October 3, 2006

Spinning the UnSpinnable

I want to say I'm totally shocked and appalled by the whole Foley affair. And to some extent, that's true. I'm not shocked that Foley was on the Child Safety commission and helped sponsor that law to protect children from pedophiles. (That seems to be kind of par for the course for our politicians. You can pretty much bet that if they're on a committee to be doing X, Y, or Z that they will be caught commiting a crime that involves X, Y, or Z.)

When I first read about this on Friday (thanks, huffingtonpost!), I thought to myself "wow, another sleazy Republican has been caught up in scandal." With each passing day, the Foley thing just gets odder and odder. The inital story I read only said that he was IM'ing/e-mailing underage pages with sexually explicit content. Later, it came out that he was trolling for some young boy loving.

Yesterday, I found out that Hastert and other leaders had known about this for 10 months, yet nothing was done about it -- other than telling Foley to break all contacts with the page. The president of the alumni pages said that when he was a page 5 (FIVE!?!??!) years ago, all the Republican pages were warned about Foley. Obviously, someone knew about Foley, yet no one did anything to actually stop him. (Head on over to abc.com for a really comprehesive set of articles on the Foley thing.)

Now, today we learn he was having cybersex with a page during a vote. Boehner is blaming Hastert. The President says something lame about how this is just "disgusting." Where is the outrage? Where is the condemnation? Why are people like Rush Limbaugh saying the Democrats "leaked" this story close to the election for political advantage, but praise FOX News for sitting on the story for a year and refusing to air it? Why hasn't every bloody politician, pundit, and anyone else involved in this sorry mess officially condemned Foley in the strongest language possible and promised full, thorough and swift investigation? Come on people, quit trying to spin this to save face -- no one loves a pedophile, the damage is done. If you want to gain points with the Americans, condemn this man for the criminal that he is!

But, of course that's not going to happen. Because Hastert is involved and doesn't want to lose his job. Boehner too. Falwell et. al won't speak up on this because it'll make the Republicans look bad. They're all too worried about losing the election. Congratulations guys ... instead of having it be just Foley -- you've managed to drag yourselves down too.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So let's make a list of everyone the Republicans don't care about:

Black people.
The poor.
The uninsured.
LGBTs.
Immigrants.
Prisoners.
Soldiers they send off to war.
Iraqis.
Pages.

Anonymous said...

can we sum that up as "everyone that isn't them"?