Election Year Issues: Interns and Pages and...

We are coming up on an election, and of all the factors that might inform voters about the integrity and trustworthiness of either party, what are we hearing most about from the media and the water-cooler crowd and the Starbucks sippers? Representative Mark Foley's horrific and hypocritical behavior. It speaks ill of him. It speaks ill of Hastert and the rest who knew early on and- not having learned the fate of cover-ups from Watergate-covered it up. To quote the original Reagan Republican, "There you go again …!"

Yes, my liberal-inclined self cannot help enjoying the sweet irony of the fact that this Republican sex scandal is near-perfect payback for the Lewinsky onslaught upon the Clinton presidency. Poetic justice and all that. But any abuse of power over employees is outrageous and illegal, regardless of the presence of sexual content and regardless of the less-powerful participant's willingness. We cannot assume willing participation by the far less powerful person, even if the subordinate believes (at the time) that he or she invited or welcomes the superior's attentions. In any workplace, these issues must be reported and followed by legal action. Psychological issues of the perpetrator and subsequent rehab therapy notwithstanding, if you do the crime, you should do the time. While Clinton did no jail time for his offenses against a number of women, his "Hillary time" must have been hard time, indeed. But that was then, and this is ...

Now. Except for one thing - the media still think we care more about sex than "the economy, stupid." Or "the war, stupid." Or the stupid war. Or who thinks we're stupid enough to believe all the lies we're being told about the war and the economy. I'm concerned about the media's perception of what we care about, what they can sell advertising space and time for at the highest rate. I mean, sure, hypocrisy and power-abuse is important for us to know about in an election season. And the evidence of those instant messages is straightforward enough for even the simplest voter to understand, and it's unarguable. Like DNA on a blue dress. Still, I have to think that the media, in all their cynical phrase-making, know this sad truth about us: "Sex sells" trumps "if it bleeds, it leads." Bleeds, as in war.

Condi Rice isn't going to appear on a Sunday morning talk show insisting that the executive and legislative branches of government acted as they thought necessary based on the best intelligence they had about Mr. Foley. Sex is easier to understand than war -for some of us, at least. But the same issues of hidden agendas, when decision-makers really knew what, and how long and strenuously they resisted informing the public about it all - those apply more significantly to the war in Iraq than they do to anybody's sexual compulsions. Wars, however, and the decisions to wage them are more complex and involve more subtle and more unimaginable (by most of us) compulsions. Now that North Korea's bomb-blast has exceeded its bombast, and the U.S. executive branch is huffing and puffing about "provocative" behavior by nations instead of congressmen, it's clear that if we hadn't deployed troops to Iraq in response to its trumped-up provocation, the availability of those troops to respond to real provocations would have likely prevented North Korea from daring to actually, you know, provoke. Whoever said, "It's better to have and not need than to need and not have" was right.

The Foley folly hasn't cost us thousands of deaths and billions of dollars wasted on a military fraud perpetrated upon us (and our allies and the citizens of Iraq) to achieve the objective of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, recorded in meetings of the current inhabitants of executive branch long before the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred. When the Iraq-WMD intelligence came to their attention fortuitously after 9/11, maybe they lied to us only insofar as they lied to themselves. But we elect people to that level of responsibility to be more objective than that, more honest with themselves than that. Does anybody still expect them to also be more honest with us than that?

The executive branch and the military leadership knew about North Korea's volatility and intentions before terrorists blew holes in our worldview. But they gambled on a short-handed military's quick success in unprecedented and unpredictable circumstances on one side of the world while ignoring the more certain outcome of Korea's opportunistic nuclear ambitions on the other side of the world. Now our worldview is split in two directions, we have insufficient military resources to succeed in either direction, and we have disgraced ourselves and our most stalwart allies through criminal (I mean that literally.) mishandling of the public trust in the interest of private agendas.

So although Foley's high eeeyewwww-factor instant messages bespeak outrageous behavior, other behaviors should outrage us far more. I have to wonder … what have we become? Not the critical thinkers that responsible citizens must be. How quickly will murky decisions, redacted to inscrutability, be scrutinized in the light of day? Do we remember how to insist on that light? When will we put new batteries in our bullshit detectors and shout out that the king has no clothes?

The greater question is: Are we properly robed for our civic responsibilities, ourselves?