on Mark Foley
The Willamette Week’s coup de grace will forever be an investigative piece which uncovered the pedophilliac relationship of an Oregon Favourite Son — a popular governor who, as Portland mayor, is credited with making Portland what it is today and as governor of Oregon is credited with making Oregon what it is today. As he moved on, Neil Goldsmidt had his hands all over the Oregon Democratic machinery. Thus the uneasy untying of alliances many politicos had to undergo when he had his fall from grace. It is akin to the banning of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part Two” from NFL stadiums — the inextricable extraction of complicated interlocking compartmentalizing is never easy.
The Great Scandal of the Oregon Governor was, however, the wanton cover-up. People knew. People swept it under the rug. It was spoken up in hushed voices. The Media and various powerful forces looked the other way and pretended like they didn’t see anything.
Which brings us to the case of Mark Foley. What did they know and when did they know it, and why couldn’t the red flags be mulled and pulled and worked over in-House; first privatedly to see if there was any fire attached to the smoke of a close relationship between a 55 year old Congressman and a 16 year old Paige, and then a more public airing of “diappointment” and “tsk tsk” and “There’s the Door, Mark Foley” when the fire is verifiably attached to the smoke? Why was it up to a media outlet to uncover this whole sordid mess and stink? It’s a failure of the House Ethics process, I suppose, and we all know who to blame for that (unspoken) breakdown, don’t we?
And why, when I listened to a bit of Michael Savage on Friday, was the host’s go-to-position to consider this a witch-hunt against a “solid conservative member of Congress”? “I don’t care about his sexuality!” A charge of hypocrisy against the LIE-BERALS!! (A blurring of the lines of homosexuality and pedophilia, while we’re at it.) See… if this sexual relationship were with an adult, the one valid attack would be largely political — Hypocrisy if his/her political persona were based on a “Moral Majority” anti-homexual kick — ala the former mayor of Spokane, James West. (Who had an added bit of creeptitude with the fact that the entrapment exposed him as waiting for a 17 year old to turn 18 — creepy stalk-horsing, that.) As it were, the hypocrisy of Mark Foley remains: he was an active anti-pedophilia legislator. But this hypocrisy is incidental and beside the point. And so it goes.