Excuse Me?!

Congress' response to the revelations that forer Representative Mark Foley engaged in inappropriate online conversations with teenage boys has only revealed to me the depths to which the national Republican Party has sunk to since 2000. If there was any question if the Republicans deserved re-election last week (in my mind, there wasn't), what we have learned since then reinforces my belief that the Republicans have lost the mandate and the trust of the electorate.

The issues surrounding Mark Foley and his unconscionable acts (while they may not have been illegal in an age-of-consent sense, they are certainly revolting, especially considering the power differential between a current or former congressional page and a ranking republican congressman) are complex, but for me, the GOP's response to the scandal is far more telling than the scandal itself.

Take for example congressman Tom Reynold's response. The other day, he staged a press conference, surrounded by the young children of his supporters, to declare to the world what he knew and when, and to deny a cover-up. When a member of the press asked him to remove the children in order to facilitate a frank discussion over the acts that Foley committed, Reynolds refused, saying that they were his supporters and that he was an advocate of children. This is the very nadir of political cynicism and showmanship.

Commentators like Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh have trotted out all sorts of explanations ranging from alcoholism to Bill Clinton to childish pranks to the liberal media to cynical democrats. Then former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich offered this gem last Sunday:

Well, you could have second thoughts about it, but I think had they overly aggressively reacted to the initial round, they would have also been accused of gay bashing.

Excuse me?!

This coming from a member of a political party who has repeatedly used gays and lesbians as a wedge issue to incubate the political support of conservative Christians. This coming from a party that, state after state and in the halls of congress, has demonized the potential for gays and lesbians to build lasting, stable, committed relationships and families. To raise the smokescreen of political correctness and gay bashing is shocking, and it makes my blood boil. How dare they?

Nobody I know, gay or straight, would approve of Mark Foley's actions. This isn't about being gay, this is about being a creep. Foley's colleagues in Congress failed to acknowledge the truly greivous and dangerous path he was going down, and so they all deserve to be tossed out.

A Boston Globe editorial rightly compared the congressional GOP's response to the Foley scandal to the Boston Catholic Church's inept handling of abusive priests. Senator Rick Santorum shamefully had this to say about the Catholic Church's scandal in Boston:

When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

Well we now know better, don't we? This has nothing to do with ideology; it has everything to do with the preservation of power. And when any group is so self-centered that their primary concern is the maintenance of their own control, then quite simply it is time for them to go. That includes lechers like Mark Foley, scapegoaters like Gingrich, opportunists like Reynolds, and hypocritical moralists like Santorum.

Incompetence, abuse of power, and corruption: George W. Bush, former FEMA director Michael Brown, and former congressman Mark Foley (courtesy Andrew Sullivan).