Everybody Shut Up and Listen to Me

I must say that I did not get into the blogging game to talk about Mark Foley. But, yes, there are aspects of the case that interest me a lot. And since even the best of them—even Carpetbagger and Matt Yglesias and Glenn Greenwald—seem to get it not exactly right, I feel impelled to offer one more effort at clarification (for their latest, see CB here, MY here and GG here). Let me see if I can be brief and to the point:

• For starters, I will go out on a limb, and say that no, I’m not terribly disturbed a about 16-year-olds having sex. Were it my own kids, I would worry the heck out of matters of disease and pregnancy, and the more elusive question of whether they were making constructive choices—which, with a 16-year-old, might very well include the choice of not having sex at all. But as Glenn Greenwald was so careful to note, 16 is, after all, the age of consent in many (most?) places, and I am not on the bandwagon to raise it. Oh, and I almost forgot—no, actually, I don’t really care whether it’s boys or girls.

• If a person ran for Congress in my district on the platform that “I want to go to Congress because it will give me sexual access to a horde of cute kids,” I would vote against him. I probably can’t count all the reasons why, but let’s start with one: it is an abuse of office, an abuse of power.

• If a person ran for Congress in my district as a member of the party of the sex police—and in fact turned out to be seeking office because it would give him sexual access to a horde of cute kids—I would vote against him early and often. Piling hypocrisy onto abuse of power does not mitigate the offense.
  
  
• So Foley is a contemptible creep and a jerk, but possibly not a criminal. Let me turn now to the House leadership, and in general, to the whole wagons-into-circle pushback. I guess I can believe the manipulative cynicism of this crowd—this is, after all, politics—but the naked, arrant, unapologetic manipulative cynicism: that part just pushes me beyond belief. This is the values party we’re talking about here. They’ve lost a round on values. Fine, stuff happens. The gobsmacking part is that they are making clear that they really do not care about the values part, and never did. They are interested in this business only insofar as it clutters up the election agenda.

So my dominant instinct is to say—migawd, do they really think we are that stupid? And a little voice in me says—ah, watch it. I tried to spell out a few days ago why voters can act stupider than they are. And of course, I have no guarantee that they won’t continue to act in ways that I wish they would not act. Democrats, as others have said, have an almost unerring knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

A secondary instinct says: migawd is the GOP leadership really that stupid? And here is a speculative guess: maybe they are that stupid. Others have said that the William Kristols, etc., are just being beastly when they vulgarize or trivialize or otherwise seem to distort this issue. For myself, I am more inclined to take them at their word. Maybe they are not distorting anything at all: maybe they just do not get it.

There, everything clear now?