October 04, 2006
Foley's Folly
To the uninitiated, it is often astonishing to discover that sexual predators as a group are not easily recognized by their goulishness. In fact, they are generally quite appealing -- especially the unfortunates who must look for their victims outside of their own families.
In fact, in these days of protective education, predators have to be pretty saavy to lure children into their pedotraps. A child therapist friend told me that some of the perpetrators she sees in treatment have as much expertise connecting with kids as she does. It's not surprizing that The Washington Post has an almost sweet portrait of Mark Foley, gathered from congressional pages old and new. Foley fits the warm, charming predator profile perfectly.
Would that he had stopped with a few romantic liasons, but Mark Foley has made a career of projecting his internal shame onto others. It will surely be in this nation's best interest that he has checked himself into alcohol rehab facility to begin to examine himself, however peripherally. Let's hope he will not decide on a Christian conversion to treat his ( alcohol?!?) addiction instead. Newsflash: Oh dear, Foley may be in a Scientology center -- they don't believe in psychotherapy, but they DO believe in the democratic process.
Glenn Greenwald has an indepth look at this issue ) excerpted for the hurried:
Mark Foley was literally at the center of virtually every activity and law and program over the last 10 years ostensibly designed to battle the evils of Internet sex and minors. Mark Foley spent 12 years in Congress and it is not an exaggeration to say that he basically devoted his whole Congressional career to adding decades of imprisonment on to the mandatory punishments for those who use the Internet to talk about sex with children. He didn't just condemn that which he was doing. He made the crusade against it his life's work, in the most vocal and public way possible.Mark Foley isn't some isolated case of shocking hypocrisy. Quite the contrary. People who have a publicly and vocally expressed obsession with other people's moral behavior and who want to use the power of the Government to enforce that obsession -- the Rick Santorums and Rush Limbaughs and Newt Gingrichs and Jim Bakkers and Ralph Reeds and Mark Foleys of the world -- are almost always fighting their own demons, not anyone else's. It is so important for them to parade around as moral protectors and moral warriors precisely because they have no other way to cleanse themselves, despite being in desperate need of a cleansing........
We have been barraged with laws, programs, sermons, demagoguery and all sorts of moral demonization from a political movement whose most powerful pundit is a multiple-times-divorced drug addict [Rush Limbaugh] who flamboyantly cavorts around with a new girlfriend every few months in between Viagra-fueled jaunts to the Dominican Republic. It is a political movement whose legacy will be torture, waterboards, naked, sadomasochistic games in Iraqi dungeons (or, to Rush, "blowing off steam"), with all sorts of varied sleaze and corruption deeply engrained throughout its DNA -- all propped up by a facade of moralism and dependent upon the support of those who have been propagandized into believing that they are voting for the Party of Values and Morals.
Yup.
The projections that Mark Foley has oozed onto others in his secret victimhood turned perpetration, have undoubtedly caused much unhappiness, but they have not cost lives. ( I take that back The projections of George W. Bush onto his perceived enemies are lethal, lethal to thousands, lethal to his own countrymen.
Photo note: A metaphorophoto. Phalllic projections in the Freudian sense,on a stormy day -- one full of holes with an American flag flying on its tip. Notice the collapsing roof of the building below -- or, Sandwich harbor where the historic fish auction house has been collapsing all summer.
Addendum: Amusing video: George W. on global warming
Deeply edifying video: Bill Moyers on Abramoff take a little time to watch, then throw a viewing party for your "undecided" friends, if you still have any.