If Erasmus will forgive me, I would like to give former Congressman Mark Foley some credit, and not just for making a few of the Washington pages feel appreciated. Foley has single-handedly (no pun intended) exposed how risky it is for a political party to become too entwined with what are, for the most part, non-political issues of morality. Simply stated -- and this should be quite obvious, no? -- politics and moral absolutism don't mix.
In the not so distant past, the GOP was known as the party of fiscal conservatism. Even in the Ronald Reagan '80s, we did not have the sense that the religious fundamentalists had hijacked the government. Of course, the "Great Communicator's" silence on AIDS, his "Just Say No" campaign and all those speeches on "Godless communism" did more than hint of a family values mindset, but for the most part, it never seemed that the Christian Taliban had occupied D.C.
And then came the new millennium. I guess we had a hint of what was in store with the feeding frenzy that erupted around Monica Lewinsky. But things settled down a bit when the Republicans one by one began falling victim to their own extramarital petards. They were chastened, but in 2000, with the ascension of George W., their moral zeal returned with a vengeance.
Now, especially around election times, the halls of Congress are full of declamations about saving marriage, the family, the flag, the unborn and the brain-dead, and about the importance of torture and the denial of science. Even war has become a moral issue -- as it always does with those who lack rational justifications -- a matter of saving the American people from the infidels abroad. To question and to criticize become immoral acts because they suggest there are nuances to morality; the official line is that there are not. For the past five years our government has been leading us down a one-way street, a thoroughfare where, at every intersection, the sign says "Right Turn Only"; all attempts to veer even slightly left have been thwarted.
True, we may have ourselves to blame for this, but perhaps the American people are not entirely at fault. Most elections are local, and most voters tend to put the interests of their district or state first. Perhaps they're thinking more about the local highway project than whether or not their candidate will keep Teri Schiavo on a respirator. They elect their home-state Republican and send him (or rarely her) off to Washington to do their bidding. And it seems that it's in Washington that their elected Republican officials either catch the moral mumps or have it flare up on them, encouraged by their leadership in the White House and Congress. At the national level, the Republican Party has come to believe that it can rule by turning every political issue into a moral one. After all, the opposition party is for the most part more secular and more diverse, harder to unify with a one-size-fits-all approach. The Republicans, on the other hand, see their constituency as, to use a Nixonian staple, the silent majority -- the people they think of when they talk about their fellow Americans -- and they perhaps shrewdly believe that these Americans would like right and wrong to be absolutes that correspond with right and left, and that there's no point parsing things to a political level when, at a moral one, they are so much easier to give an up or down vote to.
Which brings us back to Mark Foley, and the service he has done our nation. Foley has reminded us of an important element of all political equations that the Republicans are keen to forget: the human factor. It's the one area where the Republican strategists fall on, well, in this case, their stomachs. Without the human factor, the Iraq war looked pretty good: Saddam bad, get rid of Saddam, everything perfect. A moral, Manichean little war, albeit doomed to failure from the very beginning. Why? Because of what its progenitors failed to consider -- that all exclusively morality-based policies are doomed to failure. Of course, the Iraq war, as we all know, is not based exclusively on moral issues, but it has always been presented that way, which is why, today, our leaders, who refuse to acknowledge the error of their ways, have no new creative approaches to fighting or ending the war. They refuse to acknowledge that human morality is not black and white. This is why the present-day Republican Party is leading itself -- and the rest of us -- lemming-like over a cliff.
Mark Foley is a sick individual, and like others have pointed out, the Republican leadership did not appropriately address his illness. That's because the Republican Party is, at this juncture in time, itself ill. It is suffering from the same moral confusion that Foley is -- Foley, who was enjoined to protect youngsters while at the same time was preying on them. The Republicans, enjoined in this post-9/11 era to protect the United States, have instead been exploiting the country and its institutions to further their own, yes, anti-American ends. It is anti-American to compromise constitutional rights, to deny equal rights to all, and to condone war as a pro-active tool of foreign policy. It is anti-American, at least in the way I've always understood it, to hold the pursuit of power superior to the pursuit of justice.
Which is why I feel thankful for the likes of Mark Foley. As this tale unravels, we see as clearly as ever that power has corrupted GOP, and that the only known cure is for us to take it from them.