Why America Is Stupid

It's very hard to keep up with all of the developments in the Foley case, what with the FBI investigation, more stories of cyberstalking other former House pages, the fact that this was a known issue since at least 2002 and yet the GOP Representative on the House Page Board would let Foley go to dinner with the pages, etc. etc. It shows that if your party wraps yourself in the shroud of moral values and decides that the other side is nothing but a bunch of libertine bacchanalians, you are going to reap a whirlwind when something like this comes out. Bunch of Elmer Gantrys, indeed.

But there's something unsettling here, at least to me, who is someone who believes that Democratic, progressive policy is in the best interests of the country. You simply cannot get a fair hearing on any issue in the public sphere. The soundbite culture has reduced policy debate to 20 seconds or less. The cable news shoutfests are devoid of substance. The only time anybody pays attention to what's going on in Congress is when a Representative decides to creep everybody out by engaging in cybersex with 16 year-olds.

(A word on this. 16 is apparently the age of consent in Washington, DC; and yet under a law co-sponsored by Rep. Foley, soliciting sex with anyone under the age of 18 is a federal crime. So we have a situation here, as noted by Gleen Greenwald, where if Foley had sex with one of these high-schoolers he would have been engaging in perfectly legal activity, but if he mentioned it on the Internet it's a crime. This is the lunatic behavior of our lawmaking in action, one once contradictory and blindly demagoguic.)

Foley's behavior, and the appalling, Bernard Cardinal Law-like behavior of the House leadership that covered it up, deserve wide attention. It can be fit into a narrative of a group of politicians that value party over country, party over American safety, party over morals, party uber alles. But at the same time, I have this nagging feeling that there are so many other stories deserving of attention that impact the lives of pretty much all Americans.

We have the revelation that convicted felon Jack Abramoff practically lived at the White House during Bush's first term, making hiring and firing decisions, getting federal funds for his clients and overall making something like 500 trips to the executive building over four years.

We have Bob Woodward's book, and honestly I think Woodward is a self-promoter and a bad writer, but you can't deny some of the nuggets in there, for example the fact that there's an insurgent attack in Iraq every 15 minutes, or the fact that there was a meeting completely hidden from the 9-11 Commission in July 2001, where George Tenet warned Condi Rice of an impending attack and got the big brushoff (Condi apparently has no memory of this, just like she's had no memory or anticipation of anything her entire tenure), the fact that Andy Card and Laura Bush wanted Rumsfeld fired, and that HENRY FREAKING KISSINGER is a key advisor on Iraq (they're re-fighting the Vietnam War, unbelievable)... and it goes on and on. Oh yeah, 2007's going to be worse in Iraq than 2006, according to intelligence reports we haven't seen but Woodward has.

Add all of that up, and the fact that we overturned an 800 year-old law providing habeas corpus rights for prisoners, and basically legalized Abu Ghraib, and the Foley scandal really shouldn't be at the top of the list. But we have a dysfunctional system in this country where only the senstionalistic stories rise to the top. In this case, that story tells the same tale as many of the others: Republican leaders drunk on power, neglecting the cancer within their ranks, hypocritical beyond all limits, valuing the majority over security and safety and everything else. I just wish this country's crisis in healthcare could inspire as much outrage, or the unwinnable war in Iraq, or the slow and quiet destruction of the planet and its natural resources.

Republicans right now look to be going down, down, down in November. That it's about sex rather than the 450 other reasons should give everybody pause.