Why on earth is this what it takes to get people interested? Of all the reprehensible things that the Republican Congress and the Bush administration have done, why is it that the scandal with legs is Mark Foley sending pedophiliac IMs? Were all the other things just not titillating enough for the American public?
more ranting below.......
We've had an administration
torture innocent people, and congressmen and women
vote to make it legal. We've seen proof that they've
taken bribes. Several have already resigned. Several more will have to within the coming weeks, months, years.
The civil rights of ordinary people are being stripped. The administration taps our phones without warrants and tells judges not to interfere with it. It holds prisoners in secret prisons, without hope of a speedy and public trial. They are tortured, made to sit in their own shit. They have their holy book desecrated.
And yet, it's this scandal that has legs. This one that will get my non-political friends and relatives talking. This one that people will be talking about, screaming about. Why is that? Is it that nothing else "turns us on" like a good sex scandal? Is it that the other issues are too big, or too intellectual, or too complicated to wrap our heads around? I think people like a sex scandal because it makes them feel morally superior. It's so obviously wrong in a legal, moral, religious way. It's a lot easier to discuss over beers, and at some level, there's less seriousness about how we can treat it--we can giggle over Foley's disgusting IMs in a way that we can't joke about detainees being beaten. There is an obvious victim, and an obvious aggressor, and an obvious prurience to it all.
On some level, it's easier to report. There's a reason why there are so many Access Hollywood/ Entertainment Tonight/ US Weekly/ People/ Extra type TV shows. Because reading about celebrities' sex lives is easier to swallow and laugh at and handle than the actual news about dead bodies from a mistake of a war. So, when the politicians do something that involves a level of rhetoric usually reserved for gossip columns, it's easy to digest. We've already got the perfect palette for it. War, torture, bribery, vote tampering...these are new tastes.
I don't mean for this diary to belittle or question the seriousness of the Foley sex scandal in any way. It is reprehensible, disgusting, and embarrassing to all Americans that an elected congressman would behave in this way. It is reprehensible, disgusting and embarrassing that Dennis Hastert would keep it quiet for a year (and that the press would help). But damn it! This is what it takes to get people's attention?
One of my favorite anti Bush T-shirts reads: Can someone give him a blowjob so we can impeach him already? Indeed.
PS. Huge hat tip to RogueStage for all the links.