Camille Paglia is one of my favorites. She is extremely intelligent and although very liberal on most issues totally nails the Mark Foley “scandal.”
Mark Foley was never on the radar of anyone outside the small circle of news junkies. So his fall and banishment from Washington were nothing but a drip in the torrential flood of current geopolitical problems. The way the Democratic leadership was in clear collusion with the major media to push this story in the month before the midterm election seems to me to have been a big fat gift to Ann Coulter and the other conservative commentators who say the mainstream media are simply the lapdogs of the Democrats. Every time I turned on the news it was “Foley, Foley, Foley!” — and in suspiciously similar language and repetitive talking points.
After three or four days of it, as soon as I heard Foley’s name, I turned the sound off or switched channels. It was gargantuan overkill, and I felt the Democrats were shooting themselves in the foot. I was especially repulsed by the manipulative use of a gay issue for political purposes by my own party. I think it was not only poor judgment but positively evil. Whatever short-term political gain there is, it can only have a negative impact on gay men. When a moralistic, buttoned-up Republican like Foley is revealed to have a secret, seamy gay life, it simply casts all gay men under a shadow and makes people distrust them. Why don’t the Democratic strategists see this? These tactics are extremely foolish. Gay men through history have always been more vulnerable to public hysteria than are lesbians, who — unless they’re out there parading around in all-leather bull-dyke drag — simply fit more easily into the cultural landscape than do gay men, who generally lead a more adventurous, pickup-oriented sex life.
Did it help Democrats?
But what if by jumping on and making a big deal out of this, it delivers the Democrats the House and the Senate? Will it have been worth it?
I completely disagree that the Foley case has helped the Democrats. There’s been so much fudging of the polling data, which long before the Foley case already indicated that many Republicans nationwide were turned off by the direction of their party and were planning to sit home on Election Day. It’s a boldfaced lie that the Foley case caused this. Bedrock Republicans have been dismayed by the Bush administration’s overspending and by its inaction on illegal immigration, among other things. These trends were already quite visible before the Democrats inserted themselves into the Republicans’ slow drift away from the polls. So what they’ve done, in this rabid orchestration of the Foley case, is to risk energizing the Republican base again. Are they mad, or just dumb? They’ve handed the Republicans a reason to go to the polls — to register their contempt for Democrats!
entire interview in Salon today