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Monday, October 02, 2006  Mark Foley Is Just A Victim - Matt Drudge And The Monster Inside The Republican Machine I got in trouble once for calling Matt Drudge a first class scumbag. At the time I thought maybe I had gone too far, let my emotions get the better of me. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. But it turns out I hadn't gone too far. It turns out Matt Drudge is a scumbag of the worst kind, the kind that blames the victims of sexual abuse. Crooks and Liars has the audio. Jane Hamsher has the transcript. Matt Drudge actually refers to the children who were preyed upon by Mark Foley as "16 and 17 year old beasts". He also says, "they (the pages) were talking about how many times they'd masturbated, how many times they'd done it with their girlfriends this weekend...all these things and these innocent children. And this poor congressman sitting there typing, oh am I going to get any, you know?"  What we're seeing here, through the prism of this lone sexual predator, is the monster inside the machine. First you have the Republican Congressional leadership, so power hungry, so desperate to hold a seat at any cost, that they cover Mark Foley's tracks for at least a year. The revelation of the coverup is followed almost immediately by the Right Wing Message Machine, with Fox News' Brit Hume comparing Foley to Bill Clinton and John Gibson trying to equate the current scandal to previous House scandals more than 20 years old. Bill O'Reilly tries to make Foley's actions just a by-product of Foley's homosexuality. Matt Drudge takes all of this to a deeper, darker place, and perhaps it's logical conclusion. Matt Drudge, like the Republican leadership and the Fox News commentators, is so single minded and addicted to power that he's willing to blame the children themselves. This is how upside down and wretched their world has become. They blame the children for the actions of adults. And it's no different from the mindset that blames other countries for our failure to find weapons of mass destruction, a mindset that cannot ever accept responsibility, it's just more obvious. One has to believe that the right wing media, falling over themselves to protect their masters, will also suffer from the credibility they are squandering so recklessly. I have to believe that even the most dedicated Ditto-head will hesitate to believe that it's the adults that need to be protected from the children. After all, Republican Congressman Mark Foley did try to actually meet with the youth. After all, what is law and order if we can't protect our children from those that would abuse them? And adults that want to look away while children are abused are guilty of abuse themselves. See also The Mark Foley, Ann Coulter, Fox News Love Triangle, How Mark Foley Represents Brit Hume And Fox News, and How Mark Foley Represents The Entire Republican Party. - Stephen Elliott posted by Stephen Elliott 4:12 PM | link | |
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"Any true love story, if told with the urgency and animal intelligence of love, isn't for the fainthearted. On every page of this profound, distilled work of art, Stephen Elliott wrestles with the unknown and unspoken essences of love, and articulates that unknown so beautifully, with such clear-eyed fearlessness... Imagine a glass of pure water with one drop of blood hanging in its center, about to dissolve... Then drink it and be transformed." -Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City "There's an emotional courage to these stories, and a sense of urgency, that are thrilling to encounter. Elliott writes as if his life depended on each sentence. It is not overstating the case to say that he does for the BDSM community in this book what Denis Johnson did for lost druggies in Jesus' Son." - Steve Almond, The Believer Magazine Best of the year: Salon.com, San Francisco Chronicle Reviews: Salon.com, LA Weekly, The Believer Excerpts: My Stripper Year, Just Always Be Good Purchase from Amazon, Powells, Cleis, and your local bookstore 
"Happy Baby is surely the most intelligent and beautiful book ever written about juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism, and drugs." - Curtis Sittenfeld, The New York Times Book Review Best of the year: Village Voice, Salon.com, Chicago New City, The Journal News Awards: Finalist Young Lions Award, Silver Medal California Book Award Reviews: The New York Times, Salon.com, Village Voice Excerpts: Stalking Gracie Part 3 Purchase from Amazon, Powell's, and your local bookstore 
"Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Richard Ben Cramer: the great, all-American genre of the political campaign in extenso (and in extremis) has had its Homers and Boswells. To that list we can now add Stephen Elliott. Hilarious, strange, electrifyingly written, and heart-pumpingly idealistic, Looking Forward to It wins every literary caucus and primary in a landslide." -Tom Bissell, author of Chasing the Sea Best of the year: Village Voice Reviews: New York Magazine, New York Times Excerpts: The Dennis Kucinich Polka, A John Edwards Almanac Purchase from Amazon, Powell's (cheap!), and your local bookstore 
"A Life Without Consequences was harrowing, hard as nails, brutal, and soaring. Stephen Elliott has to be watched, because he knows things almost no one else could." - Dave Eggers, author of A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius and What Is The What Excerpt: Adlai Stevenson House Reviews: Austin American Statesman Purchase from Amazon |
