Can Foley save America?

With a national election only a month away, and America’s democracy hanging in the balance, all I can say is thank goodness for Mark Foley.

He came sleazing along, trailing sordid e-mails and IMs, just in the nick of time. History may well remember him as the guy who saved America, which is not bad for a grown man who seduces teen-aged boys.

Isn’t it ironic that although the Bush administration has launched two wars and threatened a third, caused the loss or ruination of thousands upon thousands of Afghani, Iraqi and American lives, and set about systematically undermining America’s great Constitution, it might end up being a smarmy pedarist who saves America’s ass and restores a little sanity to the world?

It boggles the mind. But I’m not complaining.

Since the news broke about Foley’s sometimes insinuating, sometimes explicit e-mails and instant messages to callow White House pages, the GOP has been in a frenzy, trying to back and fill, razing the air with trumpeting denials and pointing fingers at everyone but themselves. The scandal, which is just the kind that catches a lascivious America’s puritan attention the best – !illicit, non-missionary sex! -- has dominated the front pages, the Web, blogs and news shows on television and radio, offering up almost hourly mouthfuls of titillating information.

And all this just as President Bush sets out on a whirlwind tour of the nation doing luncheons and speaking engagements before friendly crowds of brain-dead supporters in order to shore up support for flagging congressmen and senators. He’s doing his damndest to ramp up the fear rhetoric and plaster the airwaves with shallow talking points before Americans head to the polls to decide who stays and who goes in Congress.
And Congress, let me just say, is not looking real good right now.

The Foley Fooforal comes on the heels of America’s gleeful support of Israel in the way-overdone attack on Lebanon and Palestine (the Lebanese are still trying to clean up the bomblets dropped from cluster bombs by the Israelis in the last few days of the conflict).

Then there’s the nodding approval of the administration’s nuclear saber-rattling at Iran, the reprehensible torture bill approval, the Abramoff scandal, Tom DeLay’s thundering and unrepentant fall from grace, and ... well. Need I go on?

As Americans who love our country and its Constitution (Democrats, Republicans and all other flavors), and who would much rather live in a more peaceful world where we work to talk out our problems rather than blowing them to bloody bits, all of us need to make sure that voters don’t forget what this latest scandal hides behind it. It stands squarely on the front lines of a government that has become fat, lazy and deaf with power, a government and a president that believes it doesn’t have to obey the laws of the land it governs.

This is wrong. This is dreadfully dangerous. If America is to survive the bloated, amoral, Jabba The Hut government it finds itself carrying on its back, it needs to find a way to throw it off or be crushed flat under its weight.

Thank you, Mark Foley, you creepy miscreant. You may have just stuffed one mouthful too many into the beast.