The guy really cheesed about the Mark Foley scandal has to be The Washington Post‘s Royal Court Reporter Bob Woodward. Until Foley’s sleazy instant messages went national, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Woodward TV appearance, as he flogged his book State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III and grimly denied that he had ever suggested – in his two previous Bush-regime-insider tell-alls – that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld triumvirate nobly embodied the second coming of the Pax Romana. Now that even purblind, official Washington has realized it’s been backing a bunch of losers, Lonesome Bob is duly anointed to deliver the eulogy. Alas, thanks to Mark “the Measuring Stick” Foley, nobody’s listening.
Although there’s undeniable schadenfreude in watching the Republican theocracy implode – if the bums get thrown out, few will weep over the details – national Democrats greeted the Foley story with an audible sigh of relief, as it meant they could at last stop talking about Iraq. Why defend yourself against charges of “cut-and-run” when you can wax moralistic about getting tough on congressional sex predators? While everyone was ranting about the sheer awfulness of Foley’s cyber come-ons – it obviously doesn’t take much to heat up adolescent minds, whatever their age – only a very few have noticed that during one of Foley’s most notorious IM assignations, in April of 2003, the vote he delayed while he finished bonking himself was to approve supplemental appropriations for the U.S. war on Iraq. (Foley and 413 of his fellows voted aye; there were all of 12 dissenters and nine abstentions; of Texans only Ron Paul voted no.)
It would be nice if, once in a while, we could call on national moral outrage at least as strongly against slaughtering innocents abroad as we routinely do against seducing teenagers via the Internet, now a serial perversion of TV newsmagazines and an absolute obsession of law enforcement. Our state attorney general, Greg Abbott, has a whole platoon of phony Web surfers pretending to be credulous youngsters in search of grownup love. Do you think he might be able to spare a man or two to find out why state human-service agencies and their corporate megacontractors can’t manage to effectively enroll hundreds of thousands of Texas children in basic health insurance?
If that isn’t child abuse on a colossal scale, what would you call it?
The Members’ Members
Yet another issue only tangentially addressed is the stench of homophobia thoroughly intertwined with L’Affair Foley. I’ve spent no time on the floor of the U.S. House but enough on the edges of the Legislature to know that most middle-aged pols don’t spend their long hours between votes ogling the page boys. While much of it’s just macho bullshit, it’s the female pages who will more likely roll their eyes when asked about such matters. Each day of new Foleyana brings us closer to the moment when some former page breaks her silence about the Ol’ Boys Club. Won’t that be fun?
I asked UT student Zack Hall, a former page (2004) who’s been organizing his colleagues to preserve the congressional page program against this current threat (at least one member has publicly called for the program’s abolition), about his own experiences. He says he knew Foley slightly and without incident but that after the scandal broke a close friend from another state called him for advice. Foley had corresponded with the friend in his now-notorious vein, making vague overtures and asking for a photograph. The friend thought it odd but had responded with a family Christmas card. He only now realizes that Foley had something entirely different in mind. “He wasn’t sure what to do,” says Hall, “and I told him he should contact the authorities and the people in charge of the program and let them know what happened.”
Hall confirmed that he observed plenty of things around the House that disillusioned him concerning the august reputation of members of Congress but that most of the boorish behavior was directed at young women, not men, and he never personally felt uncomfortable. While he knows of nothing more, he would not be surprised if there are additional revelations. “I guess maybe I was naive,” he said, “but we’re not talking about adults here. These are 16-year-old students, kids that were in high school. They need to be protected, and if there were people there that knew what Foley was doing, or suspected it, and didn’t investigate, they need to be held accountable.”
Hall belongs to the University Democrats but points out that the pages (some 400 now) involved in the lobbying effort to support the program are of both parties and that, in particular, his friend who was trolled by Foley is a Republican. “It’s just weird to think that something like that should happen,” Hall said, “and people who knew about it wouldn’t try to go straight to the truth.”
They’re Trying to Kill Us
Which by coincidence of language and morality brings us back to Bob Woodward, who, with most of his media fellows, spent the last five years in a state of denial about the Bush administration’s most spectacular abomination, the war on Iraq. Only now that the political currents have shifted – and the emperor’s nakedness makes Mark Foley look like Queen Victoria – does Woodward allow that, just maybe, mistakes were made. Like a weather vane, wrote Jacob Weisberg in Slate, Woodward can always be counted on to tell us which way the wind is blowing. “Mr. Woodward does have a consistent world view,” Weisberg wrote: “Washington’s conventional wisdom. When everyone viewed Mr. Rumsfeld as a commanding hunk, Mr. Woodward embodied the adoration. Now that we all know Mr. Rumsfeld is a vicious old bastard, Mr. Woodward channels the loathing just as fluidly.”
Well, far be it from me to feel sorry for the vicious old bastard and all his company. If the conventional D.C. wisdom has finally become that Bush & Co. should all rot in hell forever, I won’t waste time parsing the reasons.
As Yossarian once responded to the question, “What if everybody felt that way?”
“Then I’d certainly be a damn fool to feel any other way.” 
This article appears in October 13 • 2006.
