Gaffer, Foley, Grip
Wow. This Foley thing keeps going and going. Just when you think it can't get any more lurid, it sneaks up behind you and takes you by surprise. It's only needed the slightest bit of hands-on attention from the national media for this thing to keep growing and growing, incrementally but inexorably and undeniably more pointedly insistent, more intrudingly protrudent, more achingly and unignorably demanding of our attention in its lurid, purple turgidity. You know, as a news story. Also: veiny.

I don't know whether I should be outraged or masturbate. It's very confusing. Luckily, I can do both. I wish to God I could throw a baseball 95 miles per hour instead, but we can't choose our gifts.

A skeevy older guy cruising underage pages online is creepy enough. We all know his M.O. by now: some introductory e-mails, some IMs to gauge interest, moving up to an exchange of pictures, then some hot-chat, some soda cans filled with wine followed by (one presumes) some rip-snorting buggery in the House cloak room.

That in itself is not that surprising. Everyone on the Hill knows what the "cloak room" is for. It wasn't always so dark and shameful, however. Cloak room dalliances between Speaker Henry "Three At A Time" Clay and most of the British diplomatic delegation were widely known to have hammered out the final details in what became the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812.

So if not for the ages of those involved in the Foley matter not elected representatives of a Congressional district, I think it would be a non-issue.

Believe it or not, though, it's about to get worse.

I could hardly believe it yesterday when I found out that Mark Foley was fucking Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

I know. I know. I couldn't wrap my head around it either. The mental picture alone was enough to make me black out as though I'd been hit in the head by something heavy and forceful, like say Jeb Bush's ass on the backstroke of a particularly vigorous thrusting into some excitingly obscure part of Mark Foley's anatomy. Even now, 24-hours later the idea makes me a little woozy.

I know you don't want to believe it, but it's true. Of course they won't come right out and say that it's true, but they might as well now because it's all so obvious.

It became clear to me when I read this story about Foley being angry about the president "snubbing" him when GWB was in Florida.

You'd snub him too if you knew he was cornholing your little brother.

The tip-off was this excerpt from an e-mail to Jeb Bush from Foley in 2004:

"Have I done something to offend the White House? ... I am always getting the shaft..."

God, it just makes you want to throw up. You can practically see him winking with that knowing coyness when he types "Have I done something to offend the White House?" And then there are the tell-tale ellipses, which probably omit some kind of playful nickname he has for Jeb like "Pony" or "Sugar Balls."

And then the obvious--the horribly obvious--"I'm always getting the shaft."

Sounds like flimsy evidence, you say? Remember: it starts with e-mails gauging interest. These are code-words and signs and (in my humble opinion) not very well disguised ones either. It's shameless.

You can clearly see the way this trajectory will arc. E-mail, hot-chat, buggery. The only part I can't really figure out is how he got Jeb into the House cloak room, but Foley has been living a life of deception for so long, small details like that are probably almost an afterthought.

It's already been a rough year for the president and his party. Between this and the Abramoff thing and Iraq and the implication of Speaker Hastert in the Foley coverup, the polls are clearly showing the Democrats on the verge of some historic pick-ups, dangling in front of all of us the possibility of some oversight in government, some real accountability, some hard questions and the legislative heat of competing agendas to burn off some of the nonsense and hopefully leave us with some kind of balanced sense of public responsibility in Washington.

I mean, they've got this Foley guy porking the Republican governor of Florida.

I can hardly wait to see how the Democratic party manages to fuck this one up too.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 2.7


Pops
- posted by Pops @ 10:13 AM