Foley's pathetic
blame game

Our president lies about WMDs in Iraq and launches an unjust and unnecessary war. We are in debt beyond belief. Home prices are plummeting. Government spending is out of control. A woman's right to choose is under attack. Gays are bashed regularly by members of Congress and the President. Americans are dying as we speak. We've lost the war in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden has not been captured, the Chinese basically own us, and goodwill toward Americans is at an all-time low. There can be no doubt there's lot to talk about and a lot of upsetting events.

But what's got the media on their heads?

Ex-Representative Mark Foley: a pervert. a congressman, a Republican from Florida who likes to hear about how 16-year-old boys masturbate, a leader who used his own power to seduce young pages and ex-pages. A man whose party covered up his behavior by saying "bad dog, don't do it again, bad." Now there's huge fallout, and the Republicans have cut and run from Foley faster than they say the Democrats want to do from Iraq and now.

The pathetic justifications have begun.

Foley is reportedly in rehab for alcoholism--a personal problem that no one in his immediate world even knew existed. Some have told reporters they don't even believe Foley is an alcoholic. But off to rehab he goes--you know, the place celebrities go when they want the public to forgive them for this or that transgression, or simply to hide out. Mel Gibson on an anti-Semitic rage? Rehab. Kate Moss coke-head? Rehab. An embarrassing car wreck in Washington, D.C., in the middle of the night? Rehab. Betray the public trust and try and seduce a child in your care? Rehab.

Oh, and the latest excuses du jour is that he's gay and that he was abused as a child by clergy. Come on, Foley, it's 2006. Who hasn't been seduced by this or that clergyperson? But oh, no--more reasons to feel sorry for poor Mark. It's not his fault.

Say it with me: Poppycock.

First of all, I wish he had not come out (like a coward, in absentia via a lawyer's statement). Great, just what we need: a pedophile who claims to be gay. Boy, doesn't that feed into what America thinks of us already, at least conservative America. So now he's hurt one or more teenagers, his party, his state, his family, and the gay community. What a slimeball hypocrite, like most of his Republican ilk in power.

Did I mention that he chaired the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and was a cosponsor of the Adam Walsh Child Protection Act? Can't wait for John Walsh on CNN to explain away this.

First of all, the moment a 50-something congressman sent an e-mail to a 16-year-old asking for a pic, a huge red flag should have gone up. Did it? Nope. Dennis Hastert says he didn't know how bad it was from just that exchange. Well, then, Dennis, you're a blind idiot whose eyes might not even have opened wide if the e-mail had been sent to your grandson.

Hastert and other Republicans that knew of Foley's inappropriate contact with pages and ex-pages, and they didn't do the right thing, the transparent thing. They didn't do anything, really. They did not, for one thing, inform key Democrats who also oversee the page program. They did not bring the appropriate people into the mix to solve the problem. Maybe they might have told Foley to shape up and then covered it up. And when the cover-up and scandal blew up, they cut and ran, and now Foley blames alcohol, being gay, and being molested; right-wing talk radio is blaming the Democrats (a dodge so ludicrous it's not even worth discussing).

OK, here's the deal. I had sex at age 16 with men double my age. I was not molested, but it happened. And I'm gay. And up until my 40th birthday, I could have drunk Foley under the table. Now I have had sex with a 19-year-old. And good for me--he was totally hot and legally of age. But I turn my head the opposite way when passing by a high school where the jocks are on the field. Who needs that temptation? That being said, I have never tried to seduce anyone under age 18 via IM, text, e-mail, snail mail, in person or otherwise, even with all the demons in my own past.

But the worst part here is that Foley was in my House. He was in your House too. He was in the people's House: Congress. The children, the pages, were in the care of "We the People. "And in our care these bastards let Foley's behavior go on and looked the other way.

And to try and justify this and blame your sexuality, your childhood--I'll say here the same thing I said about good ol' Jim McGreevey: I am so sick of people blaming being gay for anything other than the fact they sleep with the person of the same gender. Stop using your sexuality to explain away why you're so screwed up. You're so screwed up because you're a mess to start with, not because you sleep with a person of the same sex.

It's like my old saying when referencing cocaine: They say it intensifies the person. Pople who take it say it really lets them be themselves to the fullest. Well, what if you're an asshole to begin with? Now you're just an intense asshole. Great.

From all reports, Foley appears to be a pedophile, someone who wants to have sex with minors, and that's just plain wrong in America. If he wants to behave that way, he should live in Amsterdam where the age of consent is 14.

Want to know whether a kid uses a towel when he jacks off? Want to know if a girl has given him a hand job this weekend? Read his blog. If it's not there, then guess what? It's none of your business. In fact, it's none of your business in any case.

It's age-old scenario, really: the combination of an authority abusing his power and of a compliant victim who may have been afraid to just say no, or may have thought he'd gain some advantage from playing along. Older power figure, younger opportunist--you do the math. And whatever gender combination is involved doesn't matter.

I won't even go in to the congressional page program. Why in the age of electronic communications do we need teenage kids in Congress to act as messengers? Why not train cocker spaniels to run the halls? If I have a robot named Roomba that can clean my entire floor and then find its way back to its base, we can find Congressional robots to do the job. These pages have always been bait for lecherous old white men away from home with an inflated sense of self-importance. It's happened before to male and female pages. As long as the page program continues, it's likely to happen again.

Go online and watch Foley's goodbye speech to some pages from years back--watch him well up with tears and your disgust will flow. Why? Well, you'd cry too if all your fresh meat was about to leave and become legal.

And what bothers me the most is all the piety. For the past six years, the Republicans have laid claim to be the only party that can protect us from terror, and they promised to do so while holding dear those family values that you yourself hold dear. They have attempted to grab God as their exclusive ally and champion, hinting or saying outright that Democrats are godless heathens with no values who want gay men to get married and adopt and then molest your children, the party that wants women to have the right to murder their unborn children, a party that breeds the kind of tolerance that breeds sexual predators.

Democrats, they say--they are still saying on talk radio right this minute--are the people who cover up sex scandals, like the one involving Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Never mind that both Clinton and Lewinsky were adults at the time. Well, thank you, Mark Foley, for proving what I've known for years: those who claim they are better and more moral than most people usually are those with the most skeletons in their closets--oh, and then they come out of them.

I delight in all of this, in the fall of a hypocrite. I don't for a moment believe Foley was molested as a child by clergy--certainly not in the victimized way he's claiming. Why wait until now to reveal this? Truly, with all the scandal about the Catholic Church, why not rally to the defense of those who really were molested by sharing your past? There's no shame in having been molested, it's not a consensual act. To hide it when you're in the public eye as a champion of exploited children and then to reveal it when you think it will shield you from responsibility for your own attempts at molesting--well, the hypocrisy stinks.

As for the gay issue, I can't even address it. One more screwed-up fag. Great. Thanks, Foley.

And this "bombshell" is not new. The Advocate has been reporting on Foley's sexuality for years, outing him in 1996 when he supported the Defense of Marriage Act (a time when his fellow Republican, Jim Kolbe, opted to come out and put his hypocrisy behind him) and opening his closet door again in 2003 when he had the audacity to call a press conference to condemn fully accurate (but, we now know, incomplete) reports about his sexuality. But no one wanted to listen. Except for a few brave Florida outlets, the mainstream press censored the story.

Just like in the Republican leadership in Congress, no one wanted to listen to the simple truth, because it might hurt poor Rep. Foley, a powerful man in Washington. He might get mad, as he did at that press conference. Foley did, however, abandon his 2003 run for U.S. Senate after the media brought up the 1996 Advocate story. Years ago Foley knew what might come tumbling out of his closet if it were shaken hard enough.)

What I want to know is, who is supplying these IM's? Barring cooperation from Internet service providers combing through their servers in probable violation of privacy laws, we all know the only way to get IM transcripts is if one of participants saved them on either end. So did Foley save them as fodder for his late-night spankings, or did the pages save them--out of what, disgust? A sense of opportunity? Future ammunition for job security? No, I suspect these transcripts were kept for one reason and one reason only, and that reason is scandal--and here it is.

The Republicans have hurt the LGBT community for years. Now another Republican has done us a disservice by trying to join our ranks. Well, we don't want you. Go back in the closet. And now they blame the Democrats for the timing of this scandal. Republicans can't take responsibility for anything. Foley's not responsible; some unnamed priest from some unnamed church at some unknown time did some unknown act, an act that has never been spoken of until now. Alcohol is to blame. Hastert blames Foley, other Republicans blame Hastert, the right-wing nuts blame the Democrats. Huh?

Here's who is to blame: Foley, now gone; Hastert, who should go. In fact, they all should go, everyone who had any whiff of Foley's lust for teens. It appears the Republican party is full of liars, warmongers, pedophiles, and shameless opportunists, many of whom hide behind their Bibles and their piety. Well, take that. And that. And that. Your days are numbered. The emperor has no clothes, and his knights are trying to get the clothes off the young pages.

Ick. It makes me want to take a shower.

We are five weeks away from an election, and there are so many real issues to deal with. If any good can come from this, let's hope it will open some eyes. Let's hope that voters will realize that these people are not any better or more righteous or more concerned than anyone else. In fact, they are just the opposite. If you can't be upset about 2,700-plus American deaths in a hellhole in the Middle East, maybe you can wrap your little heads around the fact that a member of the House wanted to wrap his body parts around the body parts of his page--and asked the teenager for specific size information as foreplay.

There are three things Foley is not, as far as I can tell: He is not a victim, he is not an addict, and he's not gay. He's a sick, power-crazed idiot completely removed from reality who operated inside an insulated bubble where he felt safe from harm, and his friends on the Hill helped him feel that way. Instead of rehab he should be in a jail cell with all those guys who were instant-messaging fake teenagers invented by Dateline. Yep, those guys are wrestled to the ground on camera and dragged off to jail. Most of them are labeled as sex offenders for the rest of their lives--and not even for instant-messaging real teenagers. Yep, they're in jail, where you or I would be if either of us were guilty. Foley, who instant-messaged a real teenager, is in rehab--and looking forward to a fat Congressional pension for the rest of his life.

Foley' s blaming alcohol for this gives alcoholics a bad name, just as his claiming to be gay gives us gays a bad name as well. He's looking for any excuse, every day a new one. Well, stop. There isn't an excuse. You're a creep. Live with it. Find a bridge and start living under it, you lecherous old troll. But get out of our House, the people's House, and stay out. And all those who knew about his behavior, do the same.