Drunk? Gay? Abused? Nobody Knew? Everybody Knew? What Will We Find Out Tomorrow?

Yahoo Congress coverage

(ABC News) The Lurid instant messages 🙂

Quite frankly, Mark Foley’s misdeeds are the least of the problems here. Yeah, grooming an underage page for sexual contact is pretty bad, but Foley might be telling the truth and had no intention of any sexual relationship until the kid was legal. It doesn’t matter that it was a boy instead of a girl. We find out that Foley is an alcoholic, gay, oooooo he’s Catholic, he must have been abused, but he’s no pedophile. The worst thing I see about this is the hypocrisy that’s swirling around the whole thing. Foley was the deputy whip and chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. Seems everybody and their brother–as long as they were Republican–knew about the emails and IMs LAST YEAR, but it was swept under the rug. The Washington Post reports today that the FBI knew about them in July but had not done anything about them. The Republicans claim a smear campaign by the Democrats, claim they didn’t bring it public so it wouldn’t be gay-bashing, or because the parents didn’t want it to be brought forwards or because neither Hastert nor Boehner could decide whose responsibility it was. Tony Snow tried to equate it to Clinton-Lewinsky, despite the fact that Lewinsky was, in the words of the old saying, “free, white and 21.”

You Heard It First Here–NUTCASE!

(Wash Post) The Stupid Things People Said About Karr

That about says it all. The whole thing was marked by stupidity, stupidity in Thailand, in Boulder, and especially on the 24-hour all JonBenet fests on cable news, aptly satirized by Rob Corddry hiding out in the airliner toilet. Yes, wouldn’t it have been good to finally put this terrible incident to its final rest, to give some peace to that family? The Boulder DA literally HAD to check out Karr, if for no other reason than he was a fugitive who’d broken parole AND had confessed to the murder. But 12 days of constant bombardment with John Mark Karr just went to the toilet? I mean, come on, even his ex-wife said he couldn’t have done it and when you’re a kiddie porn addict and your ex actually provides you with an alibi, you know someone’s a few donuts shy of a dozen.

Our government isn’t the only thing that’s broken around here these days, our news media is running neck and neck with it. Keep the yahoos entertained and they won’t question what’s really going on in the world. We’ve done Orwell one better. In 1984 (and remember 1984 was just a number the protagonist Winston Smith picked at random and had nothing to do with the actual date of 1984–Orwell needed a date close enough to be scary and back in the 1940s when he wrote the book, if he’d used a date in the 21st century, it would have been brushed off as mere science fiction–our attitudes towards science fiction have changed a lot also in the last 70 years), the Ministry of Truth spouted propaganda and more propaganda. OUR Ministries of Fairness and Balance provide entertainment as well. All Sensationalism, All the Time! Citizen Hearst would be proud of his legacy.

Oh well, August IS a slow month. We got a good start on the Hail Dubyus! book we’ve been planning during the last few weeks of easing off on our normal schedule. We’ll be publishing the last of our retrospectives this Friday and then will take Monday off for the Labor Day holiday and then it’s back to our normal schedule for Wednesday and Friday of next week. Welcome back to school, kiddies 🙂

Oh, and welcome to the newest member of our backyard wildlife habitat–a ground hog with a taste for peanuts and sunflower seeds LOL.