I’m not very sanguine about the effect Predatorgate will have on the upcoming elections. It seems every time one of these examples of Republican corruption surfaces (Duke Cunningham, Abramoff, Bush’s AWOL military service, to name but a few) all we end up with is a lot of media spinning and TV ratings, but little in the way of real gains for Democrats come election time. But I could be wrong.
In any event, what do you think? All sound and fury signifying nothing, or the winning issue this Fall?
In light of all this Republican Family Values events…. and an election coming up…
I’m waiting for the October Surprise to nail all our tits to the pavement… :*(
Horrible metaphor…..
But I too have a feeling that come Nov whatever, I will be singing the blues. We can be 5% up in the polls and it won’t mean jack shit. With the “Poll ID” and the machine gremlins and then the plain old messing around with the machinery of voting, 5% will get us nowhere. We need people to wake up and it seems that nothing on this earth is going to move complacent us citizens to re-evaluate Der Fuhrer (sp?)
It may actually have legs. You may see more and more people coming forward on this or related issues.
There’s a lot out there and once the lid is off, it’s very difficult to put it back on.
My concern is that they will allow Foley to sacrifice himself (notice how quickly he resigned, compared to, say, Delay..) and decry it as an “isolated instance” of a “deluded individual”… or something like that… because it will clog up the media airwaves and prevent any follow-up on the Torture Bill passed last week or the continuing horrors of Iraq. It’s probably not the kind of distraction they had planned, but if it works…
Meanwhile, what else is going on — in Iraq, with Iran, with everything else the Administration has their fingers in? We probably won’t hear about it until it’s too late.
The fact that similar abuses — and worse — occurred at Abu Ghraib, are probably STILL occurring far more often than we know, such as the young Iraqi girl who was raped and murdered with her family… will never be mentioned.
That Lt.Col in charge of the Military Intelligence Unit at Abu Gahrib? Grew up in a part of NJ where sexual abuse in the catholic church is rampant.
Have you looked at Real History Lisa’s blog and posts? There’s republican involvement in child/teen sex going back decades.
The Foley scandal is something the public can grab onto. It’s a thread that we have to keep pulling. Now that he’s going with the I was an alcoholic so please excuse the harm done sob story, we have to focus on the cover-up by House leadership.
They knew about him for five years and no alarm bells went off or fires were lit under people’s behinds when those emails surfaced 11 months ago?
Hastert’s as bad as Cardinal Law and ArchBishop Mahoney.
is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. If we tolerate sexual predators in positions of leadership in congress and the church, is it any wonder we have national leadership seeking to normalize torture and an active-duty military chain of command that seems increasigly accepting of sexual violence?
I think this story might actually have legs, if for no other reason than it’s easy to understand. Anyone who has kids will ask themselves, “How would I feel about a fifty-year old man, in a position of power and authority, sending emails like this to MY kid?”
The answer is “angry.”
Whether Foley ever actually got physical with these boys is irrelevant (except to the boys and their families, of course; I’m talking strictly politically here). The story is, a republican congressman is a disgusting, filthy old man who likes to sexually harrass young boys, and congressional leadership knew about it and covered it up.
And if some young men come forward with stories, it will get even worse.
I was thinking the same way. The media, such as my paper The St. Louis Post-Dispatch implies that Hastert’s call for an investigation by the justice dept. is the responsible way to take care of this matter. The article did not give the details that Hastert is telling the justice dept to only look at IM messages, not the emails because the house leaders have already looked at those.
The message is move on, nothing more here, just a few naugthy emails besides it’s being investigated. We, the Republicans are being responsible.
Democrats are going to cheer and crow. Republicans are going to dismiss this as “just one more ‘just one bad apple.'” Both groups already have their minds made up.
Whatever is foremost in the minds of the swing voters on November 7th is going to determine how they vote. That means that if this story is going to have any legs at all it has to drown out whatever the Republicans have planned for the next 5 weeks and a day, which means the Democrats have to go on the offensive and never, never, never let up for any reason.
I’d like to see this happen. I’m not so sure they’ll do it.
Dems are very excited about this event. It gets them off the hook for that lack of opposition to the torture/detainee bill that they allowed to go through on their watch. AND it has the added bennie of making the repubs look bad. But for both repubs and dems, nobody seems to want to talk about the bill they let go through. Like a bad fart it was!
The difference, though: sex sells — and betcha there’s more out there in e-mails & prey.
I was talking with a friend of mine yesterday about the obsession with scandals in politics these days. Its like people are looking for the silver bullet that will slay the republicans, and vice versa on the other side as well.
scandal politics can’t and won’t replace grass roots organizing on the issues. It’s hard work, but its the only way…
Josh Marshall has an interesting perspective on exactly how this scandal may hurt republicans: the leadership must sit out the rest of the election cycle.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/010107.php
My opinion is that for the still persuadable people who might actually vote, sex and scandals are pretty much a given on both sides. But it certainly isn’t good news for the rethugs.