Own-colored glasses

Now that the news stations--from ABC to Comedy Central--have turned into "All Mark Foley All The Time", I figured I'd throw my hat in the ring. Because, you know, I'm right up there with those heavyweights.

There are two silver linings to this story. One is that the story that's gotten everyone so frothed up is at least about politics. Even if it's story of perversion and corruption, at least it affects the nation, unlike Jon Benet Ramsey or Scott Peterson.

The other silver lining is a selfish one, and that's that it's taken my attention away from the Nickel Mines slayings: an event so horrible that it's hard to even get my head around it enough to be upset. I don't really want to get my head around it. I don't want to think about it at all.

But beyond that, the Mark Foley stuff is incredibly bothering in its partisanship, and how the coverage and topics are proving every cynical stereotype that anyone could have about conservatives in this country. First of all, there was Newt Gingrich saying that the reason the GOP probably didn't out Foley earlier is because then people would cast them as being "gay bashers." Jon Stewart put it perfectly when he pointed out that maybe it was because Republicans are equating a 52-year-old preying on a 16-year-old with being gay that makes people think they're gay bashing. Should we condemn heterosexual marriage because of Clinton's affair?

The clincher (meaning, the thing that caused me to write about that which doesn't need to be written about any more) was Fox News making the following "accident":

...which was shown THREE times before a correction was made. The "correction" was just not to show his name--or the correct party affiliation. And the scary part is how many people choose to believe that Foley was a Democrat.

It's really scary what conservatives in this country have come to. My office-mate and I joke that, if we were to ever run for office, we'd run as Republicans, because we could do whatever we want and still get the majority of Republican support. We laugh about it, but the "joke" is honest and serious. Spend taxes at a unprecedented rate, commit the nations resources and lives to a pointless war, ratchet up the deficit...it doesn't matter. Conservatives are so dedicated to their labels that they'll give up the principles that supposedly originally guided them to conservativism in the first place just to keep from admittingg that they were ever wrong. It's a sad and scary time.