Outing The Pages

by tristero

There’s a huge…hullabaloo this morning over the outing of at least one page by the extreme right and the possible publication of the apparently gay Congressional aides named on The List obtained by David Corn. This should surprise no one.

The rightwing really senses imminent defeat and they will do literally anything they think they can get away with to prevent it. Hence, the release of the name of the page under the pretext that he was actually not a minor when the emails/ims were sent. In fact, that’s a deliberate lie, spread to sow confusion of the he-said-she-said variety. Not only do lies of this sort dislocate the truth to the liar’s advantage, they slow down legitimate investigations as the lies have to be researched and debunked. We’ve seen this strategy many times before from the right. In Rathergate, a lie about typewriter fonts turned out to be highly successful, buying the rightwing enough time to exploit other objections that were more plausible and decisively turn the topic away the important subject: Bush’s dereliction of duty, his drunkeness, and his cowardice.

In the Foley case, it clearly is the hope that by confusing and slowing down the story, evidence of Democratic complicity in the leaking of the story will eventually appear which will again enable Republicans to change the subject and accuse the Dems of vicious campaign dirty tricks (so far, Predatorgate seems to be entirely and stubbornly an intra-Republican scandal).

Also, it may seem paradoxical but the outing of the names and the accompanying lies actually is an attempt to suppress as much real information as possible. Knowing that the extreme right will post your name and your picture and then lie about you all over the internets is a strong incentive to shut up if you were the victim of sexual harassment by Republicans. I suspect their tactic will be extremely effective.

One final point: It’s not about the sex, and especially it’s not about gay sex, sayeth many a commentator. Riiiiiight. Maybe it’s not supposed to be about those things, but the right, at least, is treating it like it is. Hence the dangerously false bullshit about gay men being more prone to pedophilia than straight men. Hence the hypocritical moralizing and also the intensity of the entire scandal. And it surely is doubtful whether the word “disgusting” would surface so often in discussions over hetero cyber-sex between a 16 year-old girl and a middle-aged congressman.

The fact is that this is a sex scandal involving a rightwing political movement which has gone out of its way to claim a God-given moral superiority when it comes to matters of the flesh (and everything else). Their sexual hypocrisy is fully exposed here – covering up for a pedophile while posing with children to pretend they care about their welfare.

The fact is that this is a uniquely gay sex scandal involving a rightwing political movement which has gone far out of its way to express revulsion for same-sex relationships in the most explicit terms possible, often by lengthy descriptions of sexual acts whose obscene content gets past the FCC only through the substituion of a pseudo-medical vocabulary for the banned vernacular terms.

By going so far as to equate same-sex intimacy with bestiality thereby making it impossible for them to perceive homosexuality as anything but an unacceptable perversion, the delusional rightwing failed, and still fail, to understand that homosexual attraction and sexual behavior is simply normal human behavior. They apparently never realized that they were inviting a sex scandal like the Foley mess which includes homosexual acts that would make it all but impossible for homophobic christianist leaders to stand aside and defer strategically to the corporatists and imperialists.

Like Digby, I feel that as sickening as it is to learn all the ways that Republicans covered up for Foley, and as reprehensible as all sexual exploitation of minors by adults is by Foley or anyone else, the truly outrageous national scandals perpetrated by the modern American rightwing are the rape of the US Constitution; the disgraceful neglect of the citizenry epitomized by 9/11 and Katrina; and perhaps most dramatically tragic, the unspeakable stupidity and madness of the war in Iraq and the utter failure of the Afghanistan war.

[Edited slightly after original post, mostly in the final paragraph.]