FOLEY OUTRAGE

As someone who enjoyed sex from an age earlier than the page ex-Senator Mark Foley resigned over, I'm not that outraged by a few horny emails to a 16 year old. What's enfuriating is the response and cover-up. On the whole, it's an easily won victory for democrats since it disgraces the republicans. Not only because of Foley's behavior, but because of Hastert's excuse for not acting on the information when he received it a year ago. Hastert's office issued this statement: Hastert "declined to contest publicly what Reynolds had said earlier, but his office did say that the Speaker could not 'explicitly recall' any such conversation between the two men." In other words, he doesn't "dispute" what he was told, but a pedophiliac representative from his own party didn't strike him as scandalous enough to act on. So maybe he just spaced the report out. Maybe he wanted to keep it quiet, but let's see, what else was happening around one year ago? There are plenty of other scandals which the republicans could have been scrambling to hush up or spin at that time. Delay, Abramoff, Plame, torture, domestic spying--take your pick. Ironically, Foley was "head" of a committe on childrens' issues. i can only imagine the issues on his mind. Like, "Why doesn't anything come out of a 10 year old's cock when they orgasm?" His tendencies were so well known that pages were warned about him by there supervisor in a page training class in 2001!

Pedophilia outrages almost everyone, particularly religious right-wingers who form the backbone of republican voters. When are these little old gray-haired ladies going to acknowledge the widespread, very un-christian corruption within their sworn political party, with whom they're alligned so closely that preachers in the last presidential election testified that a vote for John Kerry was a vote for the devil? Again and again, as someone wrote into CNN, the GOP sends the message "Do as we say, not as we do." Do you really think that ads urging Bush to help stop the murder in Darfur are going to help? You're appealing to a killer's non-existent conscience to stop killing in a country which has no oil? Puhlease! Recognize the republican beast for what it is. Will this flap over the page still "resonate"--ie pentrate and remain in their backward skulls--with conservative, bible-thumping voters in November?

In his rotten statement, Foley asked for his supporters to remember him in their prayers. Honey, they're cursing your ass, not praying for you! But in a really sick pr move, he checks into rehab for alcoholism. Whether he's a drunk or not, this somehow softens the pedophilia charges. You see, he's just a man of god who seeks our prayers and forgiveness, and it was alcoholism which led him to backslide. There's a boozer in almost every family, so THAT sickness is a little more tolerable and a little less sick than plain ol' sober pedophilia. Poor thing. Maybe once Foley's cured of alcoholism, he can pursue a career within the catholic church.

It's lucky for the dems. Unable to compete with the $90,000,00 republican advertising (of which 90% is negative) budget for the congressional race, the democrats' opponents have conveniently smeared themselves. But CNN mentioned that dems were scrambling to "get in front of" the scandal and use it to their advantage. Scrambling? Hey, take advantage of it by all means, but shouldn't democrats have a bit more of a plan than wait until a month until the election and pray for some fucking pedophilia accusations to unravel? C'mon! We don't even know that Foley had sex with any underage boy. Aren't there other more crucial issues which dems could "get in front of" and should already have been spouting off about with some of Bill Clinton's recent offensive tone long before now? An unpopular, bloody and expensive war, the screwed-up Katrina response, failing economy, health care and educational systems--take your goddam pick from those and many republican failures. Don't they all individually trump a few inappropriate emails and condemn republicans as a bunch of ineffectual crooks? Doesn't the scope of any one of them outweigh a few "overly friendly" emails? Grabbing at this sex scandal so desperately proves that we DON'T have much of a plan. I realize that TV news interviews far more right-wingers than lefties, so that whatever our plan is it isn't aired nearly as often as theirs. But whatever the reason, dems must somehow get ther plan together, get it heard and understood by voters! Otherwise, we're guilty of the lack-of-plan-coasting-on-the-republicans-failures campaign which republicans have rightly accused us of for years.

It was a shock to hear Barack Obama recently detail a comprehensive plan to coax car manufacturers towards partial use of ethanol, which would begin to remedy our "addiction to oil" which Bush himself, no stranger to addictions, diagnosed the nation with ages ago. I haven't heard many plans besides Obama's to cure us. Democrats, you've got a month. Are you gonna coast on the shock of a disgraced pedophile or inspire us with some plans as rational and necessary as Obama's? Ok, so I also happen to relish the idea of one day having a president sexy enough to masturbate to.