Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Fallout from Foley-gate

It's official: there is no Republican sin that cannot be blamed on Democrats. On the car radio this afternoon, I got to hear a conservative opine that the "real" issue was the left-wing media that was trying to use this in the election. Riiight, because we all know scandal-mongering and wedge-issues haven't been prime election fodder for say, ever.

Then we get into really fun apologist stuff- I heard one person say that there had never been any Senate page sex-scandals before the 1990s, which sounds like a stretch to me. I mean, if we have people boinking slaves (Jefferson) and maids (Thurmond), I don't think a page is so far-fetched.

So then I started looking on FOX to see what their reaction was- O'Reilly apparently has no sympathy for Foley and called him a predator. His guest Ann Coulter said that she felt sorry for him, but also mentioned that Democrats just "didn't get" why Christians weren't going to react to the Foley story the way Dems wanted them to (you know, with revulsion, horror, and more than a little outrage that the party that runs on family values is also responsible for Senators helping each other to cover up sexual misconduct, and, in Hastert's case, possibly willfully turning a blind eye to events that should have been investigated)

Nooo. Coulter started out with this gem: "Democrats... look, if I knew as much about Islam as they know about American Christians, I'd be guilty of a hate crime." Yeah, because we all know there's nothing Christians like more than homosexual pedophillia. (Please leave all choirboy jokes at the door.)

Ann continued: "No, we Christians, we feel sorry for people like Mark Foley. I hope he gets the help he needs. It's a tragedy. But we really do feel sorry for Foley... just like we feel sorry for women who have abortions."

Wow. I didn't realize those were, um, part of the same end of the moral taint scale. Good to know.

What else... Hastert was on the radio covering his ass, claiming he doesn't know a thing about anything, and he doesn't know whose job it was to tell him, but obviously they dropped the ball, and it's really too bad the Dems are piling on this issue, because so what if he missed that some page was getting "over-affectionate" emails, I mean, after all, he was trying to deal with the budget and the war on terror. Kudos, Denny.

Oh, and Hannity bitched out the various conservatives who are calling for Hastert to resign- "he didn't know about it, and it's outrageous, and why aren't you ashamed of yourself for defaming a good man like this." Yes, because we all know that in politics, if someone says something in an interview, that must be THE TRUTH . I mean, that's totally how Republicans react to Dems in scandals, right? (That reminds me, Coulter tried to deflect by mentioning a sex scandal involving a Democrat and page a few decades ago- "Nobody went after Tip O'Neill". Touche.)

The best part about all this is the suggestion that the Republicans didn't do anything about Foley because they were trying to be "gay-sensitive". Or, as Gingrich and Coulter both put it, "Can you imagine the reaction from the Left if Republicans had started investigating a gay Senator just because he asked his page what he wanted for his birthday?"

That's right, I forgot, it's the Democrats' fault. Just like everything else.

You know, I just have to wonder what the reaction would have been if this was an openly gay Democratic senator?

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