I remember my country. I remember how the United States of America used to conduct diplomacy and politics. While it was never the utopian model that our founding fathers imagined, it worked nevertheless. The populous was provided with limited amounts of the truth and nonpartisan cooperation was not an unheard of concept. At the end of the day, both sides worked and struggled along side one another to achieve a greater goal.
On September 28, 2006 it was reported that in 2005 Representative Mark Foley (R-FL) had exchanged sexually explicit instant messages and emails with underage male Congressional Pages, an activity he engaged in repeatedly for 10 years. Foley had been warned about the matter in 2005 by another House Republican as well as the House Clerk, but continued in spite of admonishment by additional Congressional colleagues.
Hours after the break of the Senator Foley-Congressional Page Scandal, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL) hastily reacted to the derision in a way with which we have all become so familiar in this Country. He summarily called for the dissolution of the Congressional Page program; a program which provides a unique learning experience for some of our brightest high school students and can be seminal in the aspirations of future leaders of diplomacy, law, and commerce. A few days later, reason reared its unfamiliar visage, and Senior Republican Leadership instead called for a reform of the program.
A reform of the Page Program? Unless we live in an alternate Bizarro World of which I am unaware, somehow that course of action seems tantamount to ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water,’ an axiom ultimately apropos. I suggest we consider this from a slightly diametric point of view.
Instead of calling for the end or restructuring of a program to keep Congressional Pages (i.e., jailbait) away from Congressmen (i.e., predators), why couldn’t we address the issue of pedophiles in Congress? Could it possibly be, because doing so would open the proverbial Pandora’s Box of Congressional transgressions and misappropriations of responsibilities to the Offices they hold and people they represent?
This is far from being bridled to the boundaries of pedophilia, as the past six years have made public Congressional scandals involving kick-backs & bribes, money laundering, abuse of corporate jets, sexual misconducts, hard drug use, profiteering, deplorable misuses of public monies, insider trading, all sadly in additional to many other actions of corruption at all levels of our government. With Republicans holding both Houses of Congress expertly spinning and burying leaks and stories of misconduct, how bad is it really if so much has already been revealed?
Which raises a broader question: Why do our public lawmakers continue to address the symptoms instead of the insidious disease? Allow me to answer with my own supposition: It’s a tale I call ‘the Deflection and the Red-herring.’ It draws attention away from responsibility..which we seem to be in short supply of lately..with a scape-goat target that can be easily dispatched.
Examples of deflecting responsibility with distractors include drawing attention to Iraq when it was realized that Bin Laden had slipped through our fingers, linking youth violence to violence in video games as opposed to parents reassuming the role of parenting, applying the moniker of Flip-Flopper to Senator Kerry instead of addressing political agendas, unilaterally debunking Bob Woodward’s State of Denial despite well-documented support of all his criticisms, associating patriotism with supporting the war in Iraq, banning all gels and fluids on commercial aircrafts, et cetera.
Ban lip balm and mascara on planes? Take off our shoes, even if they are flip-flops? We need real protection, not inconveniences which give the impression things are getting done.
Paramount to the problem is that addressing real issues could take time and perhaps the “right” solution, the solution that benefits society the most, could take longer than the 2 or 6 years of a Congressperson’s term. Further, it could reveal larger problems which could reflect poorly on those in power. It could negatively impact the power or future income potential of those affected by the implementation of a “right” solution. It could be that money would have to be diverted from such cost centers as the civil war in Iraq and the Department of Homeland Security.
This is not about Mark Foley and his grossly inappropriate conduct with minors, nor the improprieties of our elected representatives, nor is this about useless civil inconveniences imposed under the guise of patriotism and freedom. It’s about being sold a bill of goods.
Why? Because it can be sold. The Right has done, over the past 20 years, that which the Left has neglected to their detriment: selling the story, be it truth or lie. They sell what is easy for people to believe, something that can stir an emotional response and the more divisive the better. This gets people talking and gossiping, refocusing attention and implanting memory.
Examples of this occur whenever something negative is leaked about the Bush Administration and they come right out and either flatly deny it or negate the impact with a well-crafted and easy to regurgitate “so what?” Days later they follow it up with a statement or an answer at a White House press conference which admits to some extent, their dastardly wrong-doings, or to some extent the validity of the damaging news. However, by the time this evanescent moment of clarity is conveyed, the news story has past the height of its Ratings Curve and the public has mostly lost interest in the story, thus keeping in their minds that initial spin, and not the truth which is undeniably more damaging.
Needless to add, the Left inattentively play right into the Right’s strategy: Uncritically arguing the spin instead of figuratively raising their hand up in the air as if to chide a misbehaving infant while declaring a stern, yet parental “No!” and forcing the conversation back to the issue at hand.
So the lesson learned by the Right is to come out with a convolution of the truth or a bold lie which heedlessly contradicts the truth; that the talked about response that is out first, is the message that is forgot last.
The conservative spin machine has been well-worn in and the number of tactics to forward the agenda is only rivaled by the simplicity of their execution.
On a September 20th interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, President G.W. Bush said: “I like to tell people that when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a ‘comma.’ Referring to the great many other things he believes his Administration has accomplished during the 8 years of his presidency. A comment which also serves to point out that short-term failures in this case are indicative of a long-term success, which is how the they sell us on minimizing the nonsuccess of our military endeavors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To assuage the public outcry to President Bush’s insensitive remark by parents and family members of the nearly 2,800 Americans killed and the more than 24,000 Americans injured in Iraq since 2002, Tony Snow, the former conservative Fox News Anchor, now White House Press Secretary, had this to say during a White House Press Conference in an attempt to clarify the President’s message:
Now some people try to say ‘how dare he try to refer to [the war in Iraq] as a ‘comma’? He’s being glib about the deaths of Americans.’ That’s outrageous! The ‘comma’ refers to the period between last year’s election and today. What the President’s making the point [sic] is that when you look at the History books, the ten-month period is a ‘comma.’
How does that make any sense? Is that even a proper use of the English language? It seems that we have been exposed to so much of, what I shall refer to as, the “Snow Job” that we have reached the point where we don’t even exert the effort to question or challenge Delphic and Carrollianlly nonsensical rationale.
Demonstrating further patent duplicitousness, Fox News, which ostensibly panders to a right-leaning demographic “mistakenly” mislabeled the Republican Senator’s Name/Title subscript during their initial broadcast of the Foley-Page Scandal as “Mark Foley (D-FL).” While debatably, it may have been an innocent error on the network’s part, in today’s climate of political spin and media complicity, it can be difficult to tell the difference.
And of course a different kind of sell is exemplified by Foley. As soon as the story broke, The Republican Leadership prompted Foley to claim that he “thinks he may be an alcoholic” and checked into a 30-day rehab program. This served several purposes, but the most obvious are the fact that he is in a controlled state of incommunicado and more importantly, this gives nay-sayers and staunch right-wing supporters something to debate back and forth like a partisan version of the Chatty Kathy Glee Club. So Fox News (et al.) were gladly waxing poetic on yet another non-issue that draws focus away from the real issues.
And the response from House Speaker Hastert? Three days after the event and after a riled congress and several Senior House Republicans passed the blame up to him, he stood proudly before reporters and heralded President Harry Truman’s infamous edict of “the buck stops here,” accepting blame as the ranking Congressional Republican presiding over the House during the time in which the Foley-Page Scandal took place. Despite his declaration, hours later he is quoted as saying that he refuses to heed calls of resignation by members on both sides of the aisle and passing responsibility and blame to other House Representatives and even the Clinton Administration, which left the White House almost seven years ago. But could we really expect anything less?
It has been recently disclosed that Hastert earmarked $207 million of our tax dollars for a middle-of-nowhere highway project, which even locals say serves no purpose. Why would he do such a thing? In retrospect, perhaps it was because he ended up receiving two million dollars from the sale of some land he bought only three years earlier, which he ensured to be near the proposed highway he backed. Though, I do know people who make money from wastefully spending other peoples’ savings…I certainly would have expected more from the third person in line for the Office of the President. Why spend a couple hundred-million dollars to provide text books, lunches, and healthcare for children in the most depressed cities of our country, when you could spend it soullessly to collect a 1% rate of return, in this case two million dollars. The action is so wanton, it’s morally pornographic. However, it should be noted that in this particular case, no laws were broken, so therefore, no charges will be filed.
Whether it’s the moral decay of our election-year campaigns, the overall sense of disregard within the Executive and Legislative branches, or the ubiquitous “Reacting versus Responding” to issues which require considered responses, modern day politics has taken on a new form. Over the past 30 years we have been witness to an ever-quickening decline in the ability of our current form of government to govern effectively.
The market has been flooded with politicians and pundits spreading spin via the media, White House and Congressional sycophants posing as creditable, independent sources pushing targeted propaganda against the opposing party. Party politics have seemingly become a higher priority for elected officials, than the agenda to govern the United States. Political Parties are neither mentioned, nor alluded to, in the U.S. Constitution, which makes me wonder if they are a good idea to begin with at all.
We need a return to reason, a return to critical thinking, and a new purpose for our government, where politicians conduct themselves as public servants as they were elected to be. I want my country back..where our elected officials tell the truth rather than sell the lie, where political pluralism is embraced as a strength and not as an evil..not because it is the easy thing to do, but because it is the hard thing to do, “because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to accomplish.”
