It occurred to me, while I was chatting with some of the GOP operatives who work in my office building during a smoke break that this is ultimately not an interparty issue. Forget Hastert’s nattering about the liberal media and George Soros (read: Jewish investment bankers, a nod to his Klan base). Democrats really don’t have a whole lot of actual interest in this issue. We think it’s hysterically funny to watch the GOP implode, but I really doubt this will have much effect on either registered Democrats or independent voters.
This is all about the Republican base. They’re not influenced by ABC News or Democratic schadenfreude or anything we (meaning the left) might have to say on the matter for the simple reason that they get their news from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. It’s these people whose opinions matter, and they simply don’t listen to what the “liberal media” says unless Rush quotes it out of context to them. To them, sexual impropriety is a first-order concern, orders of magnitude more important than, say, bombing the hell out of a bunch of non-Christian brown people. They dig the massacre of innocents; what they don’t care for is anyone having fun with their penis, especially orally or anally. They don’t like the underage aspect, either, but considering the blind eye that most churchgoers turn to the sexual abuse of women and children in their own communities, it’s probably not their main concern. They’re a lot more worried about their children being “converted” by the “lavender lobby” than they are worried about good, clean heterosexual rape. You can see that much in the attempts by some on the GOP side to suggest that Foley was “lured” by these kids, or the performance of conservative talk shows when popular sports figures are accused of rape. There really isn’t much rape in their worldview, just lying bitches who don’t know their place out to trap men.
And that is, ultimately, why the GOP can’t stop the bleeding with the base. (It’s also why the left is wasting its time talking about child molestation to an audience that doesn’t actually care much about the subject.) Foley was caught trying to arrange GAY SEX (with kids), and practically the entire GOP leadership, the same people who showed up for neo-fascist events like Justice Sunday, knew about all this GAY SEX and covered it up. The frothing religious fanatics who form the Bush-Rove base have every right to be pissed off because they have, in fact, been betrayed. It’s the base calling for Hastert’s resignation, and if the Washington Times is any indication, they were calling for it well before opportunists on the left jumped on the bandwagon.
Don’t expect them to vote for Democrats. There are too many openly GAY Dems in Congress (having consensual sex with people their own age, but that’s beside the point). Do expect some to stay home, or spend their votes on regional neofascist parties like the Constitution Party. It won’t take many, either, because the whole GOP (read: Rovian) strategy over the last umpteen years is to simply maintain a slim majority in the 51-52% range instead of the Clintonian (and in its own way, equally nauseating) centrist approach, which for all of its flaws left a sizeable margin for error and defections.