By John Burtis
Monday, October 2, 2006
It appears that a bedraggled Mark Foley made a full and spontaneous confession of some sort before he packed his bags and dragged off for parts unknown after he was defrocked as a troubled serial e-mail sender hindered by dubious antecedents and an unwholesome desire for personal photographs -- a curse known to draw the Democrats to a situation like blow flies to a pool of cooling molasses speckled with floating sugar cubes.
Following the unveiling of Mr. Foley's rather tawdry unrequited affairs de coeur, and his sorry requests for pictures and the like from a 16-year-old kid, but apparently no more save some unnerving trash talk, Dennis Hastert and Rep. Thomas Reynolds are now being attacked by Ms. Nancy Pelosi and the undeniably gelastic members of her own chaste coterie of scalawags for initiating another global conspiracy to keep it all hushed up and then some.
Yup, according to this latest Democratic play, or is it ploy, it's hard to tell anymore, Karen Finney, the fresh dulcet voice and face of the new DNC, doxologizes gravely that, "Congressman Reynolds' inaction in the face of such a serious situation is very troubling, and raises important questions about whether there was an attempt to cover up criminal activity involving a minor to keep it from coming to light before election day."
Everything that Republicans do, according to Ms. Finney's previous appearances on televised news broadcasts, is troubling and raises important questions, while the Democrats, in the final weeks before national elections, always walk without sin, as they have forever -- veritable adams and Eves in the Garden of Eden before apples, serpents, Republicans, and e-mails.
and as a minor hayseed from New Hampshire, I seem to recall some problems of a like nature which befouled the nests of a few stodgy Democratic Massachusetts Pilgrims.
Take that arch conservationist and early gay marriage advocate, former Representative Gerry Studds (D-Ma), who has performed so many handstands for Provincetown since he left his congressional office back in 1996, and his slight acquaintance with the same criminal activity that Ms. Karen Finney opines so conscientiously about.
In those tranquil days before e-mails were the all the rage, Mr. Studds, who painfully suffered with those similar agonizing afflictions which seem to beset Mr. Foley, but who was also, in today's parlance, "self-actualized," decided that he would have a whirlwind affair with a 17 year old page who was 19 years his junior in 1983, before such lurid activity was as fashionable as it is in today's public schools. So the avant garde congressman poured a load of vodka and cranberry juice into the kid and imposed himself on the naif, rather gruffly, or so the story goes.
But since Mr. Studds represented Massachusetts which is oh so very liberal, his ethereal reputation was increasingly solidified as a result of his abominable and ungentlemanly behavior. The only public castigation he suffered was at the hands of his old friend Barney Frank (D-Ma), who chided him openly for needing the booze to sweep the lad off his feet, or some such play on words.
Of course, Mr. Studds was eventually congressionally censured for this illicit behavior. But he was safely re-elected by his district in the next election, such is the overweening concern shown by the progressive electorate when this type of lurid behavior is evinced by upright solons, street criminals, and child predators.
a bit later, in about, oh, 1989, a freshly chastened Mr. Frank would also find himself suffering as a result of his own uproarious personal lifestyle, which blinded him to the machinations of his house mate, business crony, and erstwhile confidant, Mr. Steve Gobie, a male prostitute with a criminal past, who had served a bit of jail time arising from the tender nature of his earlier romantic entanglements.
Mr. Gobie, who served as Mr. Frank's personal assistant and was offered ample compensation under the table, was somehow able to operate a house of male prostitution out of Mr. Frank's Washington home, wholly unbeknownst to the brainy maverick representative, who somehow overlooked its obvious evidence.
Later, throwing himself on the handiest of all liberal swords, Mr. Frank gamely explained the whole sorry interlude away by going on about how he was taken advantage of, that he was the real victim, that he was only trying to help an obviously troubled man, and that he was taken to the cleaners as a result of his notorious generosity to men down on their luck.
Oh, yes, Mr. Frank, too, has been re-elected over and over despite his extreme short sightedness in that troubling affair.
as Jeff Jacoby put it so well in a piece in the Tampa Tribune, "Maybe in Oregon or Illinois, depravity can cost a congressman his seat. In Massachusetts, where standards are lower, sleaziness is a bar to nothing." No truer words were ever said.
and perhaps here is the moral to the whole the sad Foley story of an allegory of a growing myth.
If Representative Mark Foley had only been from Massachusetts - a few shameful e-mails, a photo request from a vulnerable youth, some rough sexually pointed talk directed at a child, and so on - the story wouldn't have raised an eyebrow, elicited a smile, or even a column anywhere near the front section of the Boston Globe -- all the less so had it involved a Democratic congressman. and following his brief expose, his swift and tidy unction, and his foreshortened rehabilitation, he'd be re-elected as often as he'd choose to run, as a hero.
But make him a Republican from Florida, that state with the XXX on it thanks to al Gore, Katherine Harris, and George Bush, and boom, you've got a scandal in the making, all centered within a web of deceit, inside a plan hatched by Karl Rove, and directed by George Bush.
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