Child molestation! Alcoholism! The Blame Game! More!

At this point, everyone's heard of the Mark Foley scandal, wherein he got drunk, IM'ed sexually explicit messages to teenage Congressional pages, and then went and voted on a bill (not necessarily in that order. And come on Mark, cybersex is so 1997.) What's interesting to me is the wave of revelations on Foley's part that occurred after everything came out in the press; namely, that Foley was a) suddenly an alcoholic, and b) suddenly molested by his priest when he was a boy. I'm surprised he hasn't come out and revealed that he's addicted to crystal meth, or that he was forced to lose his virginity to a Cambodian prostitute.

Even more to the point, on a serious note, is the amount of people who allegedly knew about some sort of indiscretion on his part but didn't see fit to cause a fuss about it. It has come out that House Republicans knew in July about apparently inappropriate emails sent out to a Louisana teen in 2005, but kept it almost wholly silent. This is, of course, disgusting. And I'm always wary of hating on the GOP, lest I create a "TEH GOP AND BUSH ARE TEH EVIL OMG HE IS TEH ANTICHRIST!" type of impression, but God Damn, Can You Believe This Shit. The guy is most likely a pedophile (pederast?) To keep this quiet in the interest of preserving party unity and shielding themselves from public scorn around election time is repulsive and, you know, probably politics as usual. Hooray.