Malcolm X famously called the assassination of John F. Kennedy "a case of the chickens coming home to roost": White hatred, wearying of defenseless black people, metastasized until it finally consumed the head of the body politic. This is merely an idiomatic rendition of the concept of karma, what Charles Manson would describe as "what goes around comes around." As the Republican Party currently assassinates itself, it's instructive to remember that what we see unraveling on an almost hourly basis is neither supreme irony nor poetic justice: It is the founding principles of Republican rule reaching their natural conclusion.
Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fl, co-sponsor of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, the statute he will most likely be convicted under, has now resigned under a shroud of suspicion for exchanging "inappropriate" e-mails and IMs with 16-year-old pages - if in fact "inappropriate" is the appropriate term to describe asking essentially underage employees 36 years your junior, "Do I make you a little horny?" or "Did any girl give you a handjob this weekend? ...Did you spank it this weekend yourself?" The attendant outrage seems evenly divided between the alleged pederast and his Republican overseers in the House, who have reportedly been apprised of this brewing scandal for somewhere between 11 months and 10 years, and whose sensitivity and foresight are rivaled only by the likes of FEMA and the Catholic Church.
Yet such a revelation should surprise no one. This is exactly the Bush Doctrine in a nutshell: The preservation and protection of the law is categorically given over to those whose interests are best served by the elimination of those laws. The U.S. Forest Service sells off our national forests to the timber industry. The oil companies present their wish lists directly to Vice-President Cheney's Energy Task Force in a closed-door meeting on the eve of the Energy Bill, and its minions pencil in revisions in the margins of government policy papers. Ex-industry lobbyists are routinely placed in Cabinet or regulatory positions to short-circuit governmental oversight. Jack Abramoff buys countless favors for his clients. Duke Cunningham sells defense contracts out of the trunk of his car. The FCC eliminates ownership caps for big media. The FDA becomes a legal services advisor to corporate lawsuit defendants. Vaccine manufacturers get a blanket immunity provision inserted into the Defense Appropriations bill in the dead of night. The Endangered Species Act is entrusted to the very lawyer who argued that it should be gutted before the Supreme Court. The Bankruptcy Reform Act rewrites the rules mid-game at the behest of the major credit card companies. The Medicare Prescription Drug Act rejects collective bargaining, committing the government to buying retail.
Over and over again - in the Healthy Forests Program, the Clear Skies Initiative, all the interminable doublespeak and opera buffa exuberance on display in naming the nation's laws - what passes for this administration's actions is merely a self-reflexive cover for its own abdication of responsibility. This is done solely for the sake of campaign contributions -- much like the half million dollars Foley donated to the Republican Congressional Committee over the past decade. The Iraq recovery plan and post-Katrina reclamation are each a partisan cesspool and hustler's paradise precisely because this is where failed apparatchiks go to die - like faded showbiz luminaries to Las Vegas - where they can loll about at stud and luxuriate in their own muck.
By this tortuous logic, who better to serve as Chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus than a suspected pedophile and sexual predator? A fundamental - no, messianic - hatred of government as an impediment to every base impulse of greed and desire envisions a world unfettered by restraint, a land of the free from consequence, and home of those brave enough to pursue their errant wants. If it's raping the environment or raping children - really, what's the difference? History's actors are entitled to its spoils, and when those spoils lie within the fleshy heart of impunity, there's nothing stifling their free market crusade except public consensus and personal ethics - notions already rendered "quaint" and pusillanimous by the carnivores who validate this presidency.
About Bill Clinton's troubles, Mark Foley once declaimed, "It's vile. It's more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction." Like much about this man's career and life, as well as the war-room culture that perpetuated that career long past its sell-by date, this reeks of projection - at best, a cry for help; at worst, a repressed and vicious taunt. But when government is small enough to drown in a bathtub, its fate is in the hands of whatever Frankenstein sits down beside it to enjoy the idyll of a summer day. And when foxes are routinely put in charge of henhouses, you can't act surprised when suddenly there are fewer hens and more feathers.
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