Krauthammer calls 'foul" on Foley scandal

Posted by Joshua Holland at 1:25 PM on October 11, 2006.

How debased is our political culture when the public is nonplussed by an illegal war that's taken a half-million lives, wages stagnating for six years, an imminent war with Iran, a housing bubble bursting around them, the fact that the country is in debt up to its eyeballs and lobbyists are running around writing legislation, yet can become outraged about some pervy old bastard's instant messages asking highschool kids to measure their shlongs.

Priorities, folks.

Personally, I could care less -- I think a GOP rep like Foley has done infinitely more harm to America's youth with his votes than with his hunger for teenage man-flesh. And I certainly don't think the guy's a pedophile -- he's an ephebophile (or a hebephile) -- which, in my mind, is far less yucky (although still highly sleazy).

And while I'm nonplussed by the charges themselves -- as long as there's no sex with kids or coercion involved, I have a high degree of disinterest in people's sexual desires unless they're directed at yours truly -- I'm as happy as the next guy to see something pierce the fog of the electorate, especially the folks that ostentatiously label themselves "pro-family."

And it is entertaining, to say the least, to watch the right bend itself into pretzels trying to stop the bleeding.

Which brings me to Charles Krauthammer's whiney Weekly Standard column, in which he parrots one of the new classics: there's a liberal conspiracy to be mean to Mark Foley only because he's a Republican, and, damnit, it's just not fair:

Representative Gerry Studds, Democrat of Massachusetts, admitted to having sex with a 17-year-old male page. He was censured by the House of Representatives. During the vote, which he was compelled by House rules to be present for, Studds turned his back on the House to show his contempt for his colleagues' reprimand. He was not expelled from the Democratic Caucus. In fact, he was his party's nominee in the next election in his district--and the next five after that--winning reelection each time. He remained in the bosom of the Democratic Caucus in the House for the next 13 years.

In 2006, Republican congressman Mark Foley was found to have been engaged in lurid sexual Internet correspondence with a 16-year-old House page. There is no evidence yet of his ever laying a hand on anyone, let alone having sex with a page. When discovered, he immediately resigned. Had he not, says Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, "I would have demanded his expulsion." Not only is Foley gone, but half the Republican House leadership has been tarred. Hastert himself came within an inch of political extinction.

Am I missing something?

He wouldn't be the Hammer if he weren't missing quite a bit.

There seems to be an odd difference in the disposition of the two cases. By any measure, what Studds did was worse. By any measure, his treatment was infinitely more lenient.

Moreover, in the case of Studds, I do not recall demands for investigations of the Democratic leadership about what they knew about Studds and when they knew it. Yet Hastert is pilloried for having not done something about Foley.

That's because there wasn't six years between the time that Studds got busted and the whole brouhaha came to light. That gets to the heart of the issue: the Congressional Dems in '83 may not have asked Studds to resign (maybe they did and he refused), but they censured him when the incident happened as opposed to the Repubs, who were content to let Foley's predilection for young 'uns remain the subject of House gossip. What's more -- and Krauthammer acknowledges this -- they made him the co-chair of the Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children even as those rumors were swirling around. Talk about hypocrisy.

Now, as I've pointed out before, Krauthammer's columns always have a nugget of chewy intellectual honesty underneath a crunchy coating of wingnutty goodness, and here's this week's:

The usual explanation is that Republicans deserve extra scrutiny and punishment because of hypocrisy. They campaign ostentatiously for family values while undermining them in private. Foley, for example, was a founder and co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children.

Ding-ding-ding. He's right, but in his column this vital point is just a CYA paragraph -- almost an aside. I would put it like this: the Republicans are a party of moral scolds, a party that has mounted a concerted effort to make what are not, in fact, political matters -- things like sex, taste in coffee, driving Volvos, being baby-boomers or living in cities on the coasts -- into brilliant distractions for their plutocratic and authoritarian governing philosophy. Yes, the party that runs campaigns on the charge that those gays are icky and liberals want to do away with Christmas deserves to be judged on sexual deviancy more than a party whose members have never claimed some Puritan sexual ethic.

It's also the party that has turned the personal character attack into a high art of politics.

The double-standard charge doesn't hold water, too, because a lot has changed in those 23 years in terms of how we view issues like child predation. A more recent sex scandal, Monicagate, was about a 22 year-old, not a teenager, and it hobbled the Dems' agenda for two years, cost tens of millions of dollars to investigate, and at least contributed to the Republicans' grasp on Washington. If there's a double-standard, it's that the Repubs may well get off easy compared to the party of Bubba.

Now, as regular readers know, Krauthammer's columns are among my favorite targets. We don't agree on much, but at the end of this one, he reminisces about the GOP take-over of the House in 1994, let's out a long sigh of weariness and says, in effect, 'well, what goes around comes around':

One factor was the House banking scandal. In the calm light of retrospection, it was a scandal of spectacular insignificance. Perhaps the Democrats deserved to lose the House for 40 years of imperial rule. But what finally helped bring them down was a few kited checks involving ridiculously small sums from a "bank" that was little more than a convenience store.

Unfortunately for them, it was the stuff of bumper stickers and talk show rants. Now perhaps it's the Republicans' turn to be felled by a similarly microcosmic event with plenty of guilt by association. But the Republicans can't complain. They know as well as anyone that the only justice in politics is the poetic kind.

They can't complain, but they will because it's all they've got.

Tagged as: foley, scandal, congress

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.