Thursday, October 12, 2006
Hey, At Least It Wasn't 120 Days of Sodom
It happens like clockwork. Whenever anything vaguely associated with sex, sleaze, and scandal happens in the Republican Party, someone has to raise the specter of Chappaquiddick, as if that automatically cancels out every lesser scandal on their side.
The thing is, it's horribly irrelevant. To quote John Rogers, it fails the Extrapolated Everyday Bullshit Comparison. Thirty-seven years ago, a lone Democratic Congressman, either deliberately or accidentally, contributed to the death of a female assistant, under shady circumstances that may be rooted somewhere in sex. This somehow automatically minimizes any wrongdoing related to an incident almost forty years later wherein a good number of people in Congress knew for years that one of their own was aggressively flirting (allegedly to the point of playing grab ass with a page on the House floor), and, in the course of said flirting, breaking a law that he himself had drafted, and doing jack shit until ABC broke the story after getting confirmation that most of the stuff detailed within had happened.
It's not relevant to the Foley case if, thirty years ago, the House Democrats reenacted Caligula in the middle of the night on the Senate floor using thirty male pages, gallons of chocolate sauce, and a live ostrich. It's not relevant if, two years ago, Harry Reid and his family decided to stage their own version of the Aristocrats. As long as these theoretical sexual perversions were not common knowledge to people with the power to stop this, who not only did nothing but apparently aided to actively cover it up, it is not relevant to the Foley case.
The thing is, it's horribly irrelevant. To quote John Rogers, it fails the Extrapolated Everyday Bullshit Comparison. Thirty-seven years ago, a lone Democratic Congressman, either deliberately or accidentally, contributed to the death of a female assistant, under shady circumstances that may be rooted somewhere in sex. This somehow automatically minimizes any wrongdoing related to an incident almost forty years later wherein a good number of people in Congress knew for years that one of their own was aggressively flirting (allegedly to the point of playing grab ass with a page on the House floor), and, in the course of said flirting, breaking a law that he himself had drafted, and doing jack shit until ABC broke the story after getting confirmation that most of the stuff detailed within had happened.
It's not relevant to the Foley case if, thirty years ago, the House Democrats reenacted Caligula in the middle of the night on the Senate floor using thirty male pages, gallons of chocolate sauce, and a live ostrich. It's not relevant if, two years ago, Harry Reid and his family decided to stage their own version of the Aristocrats. As long as these theoretical sexual perversions were not common knowledge to people with the power to stop this, who not only did nothing but apparently aided to actively cover it up, it is not relevant to the Foley case.
