Congressman Shays Put Foley Scandal in Perspective

Congressman Christopher Shays (R-CT) stuck up for Speaker Denis Hastert’s handling of the Mark Foley sex scandal on Wednesday. He said, “I know the speaker didn’t go over a bridge and leave a young person in the water, and then have a press conference the next day . . . . Dennis Hastert didn’t kill anybody.” The allusion to Ted Kennedy and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne is clear, but if the standard in Washington is the body count, the Republicans have 2,755 military deaths in Iraq to explain. One wonders if Mr. Shays cleared his comment with the White House first.

At one level, the Mark Foley scandal is, at best, a gay version of possible sexual harassment. A man of some power sent sexually suggestive messages to young men who worked where he worked. Since the age of consent is 16 in Washington, DC, any sexual voluntary encounter wouldn’t have been a crime. This kind of thing gets dealt with in corporate America’s human resources departments all the time. It was vulgar and boorish behavior, and it shouldn’t have happened. However, it isn’t a matter of life and death.

Meanwhile, Mr. Kennedy’s craven behavior in July 1969 has ensured he never got his party’s nomination for president. It is pretty clear he was drunk and drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick. He lived and left the scene of the accident (to which he copped a very minor plea), while Ms. Kopechne drowned. To paraphrase his brother, Mr. Kennedy was a profile in cowardice.

Oddly, the Chappaquiddick incident and the Mark Foley scandal share one thing – they aren’t all that important in the grand scheme of things. While one feels for the Kopechne family, America has around 50,000 traffic fatalities a year. And as Mr. Shays noted, no one died because of Mark Foley’s actions. Both cases are distractions from the real issue of the day: America fighting a war that began with lies and went down hill from there. There are distinct differences between Vietnam and Iraq, for example, Iraq’s is a dry heat, and in 1969, Vietnamese was the language and culture of which America's policy makers were ignorant, rather than Arabic.

Yet politically, the two are the same. Vietnam was center stage in the fight against communism, or so the leaders said, and it wasn’t even a fight with communists but rather with nationalists who happened to be Marxists. Iraq is allegedly the central front if the war on terror. That is only true because the US military there provides the murderers of Fascislam a target rich environment. Not surprisingly, there are no terrorists attacks in Antarctica, Wyoming or Kahoolawe Island – there aren’t many targets in those places.

In a perverse way, Mr. Shays has done the nation a great service. He has put the whole Mark Foley scandal in perspective. The nation’s pre-election debate ought not turn on lurid e-mails but on matters of life and death. The US hasn’t lost a single Congressional page, but it has lost almost 3,000 warriors in Iraq. Really, which issue is more important and which is merely gossip?

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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