Requisite Mark Foley discussion

No sports today, there’s nothing too exciting to write about. Nobody can beat Tiger, the Raiders can’t beat anybody, and the baseball playoffs are starting, but no team other than the Yankees seems like a championship-caliber team. So, we turn to the headlines.

The big question over the last few days has been how the Mark Foley scandal will affect the Republicans in the upcoming mid-term elections. Several Republicans have left Congress in the last year over ethics issues (Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, now Foley) and it has pundits asking if this will cause Republican voters to think twice about their candidates or if it will cause “undecideds” to vote for Dems because of these apparent character problems.

Of course not.

99% of people vote along party lines no matter what. According to what I remember of Intro to Psychology, people seek to reduce Cognitive Dissonance by rationalization rather than adjusting their own views, and in this case that’s exactly what Repub voters will do, dismissing this as the liberal media trying to exaggerate a story close to the election to smear the right (as Limbaugh claimed today: read more here or here).

The “undecideds” are such a small percentage of voters that they are not likely to make much of a difference in most, if any races. They tend to be issue voters, making their decisions based on the stances of the candidates in relation to their own views, not based on party-wide generalizations, so one depraved congressman isn’t likely to affect their vote.

The fact is, a congressman was making numerous, lecherous advances on teenage boys working for the Congress. This is absolutely unacceptable, regardless of party or ideological affiliation. To politicize this unfortunate set of events (which will undoubtedly happen), rather than looking at the causes and how it was allowed to continue for allegedly up to 5 years, in hopes of preventing it from happening again, is lamentable. Then again, this is the government we're talking about here. There will be an "investigation" on the taxpayer dime that will render no results of consequence, we'll all forget in 2-3 weeks anyway, and this unfortunate episode will be under rug swept.

Catholic priest scandals, teachers who can’t resist the charms of their 13-year old students (and another rash of shootings and scares in schools), now Congressmen preying on pages…if Congress, the Church and schools are not safe places for children, we seriously need to take a look at ourselves and examine how we got to this point and think about how we can get going in a better direction.

Ultimately, Foley alone does not represent all Republicans, and to try to make it seem that, because of this event, the entire Republican Party lacks character, is ridiculous. (Misleading the public into a seemingly un-winnable war in Iraq, without any semblance of a real plan, though, does not speak highly of them).