The Foley scandal
If you haven't been reading the newspapers since late last week, Rep. Mark Foley, R-Florida, has become the latest reason to return Congress to control of the Democrats. This scandal might be the final straw.
Foley got caught sending sexually suggestive e-mails to former Congressional pages, who can be boys or girls but in this case were all boys. These are teen-agers who spend a year or two in Washington, D.C.,doing the gofer work of Congress and enjoying the opportunity to view Congress in action from close-up. Some of the ones who didn't get the e-mails knew about what their fellow pages were receiving, but kept quiet out of fear of retaliation. What makes matters worse for the Republicans is that Foley was co-chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children (he resigned from Congress last week and checked himself into alcohol rehab after the e-mails became public).
The Washington blog Wonkette did some YouTube sleuthing and came up with a clip of Foley on the O'Reilly show on Fox in May castigating Ted Kennedy for holding up passage of a bill to create a national sexual predator list (Kennedy wanted a hate crimes bill attached to that legislation). Here's a link to the clip through Wonkette. As they say in the Mastercard ads, priceless.
Compounding the scandal is that the GOP House leadership apparently knew of the e-mails for over a year and did nothing about it. Where this could particularly hurt them is in vote totals from their Christian Right base. Christian Rightists can forgive financial scandals but not garbage like this. And before anyone brings up Bill Clinton, let's recall that Bill and Monica were two consenting adults. Foley was an adult and the ex-pages were teenaged boys who had once been his employees.
The more extreme nutbars on the right are using the Foley scandal to whip up a pogrom against gays, even though an average gay man is no more likely to be a pedophile than an average heterosexual man. Take it as a sign of their desperation.