Dear Leader Nukes Foley's Hot Buns Off Front Page

Those post-pubescent Congressional pages can put their tape measures away for good, I guess. Mark Foley is in rehab for his drinking habit, and Kim Jong Ill has relegated the pages to back pages anyway with his underground test of an atomic bomb yesterday. Sic semper gloria mundi.

As a resident of the West Coast, I was always inclined to take North Korea's development of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles more seriously than the shenanigans of yet another child molestor, even before the Dear Leader, he of the dubious fashion statements and even dubiouser hairstyle, exploded an atomic bomb on Sunday. Democratic party leaders, of course, are bummed; they were counting on the Foley "scandal" to last through all of October, having finally found an "issue" worthy of the American electorate, that vast, uncharted Jerry Springer Green Room, the great unwashed and uninformed denizens whom H.L. Mencken dubbed the "Booboisie." Foley's obsession with teenage ass was supposed to be the Democrats' Monica Lewinsky, and the press was playing along, discovering one pocket of "corruption" after another, demonstrating that the Republican claim to be the party of family values was hypocritical, and their inability to protect the pages from "inappropriate" IMs from a Congressional creep was the final proof of their "incompetence."

Yeah, that's it.

The cynicism which characterizes political discourse in this country has become so extreme that I'm not sure my Alice in Wonderland metaphor can quite state the case anymore. No one on either side of the American debate takes the voters seriously. And maybe you can't. 50% of the American populace believes, for example, that the U.S. found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. While over 60% of the Iraqi populace likes seeing American soldiers blown up in Iraq, 40% of the American populace still essentially approves of the war. Such examples can be multiplied till the cows come home. You do not sway the American populace with carefully reasoned analyses of the issues. You jerk them around with scandals and name-calling.

Thus, the Democrats have put together a publicity program which is intended to analogize the Republican leadership of the House to a deceiving Archdiocese. Foley is the libidinous priest with poor impulse control, but the Bishops won't discipline him. They cover for him, while the pages, the altar boys in this scenario, are left to fend for themselves. It's a movie the American public has seen and they can follow along, and that's the critical factor. Then the Democrats can seize control and begin their own programs of self-aggrandizement, and Congress can get back to the serious work of holding hearings and investigating itself, just like the good old days.

Meanwhile, the glaciers will continue to melt, the oceans will acidify, the American standard of living will continue to fall, and Premier Poof-Hair will go right along assembling his nuclear bombs for West Coast delivery.