Wednesday, October 11, 2006

A pederastic flirtatious Congressman who wrote soft porn emails to his targeted virtual sex victims. Yes, “Mark Foley” now warrants about 23,000,000 Google matches—or about four million more Google hits than for the founder of Western philosophy, the Platonically pederastic “Socrates.” Perhaps when one of Foley’s former pages—one now claims at 21 to have had relations with his mentor— pens a Republic or Laws we will duly appreciate this better known genius who earned more attention from our contemporary electronic world in a week’s worth of IM messages than poor Socrates had after some 2400 years. And after the Dick Cheney shotgun hysteria, the flushed Koran, and all the other nonstories, it is legitimate to ask whether the New York and Washington media are simply unhinged.

Or is the problem the nature of the 24-hour news itself, when lurid sex or violence is needed to pad the hours away. Imagine the following: ‘North Korea’s bomb deliberately phallic-shaped”; or, “Ahmadinejad still in love 26 years later with one of the American hostages”; or “Americans shoot it out with a gay platoon of Mahdists.’

Could both Republicans and Democrats then forget the gross Congressman Foley? Or could he only have been forgotten, had he introduced landmark legislation on health, security, or education? Perhaps that was the better way out than resignation—simply draft an important bill on the future of America and thereby put the nation to sleep.

Or is the nuttiness because most Americans below 30 are now so poorly educated that they don’t know, or care to know, the difference between Pyongyang and poontang? Or, given that these periodic fits of insanity about Dick Cheney’s shotgun or George Bush’s flight suit usually serve to denigrate some conservative, are these present pathetic efforts to hype a pervert to the level of a national crisis, just the frustrations of a liberal news media, angry that bright sassy minds like theirs have not been able to translate that self-proclaimed intellectual and moral superiority into political power?