The would-be Congressman boyfucker and the massive flow of salivation he's generated

1. The Problem With the Mark Foley Problem -- by John Nichols

Unfortunately, it appears those of us who have argued that the current ruckus on Capitol Hill is not a Mark Foley Scandal but a Republican Congressional Leadership Scandal may be losing the debate.

A week after Foley's political career imploded -- after details of his emails and instant messages to teenage congressional pages began to surface -- the fascination with the former congressman seems actually to be on the rise. Yesterday's New York Times features a lengthy profile of Foley beginning on its front page today, while talk radio and the blogosphere are abuzz with discussion of every new salacious detail about a politician who until last Thursday was barely known outside the precincts of central Florida and a few blocks of Washington, DC. My most amusing progressive radio show on the dial, Stephanie Miller's morning program, features daily reports on "La Cage Aux Foley."

Everywhere Americans look or listen, the shorthand for the whole affair is "The Foley Scandal."

The focus on Foley is problematic for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, it turns what ought to be a discussion about the win-at-any-cost approach of the Republicans who run Congress into a wildly speculative discourse on one troubled man and what his experience says about everything from pedophilia to workplace ethics to privacy and gays in politics. Everyone is getting into the act, from moralizing conservatives -- like Family Reserach Council Tony Perkins claiming that "tolerance and diversity" are to blame for the whole mess -- to Desperate Democrats describing Foley as a "pedophile predator." The tone of the discussion is especially disturbing at a time when right-wing forces have placed anti-gay initiatives on the November 7 ballots in eight states. Prospects for beating those measures in states such as Wisconsin, Colorado and Arizona are not helped by discussions that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, reinforce inaccurate yet persistent stereotypes.

While I have shied away from writing at much length about Foley's personal story -- preferring to focus on the far more serious and significant issues that have been raised about how the Republican leadership places politics above all other concerns -- it seems that some consideration of the congressman's circumstance is in order. I was convinced of this when my wise colleague Katha Pollitt emailed the other day with some smart questions about a line in one of my articles on the scandal. In a piece discussing the pressures on Foley as a closeted Republican, I wrote, "Unlike the vast majority of homosexuals -- who, as a group, are less likely to be attracted to children than heterosexuals -- the congressman began to engage in activities that were inappropriate and potentially illegal. Details that have surfaced in recent day suggest that Foley had made a mess of his life – a mess that exploded on him and his party when it was revealed that the co-chair of the Congressional Caucus for Missing & Exploited Children had sent 'Do I make you a little horny?' e-mails to teenage boys." Katha wanted to know whether I meant to suggest that closeted gay men were more likely to be attracted to teenagers -- a notion about which she was distinctly, and correctly, dubious.

I appreciated the question, and others from friends and colleagues regarding Foley's personal story and whatever conclusions can be drawn from it, because they provide an opening to explore the backstory of a controversy that could yet depose the Speaker of the House.

As regards Katha's specific question, I don't buy the argument that being closeted caused Foley to be attracted to particular groups of men or boys. Sure, the need to cloak a huge part of his identity created pressures on the congressman. But, right or wrong, I'm of the view that our behavioral penchants and tendencies are set early in life. I share the position of Matt Foreman, the executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, who says: "Given similar past sordid situations in the page program perpetrated by male members of Congress against female pages, it's absurd to blame the Foley spectacle on his being gay, closeted or otherwise." In other words, what Foley did is what Foley did. It makes little sense to try and find in his specific actions indicators of broad patterns or universal tendencies among gays or straights, people who are in the closet or people who are out.

So, then, the question becomes: What was up with Foley?

With all the new twists and turns in his story -- including this week's declarations by the former congressman's lawyer that he's an alcoholic and a survivor of childhood sexual abuse -- that's a tough question to answer with precision.

But, as someone who has covered Foley for many years and had an opportunity to spend a good deal of time with the man, let me offer some thoughts:

I first got to know Foley a number of years ago when he was one of the few Republicans who was speaking up on the issue of media consolidation. Always interested in media issues -- especially as they related to the film and music industries -- the congressman had a good eye for the changing character of our communications after the passage of the noxious Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Foley's insights about the collapse of the political discourse on local radio stations that were bought up by national chains, as well as a his concerns about the homogenization of music playlists, made him stand out not just from his fellow partisans but from most members of Congress. I appreciated Foley's intelligence, and his enthusiasm. He was a less regimented Republican than most, which made him more interesting than the average member of the party's House caucus. I wrote about Foley frequently and we appeared at some of the same forums on media issues.

I knew Foley was gay, and was aware that he was in a long-term relationship with a Florida physician. As someone who saw him in a number of settings, I never had a sense of him as being "on the prowl." He was gregarious, even boisterous. I thought that Foley seemed oddly immature for a veteran legislator; someone who always seemed to be trying a little too hard. But in hindsight I suspect that he was trying a bit too hard to fit in with folks who he did not want to stereotype him as just another conservative Republican. Some people speculated that he was experiencing a bit of a mid-life crisis as he passed the age of 50 and looked at the prospect that he had hit a political ceiling in a Republican Party. GOP leaders had made it clear that they would not support him for higher office, but that very much wanted him to hold onto a "safe" seat in a electorally volatile state.

Foley had always been a good politician, but in the first years of the Bush presidency he began losing his touch. It was no secret that Foley was struggling with questions of how "out" he could be. The struggle heated up in 2003 when, as he was preparing to seek Florida's open U.S. Senate seat, Foley became the subject first of "he's gay" whispering campaign and then of articles in gay and lesbian publications and finally daily newspapers that discussed his sexuality in varying degrees of detail. Foley did not handle the controversy well, and ultimately ended up folding that campaign. Two years later, in 2005, he again toyed with making a Senate bid. But, by that point, party leaders were clearly and unequivocally discouraging him from seeking any office but the one he held.

Foley's political tightrope walk became an increasingly difficult one as the Bush administration and Florida Republicans ramped up their use of anti-gay messages to energize the party's social conservative base. My sense of Foley in recent years was that the congressman was growing increasingly isolated within his own party, and increasingly lonely in Washington. He wanted out. And he had job offers, good ones, coming from the entertainment industry, which is always on the hunt for Republicans who can lobby on its behalf. Foley was unenthusiastic about seeking reelection in 2006.

More than a year ago, he had begun hinting about exiting politics for a lobbying gig, or perhaps what he considered a dream job in the movie industry. Undoubtedly, complaints about his emails to pages were a factor, although at the time no one outside Foley's inner circle and the offices of House Speaker Dennis Hastert and a few other key players in the GOP caucus knew of them

This spring, as the deadline for declaring his candidacy for another term approached, Foley was pressured by Republican Congressional Campaign Committee chair Tom Reynolds, R-New York, to make one more run "for the good of the party." Reynolds wanted to keep open seats at a minimum in what was shaping up as a difficult political year, Though we now know that that the RCCC chair was aware of Foley's troubling emails, holding the House was Job One. Foley finally agreed to seek another term, and the rest is history.

But it is a more complex history than the shorthand version that reporters who are covering this fast-breaking scandal -- including this writer -- have tended to descibe.

There is more to Foley's story than the "sleazy hypocrite" label that has been attached to him by Democratic critics in particular. Yes, the congressman was a co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, and, yes, his office was the source of a steady stream of blunt pronouncements about the need to crack down on those who prey on children. If one accepts that 16- and 17-year-old young men who are past the legal age of majority and who are living away from home are children, or if one is simply unsettled by abuses of the power relationship between a senior member of Congress and teenage pages who dream of political careers, then it is evident that the "hypocrite" tag may be the kindest that can be attached to Foley.

But the congressman was not so hypocritical when it came to social issues. He was one of the most prominent members of former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman's "It's My Party Too" group, which has worked to pull the GOP away from the grip of the religious right -- although you would not know about the association from the group's website, from which all Foley references have been removed. Foley has been reelected in recent years with support not just from moderate GOP groups such as the Log Cabin Republicans and the Republican Majority for Choice but with generous campaign contributions from groups that generally back Democrats, such as the Human Rights Camaign and the Service Employees International Union.

The Log Cabin Republicans, the party's chief advocacy group for gay and lesbian rights, strongly endorsed Foley this year, noting that: "He has consistently voted against the anti-family marriage amendment, and has supported the hate crimes bill, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), and the Early Treatment for HIV Act."

It is true that Foley was an imperfect player on issues of concern to gays and lesbians. Early in his career, he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, and unlike another supporter of that foul measure, former Senator Paul Wellstone, he never renounced the vote. Foley also faced legitimate criticism for failing to be a leader in challenging the military's failed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. But his record was still better than those of all but a few Congressional Republicans -- and, it should be noted, many Congressional Democrats.

So, while Foley may have refused to publicly acknowledge that he was a gay man until this week, he chose frequently to vote as a supporter of gay rights. That distinguished him from other Republicans who have become the focus of scandals, such as former Congressman Ed Schrock. Before the 2004 election, Schrock, a Virginia Republican who regularly voted against gay rights and enjoyed Christian conservative support, was ruined politically when recordings began to circulate of the congressman using a telephone service on which men placed ads to arrange liaisons with other men. Like Foley, Schrock quickly quit his seat.

There are those who will suggest that the fact that both Schrock and Foley were closeted Republicans is an important factor in this discussion, and that being closeted really was Foley's primary problem. One of the Florida congressman's most consistent critics, online journalist Mike Rogers, told the Miami Herald, ''I do believe that he had unhealthy sexual advances to these guys because he was living his life as a closeted gay man. Healthy gay men who are mature and dealing with their sexuality in a mature way don't hit on kids who are 16 years old. What's his signature issue [child protection]? You don't know whether to laugh or cry.'' Rogers has been covering these stories for a long time, and he certainly has a right to assess them as he thinks appropriate. But, again, I'm not of the view that being a closeted Republican is the issue. There is no question that Foley struggled with the challenge of how to be a prominent Republican and a gay man without acting as a total hypocrite. No doubt, in recent years in particular, he struggled with a sense of isolation within a party that was, unquestionably, more understanding and respectful of gays and lesbians in its congressional caucus during the days when an ascendant Newt Gingrich was running the show. But other closeted congressional Republicans -- and Democrats -- have managed their lives without scandal.

My sense of Mark Foley in recent years was that he was becoming an increasingly sad and lonely man. How that sadness and loneliness related to his inappropriate and potentially illegal actions is something that, no doubt, Foley and others will explore in the future. But, I remain in agreement with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Matt Foreman, when he says of Foley's circumstance: "It's a tragedy for him and his family. I don't want to get into the pain of the closet. It's irrelevant if he's gay or not."

Above all, however, I agree with something else that Foreman says: "What's clear is that the House leadership elevated holding onto a seat above the interests of young people in the page system. And they want to talk about ‘moral values'? Please."

Pity Mark Foley or hate him, try to understand this congressman or try to demonize him, but understand that the fundamental truth of the current moment is that Republican leaders in the House knew that one of their own had a problem and chose to disregard that knowledge in order to protect a "safe" seat and their shaky grip on power.

That, to my view, is the greater scandal.


2. Scandal Rises, Outrage Doesn't -- by Marie Cocco

Oh, how I wish I could get all worked up about the Mark Foley/Internet sex predator/Republican leadership cover-up scandal. Sadly, I cannot.

The exposure of the former Florida congressman's penchant for electronically stalking teenage boys who served as House pages, and the congressional leadership's transparent failure to investigate, doesn't move the needle on my moral outrage meter. It got stuck in the red zone long ago.

Was it before Abu Ghraib, or after? It might have been the day the Bush administration's internal memos justifying torture became public — and Congress did nothing, save for confirming as attorney general Alberto Gonzales, the former White House counsel who was complicit in developing the abusive interrogation practices.

Was it the Iraq invasion, or the preview to it, when administration officials — and Republican lawmakers who made the House an echo chamber of deceit — tried to convince us that Saddam Hussein was somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks? Was it the congressional abdication of responsibility for holding anyone responsible for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — a striking absence that United Nations inspectors already had revealed before the American invasion?

Or was it the many ways congressional Republicans corrupted the very conduct of House business, and not just by selling their offices to the likes of Jack Abramoff, the now convicted lobbyist? The needle on the meter ticked pretty high during the shameful shenanigans over the Medicare prescription drug legislation. The GOP leadership lost the initial vote but then held the roll call open for three hours while arms were twisted and rewards promised to those who switched sides.

When it was over, the drug companies had won. Medicare would be barred from negotiating discount prices, as it does routinely for hospital stays and other types of treatment. Elderly patients would just have to shell out more for their medicine. Looking back on it now, I do believe it was this gouging of old, sick people that set my moral outrage meter to a permanent high.

That was nearly three years ago. It was before Congress, joined by the president, effectively stormed into Terri Schiavo's hospice room in a spectacularly ugly pander to the Republican Party's conservative Christian base. It was before the House leadership tried to marry a modest increase in the minimum wage — under which a full-time worker earns $10,700 a year — with a cut in the estate tax to benefit heirs who inherit $3.5 million or more.

The sex-capade that so excites the airwaves is only the latest squalor this Congress has ignored, encouraged or endorsed. Why, just before the Foley imbroglio seized the spotlight, both houses passed radical anti-terrorism legislation that grants the president the powers of a monarch — authority the Supreme Court already ruled he does not possess.

Congress approved lifelong detention without trials, an ancient practice that civilized nations abandoned beginning with the Magna Carta in 1215. It gave the president power to define the extreme tactics that interrogators may use on terrorism suspects. It effectively granted retroactive absolution to those who might already have committed war crimes in carrying out the depravities that were authorized as part of the Bush administration's war on terror.

As for U.S. citizens, we may be declared — solely on the say-so of the president — to be "enemy combatants." The definition of such an enemy can include any person who has "purposefully and materially supported" hostilities against the nation, whatever that means. It could mean having once donated to a charity that later turned out to have some terrorist connection; it could mean agitating for an immediate end to our involvement in Iraq.

Through much of the past six years, the congressional practice has been to hold no one accountable for anything. Why would anyone now be shocked at the failure to check its own worst impulses? The blinkered approach mimics that of President Bush, who famously told The Washington Post in 2004 that he would not examine any mistakes or misjudgments about Iraq because his re-election had served as an "accountability moment."

It is awfully late to experience a prick of political conscience when it comes to deciding the fate of those who have acted so unconscionably, for so long. But another election does approach. And we have to seize our accountability moments when we can.


3. Same Song, Different Scandal -- by Robert Kuttner

Throughout the Bush era, voters have not always connected the dots. The Foley scandal now enveloping the House Republican leadership offers a belated opportunity for voters to make some connections. Yes, the scandal is about the disgrace of a congressman sending disgusting messages to teenage pages, and the failure of leaders to act on escalating warnings. But it is so much more.

Mark Foley was chairman of a House caucus on missing and exploited children. This was a party that literally put a pedophile in charge of pedophilia.

Does that have a vaguely familiar ring? It should. It’s the same party that put the oil companies in charge of energy policy, and invited the drug and insurance industries to write the Medicare prescription bill for their own maximum profit. As investigations have revealed, it put lobbyists for polluting industries in charge of environmental protection. So there is a consistent theme here of the fox guarding the chicken coop.

And more. If the account of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert ignoring bad news about Foley also sounds familiar, it should, too. It is of a piece with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld burying intelligence accounts that did not square with the Saddam Hussein-Al Qaeda story he was peddling, and the White House blowing off intelligence warnings about an impending Al Qaeda operation in summer 2001. As Bob Woodward recently revealed, these warnings went as high as CIA Director George Tenet paying an urgent call on then White House National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice warning of an imminent attack, only to be rebuffed.

It’s not surprising that Hastert did not lead. He was handpicked by then majority leader Tom DeLay to be a reassuring and largely powerless figurehead speaker. When DeLay fell, the cardboard Hastert was not up to the job.

This pattern should also ring a bell. It was Dick Cheney, selected in 2000 by party leaders to find a running mate for novice candidate George W. Bush, who conducted a national search and then selected himself. Cheney, like DeLay, has been the power behind the throne. And when the time comes for hard decisions, Bush, like Hastert, is AWOL.

In the Foley case, the Republicans are especially vulnerable, because they have made a fetish of traditional values — one of which is hiding homosexuality in the closet and bashing it publicly while protecting closeted Republican gays. But their base of social conservatives, who excuse wrongheaded policies on national security and on the economy, will not give a pass to the Foley lapse.

The Cheney-Bush-Karl Rove governing coalition has always been an uneasy alliance between Wall Street elites, who benefit from the financial foxes lusting after the economic chickens, and social conservatives who have a genuine concern for families and traditional morality. There are just not enough votes of multimillionaires and K-Street lobbyists to keep the coalition in power, so the party depends heavily on its social base.

Social conservatives do not take kindly to child molesters, or their enablers. Republican candidates will suffer from a genuine wave of public revulsion, not just at what Foley did, but at how the leadership protected him. As always, the coverup is politically more damaging than the original event.

As various House Republicans point fingers and try to protect their behinds, this scandal will messily dominate the news between now and Election Day. Bit by agonizing bit, the facts of who knew what when, and did nothing, will agonizingly dribble out over the next several weeks.

If history is any guide, Hastert will resign. Others have resigned over less damaging lapses. Democratic Speaker Jim Wright was hounded from office in 1989 for having invited lobbyists to purchase copies of a memoir he had published. (Wright’s nemesis, Newt Gingrich, was later forced out for abusing a tax-exempt political front group.) But investigations will continue, and even a Hastert resignation will not stem the damage.

The Greeks had a piece of wisdom that applies: Character is Fate. The Foley affair, and all it reveals, was an accident waiting to happen. It was a logical product of the cynicism, opportunism, and hypocrisy that pervade the Bush era.

There is an old saw in American politics that when your opponent is destroying himself, just get out of the way. Like much conventional wisdom, it is mostly wrong. This scandal, of its own accord, will certainly damage Republican congressional candidates. But if the Democrats are shrewd, they will help voters connect these dots.

(Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His column appears regularly in the Boston Globe.)


4. Death by Instant Message -- by Maureen Dowd

So now we have our first IM scandal.

We knew it was coming, all this personal information zinging back and forth across cyberspace at the speed of write, all this constantly streaming technology being inexorably adapted to the needs of desire.

IM-ing is like whispering, perfect for furtive, racy exchanges — or slimy, perverted ones. It’s as if your id had a typewriter. In a world where everything is instant, the delaying and censoring mechanisms that contributed to a civilized life are gone.

In the old days, there was a chance that career- or marriage-destroying letters would be, upon further consideration, thrown into the fireplace. IM’s, e-mails and BlackBerry billets-doux, more perilous forms of drunk dialing, have the wings of Mercury and the indestructibility of mercury.

But peripatetic pols, like gossipy high school girls, will not give up computer messaging just because creepy Mark Foley (a k a Maf54) got caught with his e-boxers down.

Indeed, the president and his top advisers were IM-ing just last night about the party’s meltdown. I hacked into the OVAL1600 chat room and prepared a transcript. Warning: politically explicit language, reader discretion advised.

Decider: hey

Rover08: ya

Decider: Dick, u here? Don?

DarthV: ya, potus

Rumstud74: ditto, boss

Decider: I called denny to tell him i just can’t quit him ...brokeback party ... did we decide right?

Rover08: ya ... even if we’re now the party of gays and a weak military, let’s not let the Dems paint us that way

DarthV: obvi

Rover08: btw, denny’s toll-free tip # was pretty lame ... 1-800-HORNDOG or whatev ... reporters r joking the spkr’s IM name is fatfallguy06 or CapitolRotunda

Decider: lol

Rumstud74: golly, dont care who gets voted off island, long as it’s not me :)

DarthV: dont worry, rummy, u know we’re BFFs

Decider: wait! I thought I was ur BFF ...

sexylibrarian: hon, sorry to interrupt, but i think denny and rummy should BOTH go ... they’re off the heez. women are hating on Foley and Iraq and it could ruin your admin

Rumstud74: ur a bigger pain than condi, laura ... why dont you go rd a book? read wdwrd’s book ... you sure helped him write it, litl ms tattletale

Decider: haha

sexylibrarian: george!

Decider: u know u r my First Babe ... as that ad goes, u must know karate, cause your body’s kickin’

DarthV: brb ...i’ve got kissinger on teh phone. Can u believe hes never heard of IM?

Rumstud74: hope the nsa’s not snoopin on that conversation

Decider: but I thought we only listened in on terrorists

Rumstud74: don’t ask, don’t tell, kid

DarthV: you’re a scream, rummy

Rumstud74: denny and I both wrestlers ... you think he’d know how to handle some man-on-man grappling w/o all this Henny Penny nonsense. lay the smackdown on nancy pelosi and pin the puny press on the mat

DarthV: you’ve still got the muscles and the moves, Big Guy

Rumstud74: OMG, dick, we gotta shut up Warner on getting outta Iraq and shut up Frist about getting in bed w/the Taliban ... and we gotta yank those pesky videos of snipers shooting at American soldiers off YouTube ...let’s fire up the old censorship machine

DarthV: that’s hot ... censorship is hot ... torture is waaay hot

Rover08: knock it off, you two ... back to biz ... this man-boy lovefest on the Hill is def messing up my mojo with evangelicals ... after all my hard work demonizing gays, my God-gap is shrinking

Decider: if the dems win the house, will they start investigating me?

Rover08: oh ya, that’s why we gotta get back on the offensive with our own agenda: pretending to keep the country safe

Decider: totes!

sexylibrarian: u coming to bed, Bushie?

Decider: do i have to read more shakespeares ... promised boy genius we’d play w/ the fart machine for a few min ... c u l8r ...

Rover08: whoopeeee!


5. Bang, Bang! Kiss, Kiss!
Wargasms and Orgasms
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN (from Counterpunch.org)

Sex scandals, at least in societies dominated by guilt-sodden Protestants, fulfill the therapeutic function usually attributed to pleasant or exciting sex: exploration of intimate areas of political life, surfacing "issues" normally repressed. America can't talk about Iraq, where Americans boys are raping 14-year-old girls and shooting families at close range, can't talk about torture, so instead we focus on what former Republican Representative Mark Foley wrote to a page about boxer shorts and their contents. What's the other option? Pack a tube of sex lubricant, holster up, grab a box of ammo and head for the Amish schoolhouse.

Here's Foley (code-named Maf54) in instant message mode in April, 2003:

Maf54: I miss you

Teen: ya me too

Maf54: we are still voting

Maf54: you miss me too.

The two of them then-so say the transcribers at ABC News-"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 voteI don't want to keep you from doing your job

Maf54: can I have a good kiss goodnight ...

Teen: :-*

Teen: kiss

What was Foley off to vote for? That evening the House voted on HR 1559, Emergency War Time supplemental appropriations. Just another wargasm in the life of Empire.

Did Foley actually lay his filthy paws on gilded youth? There are gay guys who like to hang around teens, not necessarily with an overpowering urge for immediate sexual contact but more for the overall homoerotic buzz and the hope that one day one of the lads might say, You're the one. It's like the pilot in that great 1980 movie Airplane :

Captain Oveur: You ever been in a cockpit before?

Joey: No sir, I've never been up in a plane before.

Captain Oveur: You ever seen a grown man naked?

Captain Oveur: Joey, have you ever been in a-a Turkish prison?

Captain Oveur: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?

This sounds like Foley to me. When in doubt, head for the Betty Ford Center. Although no one seems to be buying it, Foley is trying to bring booze into disrepute, saying that he was drunk all those times he whacked out the instant messages on his laptop or Blackberry. He also says he was abused by a priest as a lad and now suffers from mental illness. A trifecta! Foley probably spent a lot of time studying the human pyramid and dog photos from Abu Ghraib before rushing off to draft the strong language he inserted into the Child Protection and Safety Act earlier this year. People cry angrily that this is hypocrisy. I'm not sure why. If you, as a human, know what you are capable of, surely it's sound moral conduct for you, as a legislator, to try to guard society from the Beast Within.

What gives a scandal legs is always the cover-up, or the appearance of a cover-up. Republicans in tight races are panicking because Hastert and other senior Republicans sat on the scandal. "I don't think it would pass the sniff test," says West Virginia Representative Shelley Moore Capito, referring to claims that the first set of e-mails between Foley and the pages on the topic of boxer shorts did not seem to be conclusive evidence of anything really bad. Sniff test? What can Shelley have been thinking of?

Beyond their inherently uplifting aspect-bringing powerful people into ridicule and disrepute-political sex scandals can be very educational about sex and political economy. (This one has already dealt a few knocks to the myth of teen innocence, beloved by prosecutors.) Who does not recall that tryst in the White House-unearthed by special prosecutor Ken Starr-between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in 1996, when Bill, receiving satisfaction from Monica in his nether regions, gave satisfaction over the phone to Alfonso Fanjul, the Florida sugar baron who was complaining that Al Gore had just proposed a sugar tax and had vowed to clean up the Everglades.

The bluenoses try to ban sex ed and then provoke scandal which duly engenders sex ed in glorious Technicolor. Bill Clinton fired his first Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders, asked at a 1994 conference at the United Nations whether adults should promote masturbation among youth as a way to discourage dangerous sexual behavior. "I think that is part of human sexuality," she answered, "and perhaps it should be taught." Maybe Foley should volunteer to be a teacher, as part of a plea bargain.

I often tell people they shouldn't worry too much about the evangelical Christians. People who spend so much time lecturing others about sin are likely to go sinning themselves, and in the end, like Jimmy Swaggart, they get caught heading into the whorehouse. Republicans are a repressed lot, unless they become libertarians like Justin Raimondo. He can flaunt his own trifecta: gay, antiwar and pro-capitalism. Back in Reagan time, when I was on the campaign trail, the motels were always filled with Republicans stitched into their squeaky-clean suits who were obvious closet cases.

Most certainly the country has been ripe for a political sex scandal. Given the paralysis at the straightforward political level, it's pretty much the only safety valve we've got. Let's hope the Foley scandal will give us at least a hundredth as much educational uplift and fun as did the great Lewinsky scandal of immortal memory. This doesn't mean Bush won't bomb Iran. He might do it to change the subject, and all those Republicans will interrupt their instant messaging to the page boys to go vote the President all appropriate powers.


6. Blame the Page
Grand Old Perverts Go on Offense
By MICHAEL DONNELLY (from Counterpunch.org)

Ahhh, as Dr. Susan Block has noted, it takes a whiff of sex to make a good political scandal these days. Ex-Rep. Duke Cunningham driving around in his ill-gotten Rolls Royce; living on his bribe master's yacht; cashing in on his position to the tune of over $2.5 million and thumbing his nose at the public barely registered on the outrage scale earlier this year. Fellow Republican ex-Rep. Bob Ney joined the Duke in prison for his own bribe-taking escapades, but you'd never know it from perusing the "liberal media." But, Rep. Mark Foley's Internet stalking (and worse to come) of teenage boys cannot be so easily dismissed.

It would probably take a false confession by a glory-seeking pervert in a decade-old kiddie porn murder to chase this one off the news now -- OK, maybe not. But, for a scandal that was quietly relegated to the back pages of every "liberal media" newspaper it first appeared in, it didn't take long for the aroma de sex to push it to the front pages.

After wasting some $80 million of tax dollars hounding Bill Clinton for consensual oral sex with an adult (though one much younger and of much lesser status), it's now priceless to see the very same GOP operatives who were behind that witch hunt scramble. The GOP spin machine is running at warp speed.

Defending the Inexcusable

Once ABC broke out the really disgusting exchanges between Foley and the Pages, it quickly put an end to the dittohead outrage against ABC and inane defenses of the indefensible. This irony-challenged writer's missive is representative of many that have appeared on ABC's website:

"Congressman Foley's enemies have been trying to drag his private life into the public arena for years, and his current opponent is no different. This is merely a case of the congressman being a clumsy letter writer on a project he should have probably staffed out in the first place, and is much ado about nothing."

Well, the GOP took little time in "staffing out" the spin. First it was Bush mouthpiece Tony Snow presenting the official White House rationale, condescendingly answering a reporter's question:

"I hate to tell you, but it's not always pretty up there on Capitol Hill. And there have been other scandals, as you know, that have been more than simply naughty e-mails."

Yeah. "Simply naughty emails" between a 52-year-old Congressman and 17-year-old boys. Nothing to see here.

Matt Drudge unbelievably blamed the Pages themselves on his radio show stating:

"And if anything, these kids are less innocent - these 16 and 17 year-old beastsand 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."

"Seventeen-year-old beasts!" What does that make the 52-year-old ex-Congressman? Remember the sanctimonious Foley was the head of the Congressional Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. He may well be charged under his own using the Internet for stalking minors for sex law. One could not make this up!

"On Offense," Indeed

Rush Limbaugh has gone way over the top--a feat even for the "Doctor of Democracy" gas bag himself. Rush treated all to the spectacle of GOP House Speaker Dennis Hastert first denying he had knowledge of Foley's emails; then, apparently after regaining his memory, claiming they were merely "over-friendly" missives; then claiming that someone (surely, not the Democrats?) had the emails and sat on them for three years (Uh, Denny, why then did they not release them for the 2004 election?); then claiming "We took care of Mr. Foley. We found out about it, asked him to resign." (Uh, again, you asked him to resign and he did? Guess it had nothing to do with ABC showing Foley the emails; which was the true causal event.)

Hastert finished off his self-serving Limbaugh appearance by telling Rush that the entire Foley affair was "a political issue" and that "we are going on offense."

Then Rush went ballistic. Limbaugh actually has blamed Foley depredations on, who else, the "libs" and the "Drive-by Media." He went so far to claim that the 'libs" are the ones now equating gayness with pedophilia;

"But throughout this whole episode, it just struck me that the libs and the media have equated being gay -- I mean, this has all happened because Foley was gay and that means he's a pedophile."

Wow. This comes from a guy who has never failed to claim that ALL gays are potential pedophiles, unworthy of even the most basic of rights.

But it is the right-wing website www.TownHall.com that takes the prize for disingenuous partisanship. Town Hall columnist Ben Shapiro states:

"Were Mark Foley a liberal Democrat from San Francisco, liberals would be hard-pressed to spot a problem with his behavior."

Huh? Guess it's a Town Hall talking point. In August, before Hurricane Foley hit, Town Hall columnist Kevin McCullough actually wrote:

"The truth is liberals seek sexual utopia where no rules apply. Restraint has in fact become a dirty word to them. Self control - a throughly (sic) foreign concept.

Waging the revolution for all that is true, just, and good involves every single one of us who know better to actively demonstrate this by preventing such an agenda from becoming reality.

For liberals to denounce pedophiles, ultimately they would have to denounce, lesbianism, homsexuality, (sic) and their particular favorite - adultery. And that's just no going to happen.

At the end of the day there are such a thing (sic) as moral values, and liberals despise them - because as they see it - those moral values limit their sexual freedoms. And if this is "America" - isn't it all about the freedom to get your groove on?

Liberals love pedophiles."

And, conservatives apparently, excuse them.

(MICHAEL DONNELLY has no problem with anyone's adult sexual preferences. He condemns anyone of any sexual persuasion soliciting children and abhors sanctimonious bastards of any political persuasion who decry consenting adult sex and then shield pedophiles. He can be reached at pahtoo@aol.com)