Resigned

A small and seemingly uninteresting Congressional district in Florida became the focus of the nation’s attention on Friday, as the incumbent Representative, Republican Mark Foley, resigned his seat in Congress and announced his retirement. With six weeks to go before the mid-term elections, Rep. Foley’s name will have to remain on the ballot under Florida law, however the Republican Party has one week to name a candidate to whom Foley’s votes will be credited.

The reason for his resignation was a brewing scandal in which Rep. Foley engaged in e-mail and instant message exchanges with possibly as many as five current and former Congressional Pages, the contents of which are now emerging. The Pages are all male, at least one of them is under age, and the exchanges were of a suggestive nature. One Page described the contents of the Congressman’s messages as, “sick.”

The Democratic challenger in the Florida 16th, Tim Mahoney, issued a brief statement Friday expressing his concern and condolences. But you gotta believe that he’s shopping for a brownstone in Georgetown right this very minute, cigar in one hand, champagne in the other.

Mr. Foley is a six-term Congressman, 53 years old and single, and was favored to win his district again in November. Some of Mr. Foley’s colleagues in the House are now admitting that they have known about Mr. Foley’s taste for young men, and preference for Congressional employees, for at least a year. Apparently warnings were given to Mr. Foley by more than one Republican Representative during the past 12 months, and now the matter is in the hands of the House Ethics Committee. It is reasonable to think there will be an investigation, though what good it will do now that Mr. Foley is merely a private citizen is anybody’s guess.

So what’s the big deal? Why is this news? Isn’t having Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, and Michael Jackson to knock around enough?

Well, let’s see…

Former Representative Foley was co-chair of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus. In fact, Foley is co-author of one of the most recent bills in the House aimed at cracking down on Internet predators. Foley has not openly declared that he is a homosexual, to his colleagues, his family, or his constituents. And finally, Foley joins a large and growing list of GOP members and supporters I like to refer to as the “Hypocrite Circus”.

Co-Chair of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, eh? What, was he doing, collecting phone numbers? I mean, Jeepers! That’s like finding out the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee is spying for Castro. While not a formal committee with any genuine legislative power, the Caucus is supposed to advocate on behalf of vulnerable and victimized children, and here we find out the Co-Chair is a perv. Politicians whine and moan about the degree to which the press dig into their personal lives during campaigns. This, folks, is precisely why.

Some will give me the gears over my next point, and that’s okay. Mr. Foley ran for office in a largely Republican district in (excluding the metro centers) a consistently conservative state. Not only did he not disclose his homosexuality to the voters, when alternative press articles began to circulate the rumor that he was gay in 2003, he called a press conference to decry the outlandish accusations and blame the “repulsive campaign tactic” on the state Democratic party. Additionally, Mr. Foley is on record as voting for legislation limiting protections for gays against discrimination in the workplace.

The fact that he is or may be gay would not likely influence many voters in many states, however I am confident that for most of his consitutency, it makes a world of difference. The retirees of Florida do not want a homosexual as their representative, and knowing this, Mr. Foley kept his sexual preference a secret. He won election, and five re-elections, by lying to the voters of his district. Not just about what he stands for, but about who and what he is, a far more reprehensible betrayal of trust.

There are openly gay men and women in Congress, and that’s just the point. Those individuals ran their campaigns with that fact out in the open. Mr. Foley lied about it, or more accurately did not disclose the truth about it, and now every candidate in every race this fall is going to have that question asked, and asked, and asked again. They’re going to have their family scrutinized, their friends questioned, their business associates spied on. None of this is necessary, but for the fact that somebody we trusted was found to be abusing that trust. And so with important issues to be discussed like American soldiers at war, skyrocketing energy prices, and millions of Americans unable to afford proper health care, instead every candidate in the country can expect to be asked about who they like to get busy with at least a thousand times in the next six weeks. Oh, goodie.

This is the one area of our personal life that is not visible to the naked eye or demonstrably evident through a campaign: male/female, tall/short, black/white/Latino/Asian/other, smart/dumb, eloquent/bumbler, all of these things are going to come out. Gay/straight is a matter of disclosure for the candidate, and it stands as a test of character when the truth is brought to light. Mr. Foley failed that test, and now the spotlight on every candidate’s sexual preference is going to be as intense as a laser beam for the foreseeable future. At a time when gay rights groups are finally starting to see some progress in their plight, an episode like this comes along and gives reporters permission to pry into people’s lives all the more vigorously, and gives another opportunity for the holier-than-thou bigots to hit the Sunday morning talk show circuit spreading their vitriol.

And lastly, I have little tolerance for hypocrisy. If you’re going to stick it out there, you’d better be willing to have it cut off, otherwise keep your mouth shut. Walk the walk, damnit. And here’s just another member of the Hypocrite Circus showing his true colors. Right-wing paragon and The Book of Virtues author Bill Bennett: turns out he’s blowing seven-figure sums of his royalties money at the dog track. Former Republican Senate candidate from Illinois Jack Ryan was exposed by his ex-wife as having a liking for swingers’ clubs. And the humdinger, Mr. Law and Order himself, the man who railed on for more than a decade on his syndicated radio show about locking up drug users and shipping Mexicans back across the border by the truck full, Rush Limbaugh: caught doctor-shopping to get multiple prescriptions of Vicodin, that he then sent his illegal-immigrant maid to go fill for him.

Mr. Foley now joins this elite cadre of pathetic weasels: lecturing from pulpits built on deceit, while holding themselves up as models of trust and respectability; purporting to advocate traditional Judeo-Christian values, while in their spare time they yield to temptation and commit the very sins for which they admonish us. These people go out of their way to belittle certain segments of our society: gays, addicts, immigrants, etc. Hopefully now Mr. Foley and the rest of these witless bullies will get a little taste of their own medicine. With luck, it will be sour enough to shut them up for good.

Sick

I would best be described by those who have to endure me in close quarters on a regular basis as a cantankerous, belligerent jackass. It’s all my wife can do to contain me, and I’m sure my kids, adorable ingrates that they are, are merely counting the days until they can give me a well-practiced one-finger salute and head for the bus station. Ah, ya gotta love ‘em…

I have my good days. When my to-do list is short, the coffee is stiff and hot, the phone doesn’t ring, nobody needs a ride anywhere, nothing spills, I don’t stub my toe, no e-mails arrive with unpleasant news about my children’s grades, and the Fed doesn’t raise interest rates, I can be a pleasant, even occasionally jovial human being. The menacing, hemorrhoidal wildebeest with the heart of gold, so to speak.

But when I’m sick…

Have you seen the first 20 minutes of “Saving Private Ryan?” I’m sure that’s how my kids feel on those days when I’m under the weather. Bullets flying everywhere, mortars, grenades, flame throwers: they put on their flak jackets and helmets and grab some cover. I’m the antithesis of the stereotypical whiny man, moaning in bed and demanding to be waited on. I fight my way through it, miserable to the core, going through facial tissue by the pallet as I refuse to give way to whatever ailment is trying to put me down. I stomp around the house in a raging stupor, leaking snot from my cranium like somebody punched a hole in a keg full of vegetable oil, and screaming at anything that crosses me.

I’m sure to a certain degree my family has learned to ignore and avoid me. Most of my rage is directed, fortunately for them, at disobedient inanimate objects: coffee pots that don’t pour right, glasses that slip out of my hand, tissues that don’t pop out of the box when you pull the previous one. So my family will hear hours upon hours of statements like, “If I ever find the @#^$@ son of a @#$^# who invented this stupid thing, I’m going to rip the skin off his skull with my fingernails and stuff it down his throat!!!” My proclamations start out gentle like that, and get more graphic and explicit as my condition worsens. By a few weeks into my illness I have vowed to disembowel most of the human species.

My usual pattern is this: I have an allergy attack for some reason, either petting the cat or getting into a dusty shelf and then wiping my nose like an idiot. Then follows about 2 – 20 hours of relentless sneezing that even quadruple-doses of Benadryl don’t touch. When it finally ends, usually at 2 or 3 in the morning, I’m exhausted and royally pissed off, and the little sleep I get is useless, because I am really just fighting to force air in and out of my lungs all night. So while I am asleep, I get no rest, which is like punching my immune system in the stomach. At that point some bug lodges itself in my sinuses, and the games begin.

I need to take this opportunity to try to bring into focus for you what it means for me to have a sneezing fit. Get three people to help you reconstruct this little scenario, and you’ll have a better idea of what each and every one of these little gifts from Lucifer is like. First, you need to be blindfolded and have a noose fastened loosely around your neck. Have Assistant #2 sit down facing you holding the other end of the rope. Assistant #1 needs to be on your left with a feather, and Assistant #3 needs to be on your right with a burlap sack filled with a half-dozen oranges. Execute the following instructions in swift succession:

1. Assistant #1 tickles your nose, then steps out of the way

2. Assistant #2 yanks the rope as hard as he can, pulling your head down to your knees, while simultaneously…

3. Assistant #3 winds up and smacks you full-on in the chest with the sack of oranges

Imagine four of those per minute, every minute, for half a day. Welcome to my world. And people wonder why I get so pissed off.

For the next two to twelve weeks we fight it out: the bug with the apocalyptic sneezing, sinus drainage, runny nose, and weeks with no real sleep; me with three types of nasal spray, two antihistamines, decongestants, “Breathe Right” strips, and the vaporizer. I wake up each morning, spend an hour trying to get feeling like a human being, and march off to work. I rarely stay home sick, and my weekends are usually so busy that I don’t get much rest then either. Monday comes and it’s more of the same, me stubbornly refusing to admit that I’m sick (“That will just give it confidence!”), and dismissing any suggestion that I seek medical help. Night after restless night, week after endless week, until finally I relent and go see the doctor. Usually he takes one look at me and just shakes his head, then starts writing out prescriptions. Ten days and sixty pills later I’m usually back to my cantankerous, belligerent, jackass self again.

Time was it would drop into my chest, and I would land in the clinic for breathing treatments. Once it got so bad I collapsed on the floor at the house, and a neighbor had to drive me to the emergency room. I thought I had appendicitis, but it turned out to be micoplasmic pneumonia in both lungs. I spent a week in the hospital under the care of an infectious diseases specialist, getting hyper-doses of intravenous antibiotics so strong they gave me seizures. Try that sometime, it’s good for a few laughs.

This latest round was as bad as it has been in a while. I lasted three months before I wised up, and then it took three different runs of antibiotics to send it to the nether regions. I’m still fighting the sniffles, but the worst has passed.

I know when I bottom out when I’m saying to myself, “I can’t remember the last time I felt healthy.” I used to laugh at people who said, “If you have your health, you have everything.” That advice seems more sage with every discarded Kleenex.

This week comes word from the medical community that they are beginning human trials of a vaccine that will all but eliminate the most common forms of ear and sinus infections in children. In ten years, with luck, this menace will be a thing of the past. Upper respiratory infections are the number one reason for antibiotic prescriptions by a staggering margin, and as these bugs get more and more resilient and the drugs get less and less effective, this vaccine will limit the number of hosts available to infect, and hopefully send these bacteria packing once and for all.

I, however, will suffer until my dying day. This vaccine is for children, and apparently won’t be tested on or administered to adults. So that guy a few seats down from you on the train, sniffing constantly and swearing under his breath, that’s me. I’m sentenced to a lifetime of this misery, enduring year after year of this gut-wrenching nightmare, which I’m sure is taking years off my life in some way or another.

More’s the pity, since I’m usually such a ray of sunshine, spreading joy and happiness wherever I go…

Slippery Slope

With the Congressional mid-term elections six weeks away, you are about to see a flurry of controversial issues come hurtling towards you like a swarm of bees. Democrats will be trying to convince you that the Republicans have bungled everything from the war in Iraq to domestic security to appropriations for fern research; Republicans will be trying to convince you that the Democrats are crying ‘wolf’, helping the terrorists, and advocating radical views that are out of touch with mainstream America.

One issue is coming to the forefront very quickly, as it was announced on Monday that the dissident Republican Senators who were blocking two pieces of the White House’s legislation, the ones pertaining to detention and interrogation of enemy combatants and the wire tapping program, had reached a compromise that would allow them to vote in favor of the wiretapping bill. This is the preamble to a showdown in the Senate, as Democrats will make this a watershed issue prior to the elections, taking the opportunity to accuse Republicans of trampling the Constitution and our civil liberties with hob-nailed boots.

I’m admittedly out to the right of even the most conservative opinions on the enemy combatants issue: I say cut their fingers off one digit at a time until they spill their guts. I’m not squeamish about inflicting pain when it comes to winning wars. But I understand that my view is outside the bounds of what America will tolerate, and I’m okay with whatever compromise is reached. As long as we don’t just pack them a lunch and give them bus fare.

But on the issue of wire-tapping, I think Americans are naïve about the implications of making a knee-jerk decision about the limits of this intelligence tool. Despite the worst-case scenario caterwauling from the liberals (excuse me, “Progressives”), the amount that this will affect you and I in our daily lives is absolutely nil. And if we simply rally behind the Constitution on this issue, we may just play right into the terrorists’ hands, and seal our fate.

The issue is this: can the President authorize the NSA to bug your phone without authorization from the legally-required secret court and the oversight committee in Congress? President Bush did exactly that, and got caught. Now he and his allies in Congress are trying to legislate those powers into existence. Should we allow that bill to pass?

I’ve heard tell of an underground facility somewhere in the prairies that houses thousands of mainframe computers linked directly to the main switches of the entire US phone network. Every single phone conversation held by anybody in the country is recorded, and software scans the tapes for watch-words like “assassinate” and “Al Qaida”. The frequency of those watch-words is noted, and when it reaches a certain threshold for a given individual, the appropriate intelligence agency is notified.

I’ve wanted to test this, just for fun. Call an answering machine that belongs to nobody, talk in jibberish, sprinkle in some of those watch-words, sound angrier every day that goes by, and see how long it takes for a black Ford LTD to suddenly appear down the street from my house. The only challenge at that point would be convincing them that I was just kidding. Haven’t quite figured that one out yet.

This is most likely urban legend. But let’s assume for a minute that it isn’t. Let’s assume that President Johnson put it in place as the radical 60’s were ramping up, and it has been whirring away ever since. Let’s go on the assumption that every word you ever said to anyone, including talking mushy to your significant other in Junior High, has been reviewed by a U.S. Government computer.

Apart from being offended, has this affected your life in any way, shape or form? Have you been turned down for a job, rejected by a life insurance company, or sent to the back of the line at the DMV because of this? Have you been grabbed by guys in black suits and sunglasses, shot up with Demerol and asked about your preference for peanut butter? Has one single thing about your life changed at all? My guess is the answer is no, and the reality of the matter is that you or I could actually have had our phones bugged since the day we were born and we’d never know it.

So given that it is possible that your phone has already been bugged and your conversations recorded, and given that it hasn’t affected your life one way or the other, what difference does it make if we give them permission to do it now?

“It’s a violation of my privacy!” the argument goes. So what? Do you think that anyone trying to root out terrorists is interested in your sexual proclivities, self-medication, or model train hobby? The only reason you have a phone in the first place is because the government allows and facilitates it. It’s not like they’re putting a mind-altering drug in the water, or shoving a tracking device up your rectum, or taking satellite pictures of you nude sunbathing on the roof of your apartment building. Although I have to believe they do that too when they’re bored on a Friday night.

The weapon that these extremist nut-balls are most adept at using against us is our freedom. They manipulate the very freedom we are trying to defend in order to bring us down. We let anybody get a driver’s license. We let anybody use the internet or own a cell phone. We let anybody take flying lessons. We let anybody get on a plane. We have a Constitution that allows for free movement across borders, free communication with people of all manner of opinions, free transfer of funds, free assembly, free discussion and dissemination of radical views, and all you have to do to buy a gun in this country is show up at a gun show with enough money — they don’t even do a background check. These are all things we take for granted as part of our democratic society, but they are all easily and deftly turned against us by those seeking to do us harm.

So it comes down to this: if you’re a law-abiding citizen, you shouldn’t care if anyone is listening to your phone calls. If you aren’t guilty of anything, you have nothing to worry about. The only people this affects are criminals and terrorists. Slippery slope though it may be, with a threat like this staring us down, we’ll need to put on some skates for a few years until things settle down.

And the reason why is this. Let’s say Dubya bugs my phone, and yours, and two or three million other people’s. And in doing so the NSA gets a lead, which starts an investigation, which leads to an arrest. And that guy has Bin Laden posters all over his house, a Hummer full of C4, and a map of my kids’ school.

Some may consider the possibility of having your phone bugged is a steep price to pay, but it may buy my kids the opportunity to grow old instead of dying for somebody else’s hollow ideology. I would pay that price to keep your children safe, and considering the fact that it won’t affect your life in the slightest, you damn well better be willing to pay it for mine.