What does Foley have to do with corruption? Take a gander at what right-wing commentator Robert Novak said:
A member of the House leadership told me that Foley, under continuous political pressure because of his sexual orientation, was considering not seeking a seventh term this year but that Rep. Tom Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), talked him into running.
Republicans in public are against homosexuality and against gay marriage. So when Foley wanted to quit and become a lobbyist, Republicans should have welcomed this development. Instead they warned him that if he did not run, the Republican leadership would see to it that he would not be effective as a lobbyist. Foley caved and ran. Republican leaders are each pointing at other Republican leaders. And Foley is in big trouble. Corruption galore!
OK, let's talk about the economy. Republicans made a deal with K-Street lobbyists: lobbyists will keep Republicans supplied with money and Republicans will write bills to please the lobbyists. This worked so well that now the Dow is zooming. Business is reaching new records. But the lot of workers is deteriorating. They are faced with part time jobs, temporary jobs, insecure jobs, stagnant-wage jobs, jobs that are outsourced, jobs with no healthcare, jobs with no pensions. Republicans corrupted the system for the benefit of business and at the expense of workers.
Terrorism? The story is one of corruption from beginning to end. The intelligence was corrupted in order to build a case against Saddam Hussein and to invade Iraq. Republican leaders corrupted Congress with this phony intelligence to get the war resolution. They lied about conditions in Iraq to keep the public on board. Lying and secrecy maintained the fiction of the "war on terror."
With the badgering slogan of the "war on terror" Republicans corrupted our system of government. They insisted that our system of checks and balances needed fixing. They were in favor of a more powerful executive, one who could keep us "safe" by calling any citizen an "enemy combatant" and incarcerating him without recourse to judicial scrutiny. To keep us even "safer," they made torture and warrantless spying legal
And let's not even get started on the sleazy Abramoff case, where Republican Rep. Bob Ney is the latest to plead guilty.
Which brings me back to moral values. The Foley case demonstrates to the world what Republicans mean by moral values. Today, I hear about a new book written by David Kuo, the man who had worked for the Bush administration on faith-based activities and left in disgust to write "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction." According to the L.A. Times:
A new book by a former White House official says that President Bush's top political advisors privately ridiculed evangelical supporters as "nuts" and "goofy" while embracing them in public and using their votes to help win elections.
....
In the book, Kuo, who quit the White House in 2003, accuses Karl Rove's political staff of cynically hijacking the faith-based initiatives idea for electoral gain. It assails Bush for failing to live up to his promises of boosting the role of religious organizations in delivering social services.
Republican corruption everywhere you turn. The public was fooled for a long time. But Foley-gate made people see that their wages and salaries are not increasing, that our troops are getting killed and maimed, that our glorious system of government is being destroyed and that religion is merely another weapon in the battle for political control.
Mark Foley is the symbol for all Republican corruption. Everybody talks about Foley. We should talk about corruption.
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