What's getting to me about the Foley thing

[nancylebov]

As bad things go, what Foley did was only fair-to-middling bad. As a result of it, political careers will be ended and elections will probably be affected. There might be criminal charges.

At the same time, the US government has been torturing people, sometimes to death. It's quite plausible that this is still going on, what with all those prisoners being held in secret. A law has been passed making it legal to hold prisoners indefinitely in secret. This has not had nearly as much political effect as the Foley scandal, and the legitimizing of torture doesn't seem to be a big issue in the upcoming election.

I begin to suspect that I am surrounded by crazy people.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't see that Clinton did anything particularly wrong in the Lewinsky case, nor do I think he committed perjury. I think Foley did something wrong, and that Clinton didn't. And in that sense, yes, there isn't a parallel

The parallel is the idea of taking down someone that you dislike with whatever you can get, even if that thing is relatively unrelated to the thing which is significant to the reason you dislike them.

In other words, I now understand emotionally what the Right was doing with the Lewinsky case.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I still don't see the parallel. Ignore, for the moment, all the other reasons this incarnation of the republican party is fit for removal. Look purely at the Foley scandal.

On it's merits this is worth making a significant change in the makeup of the house.

Which the flap over Lewinsky didn't.

So emotionally this is very different.

I may have thought DeLay a third-rate hack and a first-rate slimeball, but I never wanted to manaufactur a phoney charge, so I could try to get him kicked out of office. Hell, I wouldn't even want to do that to merely hound him out of office.

TK

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

That just means that you're a better person than I am.