I shouldn’t say anything, because I know that political entries never bring happiness to anyone, least of all me. But I’ve been reading all about this developing scandal surrounding Representative Mark Foley and his messages to Congressional pages, and I want to make sure I fully understand the situation. So, let’s review:
Item One: A Democratic president is found to have had an admittedly adulterous but otherwise legal and consensual affair with a possibly naive but definitely legal-age young woman. Republican leaders are so morally outraged that they bring the country to a virtual halt for two years while they try to hound him from office.
Item Two: A Republican representative sexually harasses underage boys for years — a representative who authored some 15 bills aimed at protecting children from sexual predators, no less. Republican leaders, who apparently knew about their man’s actions for at least a year, and possibly longer, do nothing. In fact, they urge him to seek re-election. Possibly because he was a big contributor to the NRCC, a political action committee “devoted to increasing the number of Republicans in Congress.”
I just love double standards, don’t you?
Man, I just can’t resist the political posts…
Item one: I won’t defend the House Republicans, but let’s not forget that Clinton was also accused of harrassing several other women (which is neither legal, nor consensual), and when he was called before a grand jury about one of them (an unprecedented event for a sitting President), he lied under oath about his actions. The Monica thing got all the headlines, but he was actually impeached for lying under oath.
Clinton was one of our best and smartest presidents, but he was also one of our worst & dumbest. He did all the difficult things exceedingly well, and did many of the very easy things (like keeping his hands to himself) very poorly. He’s going to have a great legacy (especially given all the good work he’s doing now as an ex-President), but it will unfortunately always be tarred by his inability to manage his personal life as well as he managed his public persona.
Item two: This freak deserves whatever he gets and more, but again you left some things out: they’re not driving him from office because he resigned right away. Also, the Democrats are aggressively trying to drive other Republicans from office (or from leadership positions).
Not that I’m complaining – anyone who would knowingly allow kids to stay in danger like that deserves to lose their jobs – but that doesn’t constitute a double-standard. It’s the same game of political football on both sides…
Oh, and by the way, doesn’t “Foleygate” sound like something you’d use to make a movie?
Just asking…
Brian’s got a good point. It’s a political mess regardless of what’s at stake at any given time. Either it’s war or fondling young boys.. nothing will change. Libs despise the conservative and vice-versa it seems. Both sides use the same guns and whatever bullets they can find.
What I find interesting is that its been noted that this was the first documented case of this with the potential of there being more issues involving Pages. So the first instance happens to be a Republican, had it have been a Democrat, I’m sure it wouldn’t be much different of a mess.
Brian, my perception of a double standard comes from the fact that Republicans, especially those in the House, have long painted themselves as morally superior to their opponents while turning a blind eye to the failings of their own. (Actually, it might be more accurate to call it a “cynical eye,” since it appears that Speaker Hastert and other GOP leaders knew full-well what Foley was up to and chose to ignore and/or conceal it for reasons so far unknown, but pretty easy to guess.)
Cheno, it’s entirely possible, even likely, that Democrats have also misbehaved with their pages, and that shit’s about to hit the fan on both sides of the aisle. But a key point in my mind is that Democrats and their supporters in the media haven’t spent the last 12 years oozing sanctimony, wrapping themselves in scripture to appeal to the religious-minded, and calling their opponents immoral at every opportunity. It’s pretty tough to resist digging into a big ol’ slice of Scalzi’s Schadenfreude pie right now.
In an ideal world, of course, neither side would use this sort of thing against the other. But we aren’t so lucky as to live in such a place…
Oh, and Brian, you’re correct: a Foleygate does sound like some kind of movie-making gadget… 🙂
Just like the scandal with the Catholic priests a few years back, former pages are now going to come out of the woodwork. With hundrds of congresspeople over many years on both sides of the aisle, the odds of all the offenders being in one party are essentially zero.
And Jason – I think if you look carefully, you’ll see that the people quoting scripture are almost always Republican supporters on the religious right, who seek to paint everything the government does with a religious brush, or Republican detractors who quote scripture in the context of “they claim to be good Christians, but then they do such-and-such [war, taxes, sex scandal – you name it].” There are exceptions, but most of what I’ve heard has been of this variety.
Put another way: if every Republican in Congress was an aetheist, this would be every bit as disgusting & disturbing…
I certainly agree with you on the last point, Brian.
Perhaps I’ve given the wrong impression here – I don’t honestly believe that only Republicans are guilty of this sort of misbehavior. I know that when rotten logs get kicked over, we see wriggling things of all descriptions under them. But one of the things that really stuck in my craw during the Clinton impeachment was the constant implication that what he did — committing adultery and then lying about it when he got caught — was somehow unique, either to Clinton specifically or to Democrats in general. Perhaps this implication was coming more from Limbaugh and his fans (roughly 3/5 of the population of my home state, I would guess) than actual Republican congresspeople, but it was a constant hum in our culture during that period, and I found it deeply offensive. Because anyone with a lick of common sense knew damn well that many of the Republicans who were crying for Bill’s head on a platter were guilty of the same damn thing. But that wasn’t what they would’ve had us believe, and it isn’t what a lot of my Utah neighbors seem(ed) to think.
And that’s why I find myself experiencing some geuine amusement over the revelation that, oops, the GOP has its pecadilloes, too. I admit I’m being immature about this, but my reaction is what it is. I believe that what goes around comes around, and there’s a big ol’ load of bad karma that needs to come back around.
In any event, I think what’s really important about the situation isn’t so much what Foley did — he’s already resigned and is off paying his pennance — but what the party leaders did. Or did not do, as the case may be. The cover-up, which was presumably a cynical effort to maintain Foley’s sizable monetary contributions to the NRCC and to avoid negative publicity for the party, is the thing I find most troubling, and the thing for which the GOP ought to pay.
If memory serves, I believe that during the Clinton thing, the Republican Speaker of the House had to resign over an extramarital affair, and then the guy they were going to replace him with also got caught sleeping around, so they had to go to a third person. I may have the timeline wrong here, but the point is yes – anyone who claimed Clinton was the only sex/liar in government was a Limbaugh freak.
As for the GOP leadership: don’t make the same mistake with them. There are plenty of things democratic leaders have covered up (now and in the past). There’s even talk that some Democrats knew about Foley before it went public also. I’m not excusing the GOP here, but as with Clinton, I’d beware of anyone claiming the moral high ground.
What he did is bad enough – anyone who has to point out that in addition to it being bad, they, themselves, are much better than he is, probably has something to hide…
You speak wisely, sensei. 🙂
I know that corruption and human weakness is a bipartisan condition; that was always my position during the Clinton years. But I guess I’ve just gotten mightily sick of hearing about Republican “family values” and all the other morality rhetoric that has become attached to the GOP, and I can’t help but chortle when I see them getting some payback for the sanctimony. Maybe the sanctimony hasn’t been generated by the politicians themselves, as we’ve discussed, but it’s definitely surrounded them. And maybe also my feelings are influenced by living in Utah, where politics and religion are inextricably mixed and many, many people seem to take it as a matter of faith that the Rs are the party of Godliness and light while Democrats are one sinful step above slime molds on the evolutionary scale. Oh, except they say in these parts that evolution is a commie lie meant to seduce people away from Sunday School. Chalk my feelings up to a persecution complex, if you must.
I would imagine that things are a bit different back there on the East Coast…