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Marie Cocco: Foley’s a SideshowPosted on Oct 4, 2006By Marie Cocco WASHINGTON—Oh, how I wish I could get all worked up about the Mark Foley/Internet sex predator/Republican leadership coverup scandal. Sadly, I cannot. The exposure of the former Florida congressman’s penchant for electronically stalking teenage boys who served as House pages and the congressional leadership’s transparent failure to investigate don’t move the needle on my moral outrage meter. It got stuck in the red zone long ago. Was it before Abu Ghraib, or after? It might have been the day the Bush administration’s internal memos justifying torture became public—and Congress did nothing, save for confirming as attorney general Alberto Gonzales, the former White House counsel who was complicit in developing the abusive interrogation practices. Was it the Iraq invasion, or the preview to it, when administration officials—and Republican lawmakers who made the House an echo chamber of deceit—tried to convince us that Saddam Hussein was somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks? Was it the congressional abdication of responsibility for holding anyone responsible for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—a striking absence that United Nations inspectors already had revealed before the American invasion? Or was it the many ways congressional Republicans corrupted the very conduct of House business, and not just by selling their offices to the likes of Jack Abramoff, the now-convicted lobbyist? The needle on the meter ticked pretty high during the shameful shenanigans over the Medicare prescription drug legislation. The GOP leadership lost the initial vote but then held the roll call open for three hours while arms were twisted and rewards promised to those who switched sides. When it was over, the drug companies had won. Medicare would be barred from negotiating discount prices, as it does routinely for hospital stays and other types of treatment. Elderly patients would just have to shell out more for their medicine. Looking back on it now, I do believe it was this gouging of old, sick people that set my moral outrage meter to a permanent high. That was nearly three years ago. It was before Congress, joined by the president, effectively stormed into Terri Schiavo’s hospice room in a spectacularly ugly pander to the Republican Party’s conservative Christian base. It was before the House leadership tried to marry a modest increase in the minimum wage—under which a full-time worker earns $10,700 a year—with a cut in the estate tax to benefit heirs who inherit $3.5 million or more. The sex-capade that so excites the airwaves is only the latest squalor this Congress has ignored, encouraged or endorsed. Why, just before the Foley imbroglio seized the spotlight, both houses passed radical antiterrorism legislation that grants the president the powers of a monarch—authority the Supreme Court already ruled he does not possess. Congress approved lifelong detention without trials, an ancient practice that civilized nations abandoned beginning with the Magna Carta in 1215. It gave the president power to define the extreme tactics that interrogators may use on terrorism suspects. It effectively granted retroactive absolution to those who might already have committed war crimes in carrying out the depravities that were authorized as part of the Bush administration’s war on terror. As for U.S. citizens, we may be declared—solely on the say-so of the president—to be “enemy combatants.’’ The definition of such an enemy can include any person who has “purposefully and materially supported’’ hostilities against the nation, whatever that means. It could mean having once donated to a charity that later turned out to have some terrorist connection; it could mean agitating for an immediate end to our involvement in Iraq. Through much of the past six years, the congressional practice has been to hold no one accountable for anything. Why would anyone now be shocked at the failure to check its own worst impulses? The blinkered approach mimics that of President Bush, who famously told The Washington Post in 2004 that he would not examine any mistakes or misjudgments about Iraq because his reelection had served as an “accountability moment.”
It is awfully late to experience a prick of political conscience when it comes to deciding the fate of those who have acted so unconscionably, for so long. But another election does approach. And we have to seize our accountability moments when we can.
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By Margaret Currey, October 6, 2006 at 8:48 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
It is not that he was talking to boys in an unappropriate manner, what galls me is that Foley was about explotiated children, what better way to hide right in sight, I don’t know if people know but ministers, boy scout masters, anyone around children will pretend to defend their rights while they are taking them away, I don’t want to think that all gay men do what Foley did, but people must remember this guy had to stay in the closet, I wonder how smart these guys are when the internet is open to everyone? I say throw all the bums out, and when the Dems take over impeach Bush, Chaney and Rummy.
M.T.C., Vancouver, Washington
Report thisBy steveV, October 6, 2006 at 7:12 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
There is always more to every story than meets the eye.
http://prisonplanet.com/articles/october2006/021006eli tistperversion.htm
Take an hour and watch the documentary within the article entitled “Conspiracy of Silence”. It will blow your mind and reveal the lies of the past 1/4 century regarding the elite’s disregard for the innocent and their complete lack of empathy.
By the way, psychopaths are not necessarily predisposed to kill, they simply have a hard time feeling pity and concern. They may wear suits and destroy lives without ever thinking of killing someone. Do we have psychopaths running our countries?
-Steve from Canada
Report thisBy zenseeker, October 5, 2006 at 1:19 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Hello Marie, I love your stuff. Surprisingly, half of our country seem to have a totally different reaction to the exact same event. For them,it just depends how you position yourself...we on the other hand, try to see it for what it is. There is something about this unabashed and even systematic corrupting of our youths though, that strikes a nerve for all Americans across the board. And I think it might have to do more than about the lust for power or satisfying their depraved perversions. It is the guilt that is hitting home and the realization that they have been a willing partner to all of this for so long. Many even willingly sacrifice the safety of their kids and some even whoring them to the house of congress or sending them to their deaths in Iraq. This is getting out of hand and they do have a breaking point. Bush and his gang..., I’m not so sure. But the question I keep asking myself is what kind of parents knowingly send their kids into the lion’s den and even to their deaths. And if they did not know about it, when they did find out, why didn’t they do anything about it. Were they too embarrassed to even fight back for their own kids or maybe even protect it from happening again to other people’s kids. Or did they have too much to lose and don’t really care about anyone else? Are they then, just cowards using their own kids for their own selfish purposes? These parents should be ashamed of themselves, and I would go up to them and that congressman, and punch them in the face if they ever tried to molest my kids or try to rape any other kids. Our country and the blood of our children deserve no less.
Keep up the good fight, and I’m making a few more Flashgames slapping Mark Foley and Ann Coulter, check them out soon at http://zenwire.com
Report thisBy Virt, October 5, 2006 at 9:40 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
I see your point. So many Republican crimes, so many Republican misdeeds, so many Republican lies. There is only a finite amount of outrage.
Assimilated Press
Report thisRead Pages Declared Enemy Combatants & Sent To Guantanamo
By SamSnedegar, October 5, 2006 at 12:42 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
Should have been in December of 2000 when a criminally corrupt Supreme Court effectively, with a ONE TIME ONLY ruling, installed George Witless Botch as Preznit.
That was the day democracy as we knew it died in the USA.
It was the “ganging up” of two of the three branches of government which made nugatory the third branch, the congress, and left us without recourse. The executive uses the legislative now just as do the juntas and dictators in China, Cuba, Pakistan, and whatever other pretend legislative bodied totalitarian governments there be, but there is no check and balance left.
This has been exacerbated by the absence of real media coverage of the real world, notably the total absence of coverage of the rape of Iraq for oil control.
Please note that it was NOT the presence of a GOP Congress which allowed this travesty to take place; it was the entire Congress which no longer represents the people of the USA but instead kowtows to corporatism, but even if the Congress had risen to the occasion, they would not have prevailed against an executive which could execute the law as it saw fit and a Supreme Court which always saw the law as the executive told it to see it.
The “founders” did not suppose that two of the branches of government would conspire against the third in order to overcome a democratic state, but they did, and they did it notably in December of 2000 when the Court installed a moron puppet as titular head of the government which would report to unseen and unheard forces in the corporate sector who obviously deliver the orders to a Dick Cheney in some remote and unmonitored location where no one can know of their malicious manipulation of our country.
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