"But Moooommmmm! Billy did it too!!!
How many times now have you heard some right wing shill trying to somehow excuse or mitigate the actions of Foley or the Republican leadership by citing Dems Garry Studds, Barney Frank, and even Bill Clinton?
I watched MSNBC for about 3 hours and saw it mentioned about a dozen times at least.
This is pathetic.
First, how does this have anything to do with what justifying what happened?? Stick to the here and now, or is that simply impossible for this gang? I mean, the country is SICK TO DEATH of their knee-jerk response to every Republican scandal of blaming it on Clinton or some other variant of the absolutely childish, 5 year old maturity level whine that "they did it too".
It's like two children in the back seat saying, "Mom! Billy hit me!" "He hit me first!!! I mean, PUH-LEEZE give the public a little more respect than that.
Countdown even put together a video clip with quick cuts of dozens of right wing flacks mentioning Studds and Frank. They must have amassed about 50 examples, and hearing them played in succession was hilarious, if it wasn't so sickening.
Not only is trying to compare Studds and Frank (and even Clinton) to Foley pointless, but in this case, it's absolutely dishonest and untrue.
This infuriates me. Out of the literally dozens of times I've heard this stupid response, both on cable news and even C-Span and elsewhere, on NOT ONE OCCASION, did either the host or any guests, even Dems, point out that the cases of Studds and Frank DID NOT INVOLVE MINORS.
Got that, DID NOT INVOLVE MINORS.
And in neither case did it involve hitting on or attempting to pick up a minor.
Secondly, in both the Studds and Frank cases, BOTH involved CONSENSUAL relationships.
Again, both cases, CONSENTUAL relationships.
Studds even stayed with the page he became involved with and they had a relationship for decades.
(and yes, there's no evidence that the Foley case actually involved sex, which is yet another distinction between his case and the three Dem cases. But again, consentual and of age are two enormous distinctions.)
As for trying to equate it with Clinton, that's an even further stretch. That too was completely consentual. And even beyond that, Lewinsky was absolutely pushing herself on him.
Bottom line, literally NO COMPARISON between the Foley's perversions and the Republican leaderships coverup and any of these trumpeted cases of gay relationships of Democrats in the past.
The fact that none of these cases involved minors (though in Studds case it did involve a 17 yr old) and were all consentual IS an important distinction that sets them far apart from what Mark Foley did with underage pages. It's certainly enough to make the Republican effort to draw parallels a sham.
What's with God's Own Party, the one's claiming ownership of God and morality, that they can stoop to trying to defend Foley's actions by trying to equate it to consentual relationships with legal adults? Where's the morals that would prevent them from making such disingenuous and intellectually dishonest comparisons?
And perhaps more importantly, why does NO ONE ever bother to point out that in the Dems cases, it was both consentual and didn't involve minors??!!
To a person, everyone just lets the accusations pass uncontested.
Are all Democrats saints? Hell no! Are there Democrat perverts? It would be a miracle if their weren't.
But c'mon, this stupid attempt to throw Franks and Studds up as some sort of argument that the Dems are just as immoral as Foley and the House leadership is both dishonest and the moral equivalent of trying to minimize what Foley did to these kids.
posted by The Inside Dope @ 10/04/2006
10 comments
10 Comments:
Screwing a 17 year old isn't as bad as talking dirty to a 16 year old? Interesting. Remind me to keep my kids away from you.
Tell that to the thousands of guys who had sex with 17 yr olds and then continued the relationship for decades...maybe your or someone else's moms?
Studd was with a 17yr old gay man and had a long-term committed relationship with them afterwards.
Yeah, that's not as bad as a gay man trolling for sex from straight boys when they don't want that sort of attention.
It wasn't so long ago that Democrats were horrified not by the specter of
middle aged pervs seeking — indeed, having — sex with the young people
placed in their care for mentoring purposes. What bothered them was what
they regarded as the preternatural interest in it shown by those stuck-up,
straight-laced Republican bible-thumpers like Judge Starr. After all, he
could have just dryly given us the bottom-line details, but ohhh noo,
Democrats cried, he had to linger on graphic detail after graphic detail.
Like here's one: phone sex — which I think is a pretty good 90's analogue of
Instant-Message (IM) sex. According to Monica Lewinsky, she had President
Clinton had phone sex some 15 times." And one of these times, Clinton was on
the phone with Dick Morris, and Morris is getting his toes sucked, and
Clinton was -- well, Monica was under the desk.
At any rate, all these tawdry details came out. "We don't have transcripts
of these, er, sessions of course. We don't know what the President of the
United States was precisely saying, or squealing, like we do with the
comparatively tame Foley (who, for all we know, was not actually having a
physical sexual relationship with the objects of his virtual sexual
attentions). But we do know that at least some of these phone-sex sessions
took place on non-secure phone lines — creating the possibility that they
could be eavesdropped on by foreign agents, compromising Clinton and our
national security. Although they are evidently sudden converts to family
values and robust national security, Democrats did not seem very interested
in such matters not so long ago. What we heard back then was that Starr was
too obsessed, that it was unseemly to go into all this icky stuff."
You know, you gotta wonder, was one of these times the CIA and the Special
Ops had bin Laden in their sights and they call Sandy Burglar and Burglar
can't get hold of Clinton, is it one of those times when Clinton's got
Monica under the desk? The story is that no, Clinton was out on the golf
course and didn't want to deal with it. But, you know, Clinton has a way of
teaching women how to play golf. The Clinton method for teaching women to
play golf is you start out with the irons and then you work your way into
the woods. So who knows what was going on out there. The theory is that
Clinton was on a golf course or at a country club, saw Burglar's name on his
cell phone and just didn't want to deal with it and didn't answer the phone
or call back when the window of opportunity to nail bin Laden had closed. So
you have to ask, was Clinton engaged with Monica during one of these
particular times?
Dr.Who,
Just click your heels together three times and keep repeating, "It's all Clinton's fault, It's all Clinton's fault, It's all Clinton's fault".
Really, by now you should be getting over your obsession with Clinton's zipper. You and the right's sick obsession with the issue brought government nearly to a halt and distracted the administration from doing it's job.
Thankfully, Clinton was able to keep the insanity compartmentalized and still focus on the growing terror threat.
All the stuff you recite about Berger and bin Laden and all the rest has been proven to be myths long ago, and only a few weeks ago was AGAIN shown to be false with even right wingers like Bill Bennett saying that ABC's attempt to repeat such garbage was a distortion of reality and unfair.
What will it take to get brainwashed cretins to finally realize that they've been fed, and greedily swallowed whole, a steady diet of lies, misinformation, lies, propaganda, and more lies?
The rest of the country is coming around Chester. You don't want to be the last one on your block to wake up.
But you'll probably end up like those Japanese soldiers hidden in caves on remote Pacific islands that held out for decades not aware that WWII was over.
This is interesting. 16 = boy but 17 = man. Looks like you're the one twisting the language and running in circles. Besides, looks like the kid was 18 at the time. There's legal authority to claim 18 = man, not just some Inside Dope.
Look, Foley is a slimeball and should probably be chemically castrated and sent to prison. But you Dems are blowing this out of proportion. Foley's out of Congress. William Jefferson remains. There's your double standard.
I think you're being willfully stupid there anon.
It's when a person is legally an "adult". The age of majority in some southern states was (or may still be) 15 fairly recently.
So yes, a 16yr old can be a minor and a 17 yr old can be legally an adult.
At any rate, you're insisting on ignoring the fact that in the Studds case it was consentual and they remained together for many, many years.
So you'd put that in the same catagory as a man who marries a 17 year old and raises a family? Is that just as criminal in your mind?
I'm sure that happens quite a bit, years ago it was common.
And your commenton Clinton is absolutely weird. "Clinton remains"? What do you expect him to do? Or are you suggesting he should have been executed?
What the hell?
Foley still "remains" as well. What's your point?
I'd just like to point out that when Clinton and Monica did the nasty act in the White House, Monica was 21 and more than willing to participate. It may have been immoral, but it wasn't criminal! Apparently we have reached the point where immorality is the only cause for impeachment proceedings. Criminal acts are just shoved under the rug and all the right wing cronies look the other way.
As long as we're on the subject - what's with all this re-hab. Last Friday Foley was a 20 year career congressman. By Monday he had declared himself an alcoholic. Then his attorney announced that the alcohol thing was true, but added mental illness, and said he was molested between the ages of 13 and 15 by a clergyman. Oh, yeah, he also wanted us to know that he's gay. I've known lots of alcoholics in my lifetime (some have been related) and not one of them has suddenly turned into a pedophile. Do elected officials really get so high on a power trip that they think they can do anything they want, but if they apologize enough and go to rehab that their sins will go away? Because, afterall, they must be smarter than the average person or they wouldn't be in office? And don't forget that those not in rehab have an uncanny ability to develop amnesia in a heartbeat.
That's another issue brought into this... the "get caught, run to rehab" PR strategy.
I heard the hilarious Wanda Sikes on some show saying, "Hey, when you're drunk you might have sex with a fattie or make an ass out of yourself, but it doesn't suddenly turn you into a pedophile!!"
Kind of sums it up.
Let's see, a democrat congressman was caught having a relationship with a 17 year old boy and was censured and yet was re-elected with the full knowledge of his affairs. A Republican Congressman was caught having online interactions of a sexual nature over a period of years with several different boys and young men, and it was hushed up, by the chairman of the page board, the speaker of the house, the majority leader, and the chairman of the NRCC so he could be re-elected. Yeah they're the same you're right.
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