Entry 31: "Page-ing Mark Foley....."

Yo!

There's a reason why up until now, I've purposely tried to stray away from blog entries about hot-button political issues. Common sense, because most of said topics are way too subjective and the potential for offending people is quite large depending on the issue. ...But eventually everything comes to light. Just ask Lance Bass. Anyway, as you can tell from the title of this one, I had to post something about this week's #2 news tidbit right behind, as Pres. Bush would say, North Korea's "nook-ya-lur," weapons tests: Congressional House Representatives and emotionally scarred pages.

Right off the bat, I gotta say that Bill Maher (I think it was him) put it best on his HBO show "Real Time" a couple weeks back when he noted that there's a difference between pedophilia and regular... Ah, crap, the right word escapes me right now. Not real molestation, because he never actually did any of that (that we know of). But it sure as heck was premeditated. Verbal molestation........? I dunno. Anyway, these pages weren't "boys"; they were young men by age, and in the HIGHLY incriminating instant messenger records, you can tell these young men were actually writing back the right things and fueling everything. I'm still a teenager myself (interestingly, my 19th birthday is this coming Thursday, the 19th), and in my early teen years and even a little earlier than that I knew the difference between homo- and heterosexuality. Not just by looking up respective definitions, but by just being around other kids my own age and talking about all that stuff, since in SexEd, we kinda had no choice (your dollars at work, parents!). Oh, and television of course. The third parent.

Also, everyone knows that at this hormonally enraged period of life, teenagers are typically horny all the time anyway. So the young man answered honestly in those IMs with (former) Rep. Foley. There can't be any VIDEO chat records unfortunately, because if there were, we'd be able to prove conclusively by now what the teen was doing while these chats were taking place. Although, as people who pay attention to certain major celebrity cases can tell you, even blatantly incriminating video doesn't necessarily mean you're found guilty. R. Kelly had a tape he freakin' made HIMSELF and the charges were still dropped somehow. Love this legal system. Incidentally, that page could've just gotten through looking at hetero porn, and his boner hadn't gone down yet so when Foley asks if he's horny and the page replies, "a little", that doesn't necessarily mean he's gay, does it? Sure, it means he's brutally, embarassingly honest, but fruitier than Carmen Miranda's famous hat? Of course having said that, we can't ignore the possiblilty that the young men who responded like that weren't all "victims of honesty" (I guess), but legitimate homosexuals that hadn't quite come all the way out of the closet yet. They could've easily just stopped the chats right at the first offensive sentence, reported him at the beginning of this thing and left the page program on the spot but, like I said, they kept the conversations going. Willingly. ...From what I heard of the transcripts. We don't quite know either way publicly yet, and I'm personally not trying to cast judgment on this page, or any of the others that recently came forward, for being/not being homosexuals, 'cause it's obviously not my place. I'm just weighing both sides best as I can.

Foley, on the other hand, knew darn well what he was doing, knew the guy was under 18, and had to know there'd be some kind of paper trail behind him. And because of this scandal, and the fact that other pages are coming forward faster than Michael Jackson's underage "playmates", people are now beginning to call this another nail in the coffin of the current Republican power structure in Washington. In fact, even Fox News is saying that Foley's scandal could result in a Democrat, Tim Mahoney, winning the primary election next month, meaning Florida's 16th district will be Democratically represented in the House for the first time in its history, since its creation in 1973. The Bottom Line is, Foley's resignation two weeks ago and the no doubt forthcoming trial (Sorry, Foley, but using the "was molested as a teen myself" copout card won't work there) and further public ridicule can't just be the end of this. I'll bet eventually all the other Republicans in Washington who knew of this and started messing up their statements on this will start politically dying like flies. However more there happen to be. House Speaker Dennis Hastert seems to be first on the chopping block.... I can't wait to see how this mess turns out. .....But that's just me.

See ya next Monday.

-D.