated and boring, but everyone understands sexual shenanigans. Perhaps, but are the voters really so brain-dead? Is there no point trying to whip them up into a frenzy about some outrage that actually matters? Like, oh, Bush's refusal to declassify the full National Intelligence Estimate documenting how the Iraq War has created more terrorists. Or Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurgent--so much so that Senator Frist said he wants to put them in the government. Have we given up on habeas corpus, just voted away with the help of twelve Democratic Senators and twelve House Dems, including Sherrod Brown, often praised in this magazine? It would be interesting if someone mentioned the record Foley compiled on the rare occasions when he zipped up his pants and went to work--like his support for that stupid 700-mile fence along the Mexican border, and for denying public education to illegal immigrant children. Now that's what I call child molestation.

It shows you how hapless and shallow the Democrats are that they find so little electoral joy in a principled coherent challenge to Republican rule. Instead, we get tactical theatrics over whatever comes down the pike: last month gas prices, this week Foley. I see why the Democrats feel they have to do it: They're too compromised, the contests are too close and the discourse has been dumbed down for so long, it takes something simple and splashy to get people's attention. But it doesn't say much for the party--or for the rest of us, either.


2. Grand Old Party of Child Endangerment
Think Foley is Bad? Republican Policies have Harmed Millions of American Kids.
By Rosa Brooks

The famously effective GOP messaging machine has broken down.

On Wednesday, just as President Bush was insisting that Americans must "vote Republican for the safety of the United States," Republican Rep. Ray LaHood of Illinois was telling CNN that Congress can't even ensure the safety of the young pages under its care. "Let's suspend [the page program], send the pages home," LaHood told CNN's Miles O'Brien. "To send 15- and 16-year-old boys and girls to Washington, D.C. … we should not subject [them] to this kind of activity and this kind of vulnerability." In response, O'Brien commented: "Well, that's kind of a sorry state of affairs. In essence, what you're saying is that members of Congress can't be trusted to be around young people."

LaHood's answer was blunt: "Well, that's pretty obvious."

Yup, that's where we're at, my fellow citizens. It's a little hard to trust the Republican-led Congress to keep the whole United States safe when you can't even trust them not to molest your children.

The Foley scandal makes for salacious reading, and it's always satisfying to see hypocrisy exposed for what it is. But neither the Foley page scandal nor the Republican leadership's energetic efforts to shove it under the carpet should come as a surprise. Though only the Foley scandal has generated substantial media coverage, the Republican-led Congress has a long record of child endangerment.

Recall that from 2000 to 2005, Congress handed out tax breaks for the rich like hors d'oeuvres at a Republican fundraiser. They slashed the estate tax and the capital gains tax, selling these cuts with an advertising campaign that misled ordinary people into thinking the cuts were going to help working Americans, instead of just the rich.

Meanwhile, they gave the president a blank check for the war in Iraq (and blithely sent other people's children off to risk their lives in that war). They made no effort to hold the administration accountable for flawed prewar intelligence or the ongoing failure to bring some modicum of stability to Iraq. Instead, as the price tag for these failed policies went up and up, Congress kept right on writing checks.

This combination of irresponsible tax cuts and out-of-control spending guaranteed that there would be little left over for the crucial social programs American children need, such as meaningful spending on healthcare, job-creation and anti-poverty programs.

The result was predictable. From 2000 to 2005, the number of American children living in poverty went up by 1.3 million, and the likelihood that any given child is poor increased by 9%. (Incidentally, Washington, D.C. — the one region of the United States under the direct control of Congress — had higher child poverty rates than any state in the nation, with 32.2% of children living under the poverty line in 2005.) There are now more American children without health insurance, as well: From 2004 to 2005 alone, the number of uninsured children went from 7.9 million to 8.3 million children, with the uninsured now accounting for 11.2% of all American children.

Children don't live in a vacuum, of course. They're part of families, and their fate is entwined with their parents' fate. And no matter how you slice and dice the data, American families and the children who live in them are more vulnerable now than they have been in decades.

The richest few are getting richer, but the middle class is disappearing, and the poor are getting poorer. From 2000 to 2005, the median income dropped 2.7% in real terms, yet Congress hasn't raised the minimum wage in nine years. The federally mandated minimum wage is still a rock-bottom $5.15. At that wage, a full-time worker remains well below the poverty line. In 2005, seven in 10 poor children had at least one working parent — and the number of Americans living in what the government defines as "extreme poverty" went up by 3.3 million from 2000 to 2005.

The statistics are dry, but what they mean, in real life, is babies who die because their mothers lacked adequate prenatal care, children who suffer from preventable diseases, children who have no homes and instead move from shelter to shelter and children whose lives are blighted by uncertainty, instability and fear.

Foley deserves our disgust and condemnation, and so do the Republican congressional leaders who worried more about their reelection prospects than the welfare of the children under their care.

But let's be honest: Foley's acts may have damaged the handful of boys unfortunate enough to have attracted his attention, but the damage to children caused by his abuse of power is still far, far less than the damage to American children caused by this Congress' disastrous mismanagement of the American economy.

(rbrooks@latimescolumnists.com)


3. Courtesy of GOP, Voters Finally Get 'It' -- by Ellen Goodman

If I had my druthers, this election would have turned on the war in Iraq. I hoped that when the voters finally got it, “it" would have been the disaster that's turned this war zone into a recruiting ground for terrorists.

Instead, we have the self-described party of family values caught enabling or at least ignoring a sick puppy of a congressman, Mark Foley, who was sex-talking electronically to teenage pages. Instead, we have Speaker J. Dennis Hastert dismissing such an exchange as merely “over-friendly" and White House press secretary Tony Snow describing the messages as “naughty." We even have right-wing webmaster Matt Drudge blaming the teens themselves as “16- and 17-year-old beasts."

This scandal is what has registered on the political Richter scale. This is what voters are asking their representatives about. Well, I wouldn't have chosen to play on this field, but I will take it.

The late political scientist James David Barber once said that nobody understands the word “deficit," but everyone understands the word “adultery." Maybe nobody knows what to think about solving the problem of Iraq, but they know what to think about the then Florida congressman, Maf54, instant-messaging a teenage page: “how's my favorite young stud doing?"

This scandal keeps adding up to the same punch line: You can't make this stuff up. A 52-year-old cochairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus turns up on ABC News sounding like one of the creeps who populate sweeps week on “To Catch a Predator." A politician who testified in Congress that sex offenders “prey on our children like animals" is revealed chatting about a teen getting “horny."

And a sponsor of laws against Internet exploitation is reincarnated as every parent's nightmare: the lewd older man talking to their boy until he signs off to finish his English homework.

Remember the last presidential campaign, when the religious right claimed the “values voters" as their own? Having insisted that values were partisan, the same Republicans are whining that value-busting is nonpartisan. This scandal, said Jeb Bush, “has nothing to do with Republican or Democrat. It's just wrong."

Indeed, in a dizzying move, the right-wing spinmeisters are trying to blame Foley's pathological follies on “political correctness." Newt Gingrich was first to suggest that Hastert held back from chastising Foley out of fear he'd be “accused of gay-bashing" because Foley was long assumed to be gay. Who knew that Hastert was a closet liberal?

After days of stunned silence, the religious right found its familiar voice. They chimed in to blame, yes, “tolerance." Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council accused “a society that rejects sexual restraints in the name of diversity" and a Republican leadership that puts “political correctness . . . ahead of protecting children." Said Perkins, “when we hold up tolerance and diversity . . . this is what you end up getting."

Who would have dreamed that the same party that ran the 2004 campaign as a crusade against gay marriage would suffer from an overdose of acceptance for homosexuality? Is it any wonder that in all this confusion a Fox News screenshot misidentified Foley as a Democrat?

As for Mark Foley himself? This is a man with one foot in the closet, a man who only publicly acknowledged his sexuality this week from a rehab facility and through a lawyer. For over a decade Foley dodged questions about being gay, describing them as “revolting and unforgivable." Now, he says he was abused as a child by a clergyman. Can it be that the problem behind his double life was too much tolerance and diversity?

I remember when Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania blamed the Catholic priest pedophilia scandal on the blueness of Boston, “a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America." You can no more label homosexuals as predators than you can label milkmen as murderers of Amish school girls. But you can try.

Republicans have been successful in getting a hold on the language and politics of values. There isn't a parent is this country who doesn't wince at and worry about the sexualization of children all over the culture from the clothing racks to the Internet. But the right has grabbed onto the free-floating anxiety and attached it to everything on their agenda from abstinence-only education to the dismissal of a Texas teacher for taking her students to a museum that had nude statues.

Now we are beginning to get “it." The self-proclaimed party of moral values can't keep its own House in order. The Republicans in charge of too much for too long have one value they now hold above all others: staying in power. Got it? Well, that's a start.

(Ellen Goodman is the author of “Turning Points”, “Paper Trail: Common Sense in Uncommon Times”, “Close to Home”, “At Large”, “Keeping in Touch”, “Making Sense”, and “Value Judgments”. She is also co-author with Patricia O’Brien of “I Know Just What You Mean: The Power of Friendship in Women’s Lives”. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1980 and lives in Brookline, Mass., with her husband.)