Hear no, See no, Speak no …

October 7th, 2006

Some people simply don’t want the truth … they’re happier with their illusions, even if their dreamscape puts them behind the 8 ball. It’s odd and delusional and ignorant … it’s the kind of emotional disconnect that floats the What’s The Matter With Kansas theory, and it’s not always “values” oriented. Sometimes it’s more like What’s The Matter With Limbaugh or What’s The Matter With Drudge — and why would anybody think they’re role models worthy of attention?

Three new male pages have come forward to tattle Mark Foley’s pick-up lines. Matt Drudge, Dark Overlord of the Ditto Head Spin Machine [also known as He Who Feeds Limbaugh Raw Meat,] has suggested that these kids are making it all up, dupes of the Liberal media. That’s so incredibly cowardly that it takes the breath away — but the gullible are buying it. Here’s one bloggers response:

This thing has blown up in the Lib’s faces. Young punks making up pranks and then it plays perfectly into the political scheme, a month before elections. It just strengthens my resolve to go all-Republican.

Pfffft!

Wayne Madsen has further tacky insider dish on Denny Hastart and the homoerotic underpinnings on the Hill, which suggests that Hastart’s protecting his ass is both a desperate measure and an irony … and this is probably more than you want to know. As we are in the Times of Revelation, and if luck holds, I think we’ll ALL get more than we want to know about this and other pithy “internal” subjects in the next months.

As usual, I’m not going PC on this topic. Foley is a sexual stalker taking advantage of his Congressional position and status — his sexual orientation attracts him to men, and young men of the age group Foley was soliciting are usually sexually active. The odds were against him, but over the years he evidently struck pay dirt a couple of times. That’s realistic. At some point in any given week, you’ll find a teen not old enough to drink hanging around a gay bar looking for some reassurance that he’s not alone in his choices. It was extremely rash behavior from Mr. Foley, but he evidently thought his comrades in the Congress had his … mmmm … back.

The argument that Foley is a pedophile is, at least with me, suspect … he wasn’t cruising middle schools — and pedophilia is about power and control, not sex. Seems to me that Foley is, rather, a pederast … seeking sex with young men. The eye candy set. I don’t think Foley’s attention was focused in his power/control centers, but farther south, in his groin — and I doubt that he saw his sexual candidates as children. That WE do says a lot about who we pretend to be, rather than who we are.

We think that our 16 and 17 year olds aren’t sexually active … and that they would be as shocked and horrified by Foley’s proposition as we are. Their response to this should inform us … but I don’t think we’re listening. The majority of these kids knew the drill, had heard the whispers and just thought Foley was “weird” and “sick” … that doesn’t sound sexually bewildered to me. And I can’t help but wonder what kind of action a good-looking Congresswoman playing the Foley role might have gotten from the straight pages. Which is NOT to say that unwelcomed sexual advance is not traumatic and perhaps even more so to those just exploring their sexuality. It’s simply that if we regard these young people solely as “innocents” and “children,” we again miss the complexity of the issues.

This is a firestorm of ignorance breaking over the can of worms that is [a]merica’s Homegrown Mythology and Sacred Cows — and it looks to leave no one out, with the confusion about gay pederasts v. straight pedophiles still up for grabs in the mind of the church and it’s followers.

I’m not defending Mark Foley — but I see Foley as a middle-aged gay man looking for young dalliance [and evidently leaving his life partner out of the loop, as well.]
I regret that this whole affair [pun/no pun] does nothing to help gay equity and civil rights — the nation does not need further examples of irresponsible sexual behavior so it can finger-point on issues of gender bias. Studies show that most child sexual abuse is perpetrated by straight, not gay, men — but the nation isn’t ready to hear it.

In homophobic [a]merica, the distance between the concept of straight sex and gay sex is as fathomless and hard to breach as the Snake River Canyon that Evil Knevil tried to jump on his ‘cycle — you don’t just need a parachute to make a try at it … you need waders.

Our schizophrenia on this topic is what is really twisted. The truth is that if some old coot was hitting on the young women pages, it would have been a much smaller outcry … hardly a blip on the radar. Besides — women ask for it, doncha know. In Pennsylvania, Rep. Don Sherwood has apologized to his constituents for having had a mistress, but assured them, in his re-bid campaign, that he did NOT try to strangle her, despite police reports — notice he didn’t quit his campaign and doesn’t expect to lose. And Mormon polygamists, for instance, are snatching little girls right out of the cradle and pluralistically marrying them off to the old patriarch’s, while nobody but Anderson Cooper, himself a gay man, seems upset enough to explore it. In [a]merica, not all sexual crimes are equal — today, we are lost in the disproportionate.

What this is telling us is that we’re so disconnected from our sexuality in this nation, so locked down in our puritanical roles, that we are patently unable to handle either the facts on the ground or the checks and balances that allow protections against abuse. If we can’t even think it, let alone discuss it, there is no hope for oversight. And if some sexual abuse is blasphemy while other examples are excusable because “it’s always been that way,” we’ve got to wonder which of us are the sane and which are the actual “deviants.”

As I said, I’m not PC on this. Over at Huffington Post, they had a contest recently to put a caption on a picture of Dubby, Foley and the Walsh’s [from America's Most Wanted.] I made the cut — check it out here, some are very funny — and one of the first blog responses is that, based on my submission, this isn’t about “gay.”

Get real. Of course it is. That it’s being used as a conversational billy club wielded with christocratic hysteria [Gingrich has called Foley a 'flamer'] doesn’t make it NOT gay — and because the Red’s are eager and happy to try to turn the conversation to exploit one of this nations bugaboo’s doesn’t change the fact that Foley was cruising. “At the office,” and on the company dime. Can’t we just admit that? And while we’re at it, let’s acknowledge that his culpability in this matter is not an indictment of gays everywhere. The gay organizations have come out strongly against Foley’s activity and the Log Cabin Republican’s are the one’s who will take the most heat on this … at least for now.

The larger context — and the Important One — is that this is about abuse of power and moral apathy in a position of trust … priests, rabbi’s, ministers, politicians, teachers and even parents misuse authority and betray trust, and sometimes sexually. They must be held accountable. It’s also about personal cover up and partisan enabling — and if our lawmakers have no ethics, our nation will have no ethical law.

It’s simple at the heart of it … but unless we tell ourselves the truth, we’ll never cut through the crap and start behaving like adults. We need to SERIOUSLY grow up in this nation. Sometimes I think the kids are more emotionally mature than the rest of us.

Buzz is that there will be a Dem pilloried soon, a red herring offered through the maneuvering of our friend Karl — we’ll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, here’s good news — in just this week, Bush has lost six popularity points; he’s down to 33%

Jude

The gay problem in the GOP
David Link, Boston Globe
October 5, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/mxffb

THE TRAGIC OPERA of former congressman Mark Foley is the revenge of don’t ask, don’t tell.

Foley, a Republican from Florida, resigned Friday after e-mails and instant messages between him and several teenage congressional pages surfaced. The Republican leadership knew that at least one page had gotten e-mails where Foley admired the body of one of the page’s friends, and asked the page for a picture of himself, e-mails the page naturally found sick and a bit creepy.

Republican leaders responded to the potential political problem by telling Foley to knock it off. With respect to the larger issue, though, there was no asking or telling. The boy’s own revulsion at the obviously inappropriate attention was ignored, not only by Foley’s partisan fellows, but by some news outlets that also had seen the e-mails.

If this has a familiar ring, look in the Catholic Church for the bell. Republican leadership was acting like the Catholic hierarchy, which played shell games with men accused of sexually abusing children. And there’s a good reason for the similarity. The inability to deal straightforwardly with gay people leads to other kinds of truth-avoidance when things go south. But that’s what comes from not wanting to know something, and going out of your way to remain ignorant.

We’ve come a long way since homosexuals had two basic options: the closet or jail. But a good portion of the electorate, most of them Republican, still seems to long for the good old days when we didn’t have to think about “those people.” Both Libertarians and, generally, the Democratic Party have withdrawn their official support for the closet over time. States, too, are seeing what a losing battle this is, and allowing homosexuals to live their lives in conformity with, rather than opposition to, the law.

But that leaves Republicans and the religious right trying to live a 1950s lie in the new millennium. As Foley prepared in 2003 to run for the Senate, newspapers in Florida and elsewhere published stories about his homosexuality. But you’d never hear any of his colleagues saying such a thing. And Foley himself refused to discuss the issue, until his lawyer acknowledged Wednesday that the former congressman is indeed gay.

Being in the closet is hard to pull off without help, and for years Foley was eagerly abetted by his Republican brethren, whose willful blindness is at the heart of the current tragedy. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, majority leader John Boehner, and others in the House leadership are still under the impression that the closet, like Tinkerbell, will continue to live as long as we all believe. And believe, they do — against all the evidence.

But the number of people who believe in the closet is declining day by day and generation by generation. Hastert and the rest of his cronies are their own victims. The political turmoil they caused for themselves is only just.

But their failure to acknowledge the obvious reality has other victims as well: the boys whom Foley apparently pursued. Some of the messages show some tolerance of Foley’s advances, but not much more. This was no one’s “Summer of ‘42.” The healthy disgust in one boy’s use of the word “sick” repeated 13 times seems about right.

But what can one expect from denying grown men — and women — a normal, adult sex life? Whether the denial of adult intimacy comes from religious conviction or the ordinary urge toward conformity, people who run away from their sexuality nearly always have to answer to nature somehow. For people who fear abiding and mutual love, the trust and confusion of the young is a godsend. Add to that the perquisites of power, and a degenerate is born.

Fortunately for the arc of justice, the closet ultimately works against itself. Foley’s case and the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal are the last screams of the dinosaurs. It took the dinosaurs a long time to finally die off, or evolve into creatures that could continue to survive, and the same will be true of the closet’s final supporters. But they will look more and more ridiculous each time that they take pride in holding up the ruins of this particular antiquity while tending to the wounded when the building again collapses.

Like the Catholic Church, the Republican Party in Washington guarantees its own future calamities in its enduring and steadfast habit of pretending that, unlike heterosexuality, homosexuality can be either denied or suppressed. ++

Focus On The Hucksters
by digby
10/07/2006
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

James Dobson is not just an average run of the mill preacher. In fact, he’s not a preacher at all — he’s a child psychologist:

Dobson holds a doctorate in child development from the University of Southern California (1967). He was an Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California School of Medicine for fourteen years. He spent seventeen years on the staff of the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles in the Division of Child Development and Medical Genetics.

His organization, Focus On The Family, is allegedly based on an amalgam of Biblical precepts and psychology and he dispenses his child rearing and marital advice in modern psychobabble terms. He’s more than a religious leader — his followers look to him as a doctor, particularly in the field of child psychology.

He has often been critical of modern popular culture not just because of its supposed anti-Christian message but because of its effect on young, developing minds. You’ll remember this, I’m sure:

In truth, this tale has very little to do with SpongeBob himself, and everything to do with the media’s ability to obscure the facts and to direct lies and scorn toward those of us who care about defending children. It all began on an evening in late January, during Inaugural Week in Washington, D.C. At that time, I spoke briefly to 350 guests attending a banquet hosted by Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and Gary Bauer’s American Values. I concluded by sharing a word of concern about a video that will be distributed to 61,000 public and private elementary schools across the nation, for use on the proposed “We Are Family Day,” March 11.

[...]

Imagine a classroom full of wide-eyed five-year olds, sitting in a circle in front of the teacher. These kindergarteners will believe anything they are told, from the notion that reindeer can fly on Christmas Eve to the idea that bunnies lay candy eggs during “Spring Break.” They are vulnerable to whatever adults tell them. In this instance, the kids are not learning about the alphabet or about exciting fairy tales; they are potentially hearing incomprehensible references to adult perverse sexuality. And the rationale for this instruction is “tolerance and diversity.” Generations past would have been shocked and outraged by the very thought of such nonsense. Yet many parents either don’t know of the teaching or are passively willing to go along with it.

[...]

Parents, I urge you to keep a close eye on your sons and daughters. Watch carefully everything that goes into their little minds. Monitor their textbooks and the words of their teachers. Do not turn them over to harmful television programs. When God’s name is used in vain, or when sex and violence come on the screen, turn off the tube and then read and discuss together the scriptures found in Psalm 101:3: “I will set before my eyes no vile thing”.

Here’s James Dobson today on the Foley scandal:

DOBSON: As it turns out, Mr. Foley has had illicit sex with no one that we know of, and the whole thing turned out to be what some people are now saying was a — sort of a joke by the boy and some of the other pages … By midafternoon yesterday, a rumor emerged that in fact Mark Foley had been pranked by the House pages. It is the first plausible thing I’ve heard in seven days…

Spongebob holding hands with Big Bird on a video about tolerance is shocking homosexual brainwashing. Exchanging lewd e-mails with Republican congressman is good clean fun.

That’s an allegedly professional child psychologist and religious leader there, adopting Drudge’s GOP approved talking point that this whole sordid affair is nothing more than an elaborate joke perpetrated by the victims. No harm, no foul, no evidence. Let’s have some tolerance for powerful Republicans who can’t be bothered to stop a drunken congressman from hitting on teenagers. The kids are alright.

Please do not ever tell me again that I have to respect this man’s religious beliefs or his professional analysis of human behavior. They are clearly just disposable political garbage to be used to bilk his followers and empower himself. I don’t want to hear about morals from any of these people anymore. They are just cheap political operatives and deserve no more polite consideration than Karl Rove or Dick Morris. Less actually, Karl Rove and Dick Morris aren’t making the huge profit that Dobson and Perkins and the rest of these Jesus hucksters do. They should retire and go into the Republican religion business. But I suppose it might be too low and unprincipled, even for them. ++

“Sure I Slept With Her”
by digby
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

… but I swear I didn’t try to kill the lying bitch. Vote Republican!

In other races, the Foley case has created an unfavorable backdrop for Republicans. In Pennsylvania this week, Representative Don Sherwood, a suddenly endangered Republican, bought time on television to offer an apology in response to allegations that he had abused his mistress.

Hello?

And then there was this bizarre statement by David Brooks on last night’s Newshour:

I don’t want to minimize the Foley thing because the way kids are raised is a voting issue.

Who’s talking about the way kids are raised? No matter how you slice it, the kids behaviors are not the issue. It’s the 52 year old man trying to seduce them and his bosses and pals knowing about it and covering it up. Am I missing something here?

Why is this stuff so hard for the black and white morality crowd? Consensual sex between adults — nobody’s business. Marrying member of the same sex — nobody’s business. Choking mistress — wrong. Sexually preying on 16 year-olds — wrong.

Maybe we could make up some flash cards so the moralizing rightwing could carry them around and consult them whenever they get confused. ++

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves