Foley's Problem

I've not posted about Mark Foley, though the whole scene makes me wince: once again, the sexual improprieties of a political figure drive his party's message and fortune more than any of the depressingly serious--utterly, profoundly serious--matters that ought to be driving everything. That he was such a condescending boob when Clinton had the affair with Monica Lewinsky (who was 20) makes me sneer a bit. But in DC the age of consent is 16, and congressional pages are 16 and older. (And if the accounts are right, the page played along at least for a while--tossing back his own suggestive IMs.) It's not to say it was appropriate--and not to say that I wouldn't flip out if it were MY teenager he was being salacious with. But child molester? Child predator??

Katha Pollitt writes this in this week's Nation:

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... 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.

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.

I'll take the Democrats back in power any way it happens; the day the Republicans drop-kick the fanatics to the curb is the day I'll reconsider them. Still, what an embarrassment if it happens this way: because Mark Foley couldn't keep his repressed little mind off of teenaged boys, and everybody else decided that that was the issue that would stick. Is it true? Do we want no other dialogue at this dark hour in our country's history, three weeks before election day? It's a golden opportunity for a Democrat worth his or her salt to step up to the plate and shout through the din. Predictably, not a one of them is doing it.

Shame on both of their houses. And God help the rest of us.