Ex-Foley-ation and Other Campaign Issues

What do President Bush, former Representative Mark Foley, and Michael J. Fox have in common? All three have commandeered one or more news cycles in the past ten days, and each one's headline-grabbing has incrementally benefited Republicans, although only President Bush, with his strong performance during an October 25 presser, did so intentionally.

For the first time since I can remember, the name "Fox" has come to represent something positive to the Left. Since it was suggested by Rush Limbaugh that Michael J. Fox may have either been acting or had intentionally not taken his Parkinson's meds when he made his shameless commercial in favor of embryonic stem cell research, he's become the libs' poster child for yet another disingenuous cause.

First, embryonic stem cell research is legal in the United States and is practiced in the private sector in a number of locations. The U.S. Government just won't hand out taxpayer money to subsidize it. But second, and even more important, embryonic stem cell research has yet to produce any positive outcomes in the treatment of such diseases as Parkinson's. While experimental adult-stem-cell based treatments using the patient's own stem cells have produced dozens of positive outcomes in the amelioration of such conditions as Parkinson's Disease, embryonic stem cell research has yet to produce even a single positive outcome.

Add to that the fact that harvesting embryonic stem cells is an extremely difficult process, and it's painful and dangerous for the patient (25 deaths have resulted from administration of the drug required during the process), and you've got a process the support of which can only be political. Further, the difficulty of tissue matching between embryonic stem cell donor and recipient, coupled with the very high likelihood of rejection by the recipient, also militate against the process. Like so many issues on the Left, the outcomes simply don't matter; as long as an issue presents the opportunity to bash conservatives, it's guaranteed to show up on Dems' flog lists. Leave it to the Left to ignore the fact that using a patient's own stem cells in treatment has produced many successes and is far less dangerous to patient and donor (they being one and the same in this case) when they misrepresent the facts.

(For further discussion of this issue, see "Egg Harvesting, Embryonic Stem Cell Research Threatens Women's Health," by Dr. Pia Solenni, at www.thehumanfuture.org.)

But the issues went beyond danger to women to include danger to House pages. In this case, however, the danger was "virtual" danger; that is, the risk that if you're a House page some Congressional creep will send you suggestive e-mails.
Let's start with this unfortunate truth: Sexual predation is a fact of life. To spotlight a specific "type" or "class" of this phenomenon: Older, more experienced adults routinely approach younger people in a sexual way. I have no doubt that this has happened since the dawn of civilization, and I have no doubt that it will continue to happen as long as something even remotely resembling civilization survives.
Historically, civilizations have often acknowledged — and even approved of — such relationships. The Greek city-state Sparta, for instance, approved of, nay institutionalized, homosexual relationships between warrior-mentors and their charges. Indeed, the Greek word for "student" carried with it the connotation of "sexual obedience."

Don't get me wrong. The sleaze coefficient that applies to Representative Tom Foley's approaching with inarguable sexual intent Congressional pages through the electronic information highway that internet e-mail and instant messaging has evolved into is off the charts. Foley has resigned? Good riddance to bad rubbish, as the phrase goes — or used to go, at least.

The question is, though, Where exactly does the buck stop in this case? Democrats' insistence that the Foley issue, with its attendant pressure on House Majority leader Dennis Hastert to resign because he somehow failed to mount something akin to an intervention based upon demonstrably scanty evidence that Foley had breached accepted boundaries, is disingenuous at best.

First, in every case but (possibly) one, the electronic communication between Foley and his communicants took place between consenting adults. Second, the e-mails between Foley and one or more pages that occasioned this maelstrom are, at least legally speaking, innocuous. If someone had presented the e-mails themselves as evidence that Foley was a sexual predator, he or she would have been laughed out of any DA's office.

But even giving a modicum of credence to the politically motivated Democrat attacks against Foley and (by extension) Republicans fails to uncover one of the core issues now in play. That issue is the fact that Dems, ostensibly defenders of homosexuals' rights and the rights of American citizens to engage in all manner of sexually deviant behavior, have somehow managed to abandon their "principles" (such as they are) and use those principles to attack Republicans.

By identifying Foley as a villainous homosexual predator, even though most of his internet activities arguably constituted communications between consenting adults, Democrats have actually nullified many of the positions their party has seemed to stand for.

Hell, yes, Mark Foley is a reprobate. The guy is sleaze incarnate, and I'm happy to see him go. Too bad Democrats' principles (or lack thereof) didn't lead them to insist that, to cite one example, Jerry Nadler, whose homosexual paramour was running what amounted to a gay whorehouse out of Nadler's New York City apartment, should have been unceremoniously run out of Congress.

Homosexuality is a crime when engaged in by Republicans, and it is laudatory behavior when perpetrated by Democrats. How is it that Democrats find Mark Foley's behavior to be "predatory," while at the same time they failed to see in, for example, recently deceased Congressman Gerry Studds' real-time seduction of a page an example of sexual predation?

And so, amid what might be amounting to a fairly serious backlash against Democrats' disingenuous posturing on two of their core values — that sexual predation is a virtue and that women's lives should be endangered in the pursuit of research that has virtually no possibility of producing meaningful positive results — President Bush stepped up and knocked several balls out of the park during his October 25 press conference. His theme was that Democrats are spiking the ball before they've scored a touchdown, and his confidence grated on the large number of anti-Cons in the audience, ur-Bush antagonist David Gregory in particular.

After an almost unprecedented 15+ minute introductory address, in which he forcefully reiterated why we must continue to wage war in Iraq, he took the offensive in answering every question from the White House press corps, especially those questions about the war.

There's growing evidence that the American people, having once again been exposed to the Left's empty viciousness with regard to their blind pursuit of power, are going to simply vote no to the Party of Perniciousness. While Republicans will almost certainly suffer some electoral losses, it's looking increasingly as if they're going to retain power in both the House and the Senate, leaving Dems to once again skulk off, licking their wounds and wondering what happened . . . again this time.