The ground is moving rapidly under Washington.

Congressman Mark Foley may eventually be seen as a sort of dark Prometheus for finally lighting a fire to the Republican Closet and burning it down.

In the process, he has shed light on how homosexuality is used to scare and distract the Republican party’s rural, Bible-centric base, while in fact, the Republican elite are no more troubled by gay people than any other corporate employer, looking for bright, competent workers — not sexual conformity.

It’s all been a big sinister hoax (at our expense). And now, finally, the jig is up.

Item: The Sex Was Legal, Says Foley Page

The Los Angeles Times reports that a House page acknowledged that he had sex with the disgraced Congressman, but only after he had turned 21. The young man, who quietly knew he was a gay when he was a teenager, agreed to talk to The Times only if his identity was protected, because of his fear that exposure could hurt his job prospects. (more…)

Editorial from today’s New York Times:

Real Scandals, and Fake Ones

When it comes to sexual scandal, American voters tend to be more rational than American politicians. The House Republicans raced to impeach President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky episode. But the people, shocked as they were, showed no desire to punish him by upending the national government. Conservative politicians frequently try to score political points by railing against homosexuality, but voters from very conservative areas often support politicians who are living out their private — and often not particularly secret — lives as gay men and women. Lawmakers from both parties have announced they were gay over the last generation, and they were almost always re-elected.

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The most striking thing about the emails that Mark Foley sent a 16-year-old Congressional page is how much like a 16-year-old he sounds himself:

“I just emailed Will,” he writes, at full gush, not slowing to punctuate. “hes such a nice guy … acts much older than his age … and hes in really great shape … i am just finished riding my bike on a 25 mile journey now heading to the gym … whats school like for you this year?’”

It’s the sort of naive twittering you might find in a diary entry on MySpace. At any moment you expect the 52-year-old Congressman to tick off a list of his “likes” in the manner of the moonstruck girls on that site (”hugs, making friends, soda, cookies, marshmallows, music”) — but then, as if carried away by the momentum, adding “bubble butts, circle jerks…”

Some of the teenage pages Foley regularly emailed have since come forward and at least one said he was “freaked out” when the Congressman asked him to email back a photo of himself. But other young men apparently took the attentions in their stride. Access to power is a powerful thing, and the Congressional page program is intended to fan just this sort of uncritical youthful vigor. (more…)

The Blowhards love this “war on terror.” Love their little flag-pins and yellow-ribbon bumper stickers. Love their little rah-rah rallies to support the President, where they stand behind him in rows, nodding along — yes, yes! — with every asinine statement.

Photogenic affairs, these rallies, closed to all but invitation-only Republicans, where the rows are strategically arranged to feature every shade of American and where our eye never fails to linger on the black man or woman and wonder what’s that all about! … but then black people must ask the same question about the Log Cabin Republicans.

Thing is so many of these 9/11 patriots are way too old to actually put their ass on the front line, where their mouth is. And of the ones that are of age, so many of of them are overweight wankers tapping out right-wing blogs or dreaming up “think-pieces” for neo-con house organs like The Weekly Standard to ever get any grit under their nails in an actual dustup. (And they call us effete! We who made terms like pig and pigpen sell-words for after-hours clubs and holiday weekends!) (more…)

Televangelism is nothing without its prophets. And on Trinity Broadcasting Network, the world’s largest evangelical TV conglomerate, it has something more than a prophet, it has a S*T*A*R:

The Cher of God TV, the pink-haired Lady of Galilee – Jan Crouch.

I’ll admit I make repeated pilgrimages to TBN, usually late at night when I’m frustrated with all the infomercials and text-messaging hookup ads. I tune in and fall under Jan’s dizzy, drunken spell.

Jan’s garish image is kaleidoscopic, never the same woman twice. There she is dressed in cotillion white while ministering to the drug-addled Born Agains in Houston. Jump Cut: There she is a disheveled, frighteningly sleep-deprived Jan cuddling black children in the slums of Haiti. Jump Cut: Back to the bright lit Rococo TBN studios where Jan sits on her throne chair and shares tales of how Jesus touched her life personally: He once raised her pet chicken from the dead. Someone in the audience cries “Praise the Lord!” (more…)

We love a good public ass-reaming as much as the next guy! And has there ever been a bigger jackass than Bill Bennett, so-called “Morality Czar” and professional right-wing scold?

Possessed of a mellifluous baritone, the glum-faced Bennett affects a tragic gravitas as he pumps out the bullshit. Where is the outrage, he moans. The outrage he speaks of is not over the Haditha massacre, or unauthorized wiretapping, or Congress being bought and sold by corporate lobbyists. No, our boy Bill is worried about “the assault on marriage” coming from all those lesbian commandos in Massachusetts.

Hawking a new book with the triumphalist title America — The Last Best Hope (of civilization, we assume), he is making the rounds of the news shows, gassing about the issues du jour. Yet not one of his interrogators — not Tim Russert, or Chris Matthews or Jim Lehrer, all serious journalists who pride themselves on hard-hitting interviews — has called him on the stream of non sequiturs and inanities that make up his anti-gay-marriage shtick.

No one, that is, until Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show on Comedy Central. (Why is a comedian on a fake-news show the only really vigorous interviewer in America today? That is a question the historians will need to answer, and trust us, they won’t be kind.) Sit back, kiddies, and enjoy the show (more…)

He didn’t mention gay marriage. But comedian Stephen Colbert confronted George W. Bush with nearly every twist of public lying, pious hypocrisy and war ineptitude in his calamitous presidency. Not all of it was funny, but all of it was true.

It happened over the weekend at the White House Correspondents Dinner, usually a genial event where the President pokes gentle fun at himself, and even gentler fun at the press, who sit in their tuxedos and gowns happily liquored up.

Comics are invited to take the President on from the podium — easy going punsters not known for social commentary, like Ray Romano or Drew Carey — and everyone leaves with the sense that the President is a swell guy, after all.

As an example of what usually passes for humor, last year Cedric the Entertainer — who? — was so lame he was overshadowed by the mock-critique First Lady Laura Bush gave her husband from the stage. Typical of the sugar-coated zingers deemed quotable the next day by a sobered press: (more…)

Dystopia — that’s a word we learned in high school when we read 1984. It means a society turned upside down, the negative inverse of Utopia, the perfect world.

In George Orwell’s masterwork of totalitarian government, giant televisions watch you. The news is fictionalized and history is contradicted (and then rewritten daily) to prop up the government.

It’s a place where the vision of the future is “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Where it is not enough to acquiesce to Big Brother, one must love him wholehearted too. One must, with one’s own free will, believe that 2 + 2 = 5, or 3, or 4, or all those answers at once — if Big Brother says it’s so. (more…)