L8R G8R

by digby

Lord Almighty, it looks like we got us a gen-you-wine Republican sex scandal. And it’s a doozy, isn’t it? Maybe people will notice that something is seriously rotten under GOP rule now.

If we lived in a nation that wasn’t completely dysfunctional, this scandal wouldn’t be at the top of the list of scandals that have been revealed just in the last week:

• A new book by the official court scribe describes an administration so inept, unorganized and incoherent that if most people were aware of the details, the president’s fear campaign would blow back hard against him. If the terrorists really are coming to kill us in our beds any day now, then we are in deep shit with these guys in charge.
• We have more news this week-end that Karl Rove and the white house were actively and personally involved in all the Jack Abramoff congressional corruption scandals which feature ripping off taxpayers of many millions of dollars.
• It turns out that Bush fired Colin Powell.
• The intelligence community agree that the invasion of Iraq super-charged the extremist jihadist moviement and is fuelling terrorism far more quickly and broadly than we would have had to deal with otherwise.
• We have officially sanctioned torture and the repeal of habeas corpus — at the least competent president in history’s discretion.

I’m sure I’ve missed something.

But it looks like Mark Foley’s raunchy emails are going to be the scandal that may just bring it home for November. They made their puritanical, moralizing bed, now their going to have to roll around in the muck and the mire they made it with. Let’s let ‘er rip.

First of all, Mark Foley is clearly one exceptionally screwed up dude. A semi-closeted gay Republican whose signature issue is online sex predators and missing kids sending sexually explicit IM’s to congressional pages is one of the most blatant act of self-immolation I’ve ever seen.

But that’s not the real scandal, is it? While I’m sure the religious right will make the same charges about “gayness” they always do when their institutional leaders turn out to be hypocrites and chickenhawks (in all senses of the word), Foley’s unsavory habit of hitting on teen-agers who worked at the capital and the GOP leadership’s truly disgusting propensity to cover it up at all costs is the issue.

George Will mentioned “Elmer Gantry” this morning on This Week, a novel that I have discussed many times on this blog. There’s a great line from the book that I think perfectly describes the modern Republican moralists who’ve been kicking us in the teeth with their alleged family values for the past couple of decades:

“He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.”

The politicians of the modern Republican party are a bunch of Elmer Gantrys who sold a lot of Americans a bill of goods for a long, long time. I don’t know if their supporters are ready to hear it, but I have to believe that if the leadership of the GOP congress allowing one of their own to sexually prey on 16 year old male pages doesn’t wake them up, nothing will. I am not sanguine.

.