The Perfect Shit Storm for Republicans in the Midterm Elections?
I'm not usually one to gloat at someone elses misfortune - but seeing as misfortune has nothing to do with this rapidly metastiziig scandal par excellance that was wrought from hubris, cronyism and cowardice - I'm gloating big time.
I had hoped that not finding any WMD's would be the breaking point. Or Katrina. Or Libby. Abramoff. Guckert. Cunningham. Safavian. Allen. Dusty Fogo and the Hookers? But it looks like Foleygate just might be it.
You know it's bad when they have to sneak Karl Rove's assistant out the kitty door in the dead of the night - and hardly anyone notices. Almost.
Even though the primary source for this story has been a Registered Republican since being able to vote - in response to the scandal Tom Delay's hand-picked House Speaker Dennis Hastert (and his enablers such as Rush Limbaugh and Drudge) have tried to blame Democrats, ABC, Gays, George Soros and even the Pages themselves.
Limbaugh:
Back in these days you could call Sears and order a refrigerator on the phone. I had a teacher living up the street and it was the biggest thrill in the world to just call and order a refrigerator and watch Sears deliver it to an unsuspecting teacher and his wife, and far stranger things than that. But we always picked out adults that we just thought were odd or weird, and it would be fun to make fun of them, and I don't think kids today are any different...But you know as well as I do that young kids make fun of gay people. They make fun of the way they talk; they make fun of the way some of them walk and so forth. Who knows what the word around town about fellow Foley was. Who knows? We all know that young people gay bash. Young people do a lot of stuff. They don't have the maturity to understand this kind of stuff...
I tell you, folks, you've got this page out there; you probably have a bunch of pages laughing and making fun of Foley and the way he comes on to them, and he's gay and so forth, so they egg him on and so forth....
All this proves to me is that when Limbaugh was a kid, he was a abusive xenophobic asshole. Then again, not much has really changed for him since then has it?
They've tried to claim that Hastert acted quickly to have Foley resign, when the truth is that Foley had already resigned before the ABC report even aired.
And the News Media have even helped Hastert and crew get their disinformation message out there with their tried and market tested "he said/she said" reporting style which gives equal weigh to competing arguements even when one side is nothing more than a big bag of male cow feces.
- CNN Reported the "Hastert took responsibility" line, without pointing out that he's actually done nothing of the kind.
Chris Matthews pimped the Democrat C-O-N-spiracy meme without question.
Despite all this though, the core message seems to be getting through.
Following the ABC revelations that self-styled child protector Mark Foley (R-FL) has instead been a child-predator, targeting former Congressional pages - the GOP has been in complete freefall and are taking a brass-knuckle beating in the polls.
But the worse numbers aren't at Newsweek - they're at Polling Report where it shows.
- Congressional House Dems lead Reps by 15% (54 to 39) according to the latest Time Poll (10/3).
But the picture painted by the job trend numbers are much worse.
78% of respondants have heard of the Foley Scandal.
64% think the Republican Leadership tried to cover it up.
Although 68% said it made no difference, 24% said they would be less like to vote for the Republican candidate as a direct result of Foleygate, while just %4 said the reverse. That's a 21-point drop - one which is also reflected in reports that White Evangelical support of the GOP has dropped from 78% to 57%. Coincidence? I think not.
The Jury is still out however, on whether Speaker Haster should (39%) or should not (38%) resign.
What is clear however is that he's become Republican Kryptonite. Internal polling reported by Fox News indicates that the already likely Democratic take-over of the House might jump from 20-seats to 50 as a result of Hastert's failures of leadership. Fundraising engagements with Hastert have been cancelled by everyone but the one person with a higher particle-per-billion geiger rating than Hastert's own - President Bush who has just crashed landed at 33% again (Newsweek 10/5).
The irony of this pairing of last resort should be lost on noone.
The Republican pattern shown by Hastert of refusing to recognize clear warnings (Rice), claiming you didn't know and should have been told (Ashcroft, Rumsfeld), ignoring the facts even after the evidence in incontravertable (Cheney), then turning around and blaming people who had nothing to do with it - even making up imaginary strawmen enemies to rail against (Bush) should be crystal clear by now.
This has been the Neo-Con modis operandi since long before the invasion of Iraq. It's what we've seen over and over again. If the core of the poll bloodbath we're seeing now isn't simply tied to Foley's ignoble exit from Congress, but rather to the long-standing refusal of Congressional and White House Republicans to do their freaking jobs - we just might have a serious sea change in the offing.
Just think : a week and a half ago, Dennis Hastert was accusing Democrats of wanting to coddle the "most treacherous people in the world". Well, look who's coddling who now?
With Sen John Warner's "We need to change course" proclaimation laying a sledge hammer to the entire Karl "Cut and Run" Rove strategem - that Perfect Storm just might be arriving on November both in the House and the Senate, and hopefully it'll stick around for - oh - a decade or so.
It's going to take at least that long to clean up the mess Republicans have made of our Country.
Vyan
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