Thursday, October 12, 2006
The Foley affair, killer Marines and the direction of my country.
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
This week I heard the President express his dismay and shock that Representative Mark Foley had used his high office to lure Congressional pageboys.
Curiously, this came right after my own experience of dismay and shock, hearing a broadcast about US marines searching for a insurrectionist bomber. When they did not find him, they took a neighbor and killed him, after faking a scene suggesting that the man was rigging an attack. It was disclosed by a Navy man who objected but was not listened to, and when asked why he par-ticipated, replied that he wanted to be part of the team. Now he is going to jail, and so are the Marines.
This case of cowboy or vigilante justice brought up the hint of another nightmare situation with some comparable aspects, that of a government that wanted revenge for innocent 9/11 victims, and not being able to find the guilty, settled for attacking the neighbor, with a majority of Con-gress people agreeing, wanting to be part of the revenge and willing to believe in the rightfulness of their cause.
We can certainly argue about the details of this analogy, but, unmistakably, my sweet America has changed; I the not-so-distant past we have been the country of right and justice, the country that takes care of the oppressed and the poor, and opens the world for democracy. We have de-scended to the level of the angry and wrong-headed people who want to destroy us. There is no doubt that the road to here has been paved with good intentions: part of what has led us here has been that we stand by a small democratic nation in a sea of dictators and wants to keep its free-dom, Israel. We have attempted to preserve balance and stability in a region that could at one point have fallen to communism, and has instead fallen to radical Islam in some parts, to person-ality cults in others. But the more we have done, the more we have sullied our own name; and as we have gradually lost the popularity contest, we have in turn become the class bully. And thus we may be on the road of losing our soul. Religious and conservative prophets of doom are pre-dicting the end of democracy, the dying of the ever-secularizing Western civilization and a Sec-ond Coming, or rapture. Whether or not that is in the book, we are doomed as a culture unless we step back and rethink this atmosphere of hatreds, and what it does to us, inhabitants of Planet Earth. Talking to people rather than issuing edicts and sanctions is absolutely needed.
[Check the facts here - she was defending Hastert until a few days ago.]
Coming back to Foley, note that a Congressperson of Ohio, Deborah Pryce, fourth-ranking Re-publican in the House, has aggressively proclaimed that anyone who protected Foley must re-sign, including Speaker Hastert. She has returned the $5K received from Foley’s PAC. This is very principled on the surface, and interesting, because Pryce’s is one of the vulnerable 30-35 House seats targeted by the Democrats; she is being mightily challenged in her home district of Columbus, OH by a local politician named Mary-Jo Kilroy. Now the Kilroy campaign, clean and Iraq/budget/taxes oriented, has started asking some heavy leading questions, in particular, whether Pryce, as a House leader, knew the secrets of Foley, who was her friend and campaign manager for the influential House Republican Committee chair. Pryce is vulnerable as she has also received monies from Abramoff and the likes; until this year, she often had more money than she needed in what used to be a “safe” district and thus was able to grow her influence. Pryce has never been a leader on issues, but rather has voted along party lines and focused in-stead on the money side of the political game. The next question may be whether Foley was pro-tected not only to squelch potential scandals for the midterm election but also because of his im-portant role as a campaign fund raiser for the Republican House organization. The prospect of ethical problems for the party leadership is formidable, given its recent tendency to seek refuge in the high principles of conservatism and “family values.”
The influence of money on politics is no longer a question, and it hits both sides of the aisle: one may fairly speculate that Democratic leaders Clinton and Spitzer have probably compromised some of their positions to gain their formidable $30M battle funds. The question here is not whether money has bought influence, but whether an internal influence-peddler like Foley could either have bought his own protection or have been protected for his value to the party. In the face of accusations such as those that have been brought against him, such protection would clearly be an unacceptable overreach in the eternal grasping for political money.
If this Congressional election subject interests you, please visit my Looking Ahead website online (http://dobelisfile.blogspot.com, or just search for “Wally Dobelis” on Google) for a fur-ther discussion of Foley, Pryce, and Hastert; last week I launched a post-primary review of the Democratic strategy to recovering the support of the middle of Americans, “using the soft touch.” You can also see the unedited version of last week’s piece Brian Kavanagh, which con-tains some very strong arguments that he is a New Yorker and not a carpet bagger.
This week I heard the President express his dismay and shock that Representative Mark Foley had used his high office to lure Congressional pageboys.
Curiously, this came right after my own experience of dismay and shock, hearing a broadcast about US marines searching for a insurrectionist bomber. When they did not find him, they took a neighbor and killed him, after faking a scene suggesting that the man was rigging an attack. It was disclosed by a Navy man who objected but was not listened to, and when asked why he par-ticipated, replied that he wanted to be part of the team. Now he is going to jail, and so are the Marines.
This case of cowboy or vigilante justice brought up the hint of another nightmare situation with some comparable aspects, that of a government that wanted revenge for innocent 9/11 victims, and not being able to find the guilty, settled for attacking the neighbor, with a majority of Con-gress people agreeing, wanting to be part of the revenge and willing to believe in the rightfulness of their cause.
We can certainly argue about the details of this analogy, but, unmistakably, my sweet America has changed; I the not-so-distant past we have been the country of right and justice, the country that takes care of the oppressed and the poor, and opens the world for democracy. We have de-scended to the level of the angry and wrong-headed people who want to destroy us. There is no doubt that the road to here has been paved with good intentions: part of what has led us here has been that we stand by a small democratic nation in a sea of dictators and wants to keep its free-dom, Israel. We have attempted to preserve balance and stability in a region that could at one point have fallen to communism, and has instead fallen to radical Islam in some parts, to person-ality cults in others. But the more we have done, the more we have sullied our own name; and as we have gradually lost the popularity contest, we have in turn become the class bully. And thus we may be on the road of losing our soul. Religious and conservative prophets of doom are pre-dicting the end of democracy, the dying of the ever-secularizing Western civilization and a Sec-ond Coming, or rapture. Whether or not that is in the book, we are doomed as a culture unless we step back and rethink this atmosphere of hatreds, and what it does to us, inhabitants of Planet Earth. Talking to people rather than issuing edicts and sanctions is absolutely needed.
[Check the facts here - she was defending Hastert until a few days ago.]
Coming back to Foley, note that a Congressperson of Ohio, Deborah Pryce, fourth-ranking Re-publican in the House, has aggressively proclaimed that anyone who protected Foley must re-sign, including Speaker Hastert. She has returned the $5K received from Foley’s PAC. This is very principled on the surface, and interesting, because Pryce’s is one of the vulnerable 30-35 House seats targeted by the Democrats; she is being mightily challenged in her home district of Columbus, OH by a local politician named Mary-Jo Kilroy. Now the Kilroy campaign, clean and Iraq/budget/taxes oriented, has started asking some heavy leading questions, in particular, whether Pryce, as a House leader, knew the secrets of Foley, who was her friend and campaign manager for the influential House Republican Committee chair. Pryce is vulnerable as she has also received monies from Abramoff and the likes; until this year, she often had more money than she needed in what used to be a “safe” district and thus was able to grow her influence. Pryce has never been a leader on issues, but rather has voted along party lines and focused in-stead on the money side of the political game. The next question may be whether Foley was pro-tected not only to squelch potential scandals for the midterm election but also because of his im-portant role as a campaign fund raiser for the Republican House organization. The prospect of ethical problems for the party leadership is formidable, given its recent tendency to seek refuge in the high principles of conservatism and “family values.”
The influence of money on politics is no longer a question, and it hits both sides of the aisle: one may fairly speculate that Democratic leaders Clinton and Spitzer have probably compromised some of their positions to gain their formidable $30M battle funds. The question here is not whether money has bought influence, but whether an internal influence-peddler like Foley could either have bought his own protection or have been protected for his value to the party. In the face of accusations such as those that have been brought against him, such protection would clearly be an unacceptable overreach in the eternal grasping for political money.
If this Congressional election subject interests you, please visit my Looking Ahead website online (http://dobelisfile.blogspot.com, or just search for “Wally Dobelis” on Google) for a fur-ther discussion of Foley, Pryce, and Hastert; last week I launched a post-primary review of the Democratic strategy to recovering the support of the middle of Americans, “using the soft touch.” You can also see the unedited version of last week’s piece Brian Kavanagh, which con-tains some very strong arguments that he is a New Yorker and not a carpet bagger.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 2:29 PM 
