Foley’s follies

Of the former congressman and his awful predilictions I will not say very much beyond the fact that the man is evidently sick and sadly troubled. I hope he gets some help, and furthermore, I hope that if he’s found to have committed crimes- DOJ has been asked to look into the matter – that he pays for them with whatever grace he can manage to salvage from this lurid episode.

The story itself has of course created the perfect blogostorm, with Congressional Republican leaders – who had reluctantly acknowledged being aware of recent, but ambiguously worded emails from the former congressman to teenaged pages – falling all over themselves to establish distance from accusations that they were aware of explosively sexual and unambiguous IM chat logs going back to 2003.

Thus armed, House Democratic Congressman and minority leader Nancy Pelosi has turned the tables on those who use the prospect of her elevation to the Speakership as a fright mask to scare red state children, insisting for her own part that Foley’s ebophilac failing is somehow all of a piece throughout. This is standard fare in Washington these days, especially in an election season – guilt by accusation, the “culture of corruption,” etc, etc. I’ll be only too content to let the legal process run its course, and then fervidly support running anyone who knew of Foley’s actions out of town on rail, if the facts of the case support it. Speaker of the House, or no.

Others political critics are shouting their favorite war cry, “BECAUSE OF THE HYPOCRISY!” since Foley has been revealed (to those who couldn’t puzzle it out on their own) as an evidently gay, closeted conservative. No doubt it would be fine for a liberal to choose a gay and closeted life, but for a conservative to do so violates the Identity Politics dogma so sacred to some on the left. It doesn’t help very much that Foley made a career out of co-leading the House caucus on missing and exploited teenagers, but perhaps it’s true as Taranto says, that hypocrisy really is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. In any case, I’ve never really understood the focus some people place on “hypocrisy” as a mortal sin, since it doesn’t seem to me that having moral standards but failing to live up to them is intrinsically inferior to having no standards at all, which appears to be the proffered alternative.

So Ms. Pelosi et al have succeded in changing the subject from the war in Iraq – a topic once seen as a sure winner in November, but now perceived as a difficult nettle to grasp once the President started to fight back, and once his critics started to cobble together the actual “we haven’t got a plan, we just hate yours” talking points. Now we are left with poor Andrew Sullivan, among others, moaning that this is somehow evidence of the Cruel Psychic Penalties to be paid by that increasingly small number of people who prefer to remain in the closet.

Mr. Sullivan, bless him, doesn’t get to have it both ways: He and many others have insisted over the years that there is no reason to bar gay men from teaching young children or leading boy scout troops for example because ebophilia – a deviant attraction to teenaged children – is no more common among gays than it is among heteros. This is an eminently reasonable argument, well-supported by the behavioral science literature, but holding that point of view and simultaneously averring that, well, it’s different for closeted gays – those guys might have a real problem, is a rather contortionate bridge.

In all of this a dispassionate observer might detect the scent of an agenda.