Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) likes to send sexually explicit instant messages to young Congressional pages while masturbating. This is a bad thing for the Republican chairman of a subcommittee on exploited children to do. He also has a drinking problem.
I know this because every time I open the newspaper or read the Internet, a multitude of partisan pundits are drenching the scandal in spin, stating the most obvious facts with stentorian gravity. As if their words carry any profound insight. The majority of columnists and political activists feel an overweening need to inveigh against this situation. They do this, ostensibly, to convince people of their correctness, despite their clear political hucksterism.
What I’ve read, from both the left and the right, has been laughable.
Recently, game show host, actor, and former Richard Nixon sycophant Ben Stein, gave his take on the Foley fiasco in The American Spectator.
“We have a Republican man in Congress who sent e-mails to teenage boys asking them what they were wearing, and an entire party, the Democrats, whose primary constituency, besides the teachers’ unions, is homosexual men and lesbian women. I hope it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that a big part of male homosexual behavior is interest in young boys.” But don’t get Stein wrong. He qualifies this statement by insisting that his best friend is gay.
I would expect the Democrat-as-homo-as-pederast argument from, say, a crazy derelict on the street, but not from Stein. It’s true that the Democrats have encountered a few “gay” scandals in their time. Rep. Gerry Studds, (D-Mass.) the first openly gay Congressman, was censured in 1983 after admitting that he had had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old page. Not to be outdone, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) admitted to living with a male hooker who ran a prostitution service out of his house.
When I heard that Ann Coulter, Skelator on the Potomac, weighed in on the Foley scandal, my heart skipped a beat. Her article, cleverly titled “Who Knew Mark Foley Was a Closet Democrat” is absolutely insane. Once again, per wingnut dictum, “Democrat” equals “homo.” Over the course of several hundred words, Coulter accuses the Democrats of political opportunism. Coulter decries the Democrats’ hypocrisy in expecting the Republicans to hack into Foley’s instant messaging account, while concurrently criticizing Bush’s warrentless wiretapping legislation. Of course, this ignores the fact that evidence suggests that the Republican leadership knew of Foley’s inappropriate relationship before finding the messages and did nothing; similarly, evidence suggests that House leadership knew of Rep. Studds’ inappropriate relationship with a male page in the ’70s and also did nothing, a point Coulter is quick to make. In typical Coulter fashion, she fleshes out her argument with some good old-fashioned gay jokes. What a classy lady.
Ann Coulter’s column proves, once again, that she is the Carlos Mencia of punditry, pointless and unfunny. Coulter’s weakest argument is that the Democrats would not be as incensed by Foley’s sexual peccadilloes if he were one of them. There’s a clear tautology to this argument: If Foley weren’t a Republican, the Republican leadership wouldn’t feel the need to make excuses for his actions; his heretofore never-hinted drinking problem, for example. They wouldn’t need to voice quick, equivocal denunciations of his behavior either. Further, this current imbroglio is quite a bit different from the Studds controversy: There was no sex, only masturbation.
It gets better. L. Brent Bozell III, syndicated columnist and president of the odious Media Research Center, stated in his latest column that the Democratic party is hypocritical. My friends and I used to play a game wherein anytime a political pundit said that something was “hypocritical” you’d take a drink. If you played that game with Bozell’s column, however, you’d die of alcohol poisoning before finishing.
“Did Democrats, the party of feminism, the party that hates sexual harassers, demand accountability when President Clinton was accused of putting Kathleen Willey’s hand on his crotch as she asked for a job?”
Good point, Brent. But when did the Republicans start believing every allegation of sexual harassment prima facie? Instead of lamenting the Left’s supposed hypocrisy, about which Bozell expects us to be shocked, Bozell should take a principled stand: Foley’s young man fetish is wrong. Period.
Liberal pundits are just as quick to jump on this scandal. Shrill-talking meat puppet Susan Estrich has a column entitled “The Hypocrites’ Caucus” (drink!). “Democrats don’t feel the need to lie as much,” states Estrich, in her obnoxious declarative, clause-reliant writing style. Frankly, I think one could argue that Democrats, like all other politicians on the planet, feel the need to lie every waking hour, and sometimes hours during which they are asleep.
This scandal will remain a talking point for years to come. Both Democrats and Republicans, using their logic-deficient political columnists as mouthpieces, will hurdle over the prescient points of debate in favor of making partisan attacks.
A polarizing political scandal of this magnitude makes someone like myself wonder: Where are all the independent thinkers out there? Have they been stricken from the op-ed pages in favor of the easily digestible ramblings of partisan hacks? Must we wallow in middlebrow, tautological thinking? Alas, it’s always been this way, as the opinionistas cluck their tongues and wag their fingers in red-faced, bloviating outrage.
[email protected]