John O'Neill's Cup-with-Handle full of Kool-aid®

Investor's Business Daily

Did Democrats Page Mark Foley?

Scandal: Right after Mark Foley was revealed to have had inappropriate e-mail conversations with a 16-year-old page, he resigned and checked into rehab. Now, what did Democrats know, and when did they know it?

Shocking, shocking. It wouldn't be fair to take advantage of a market change, would it? Political parties always stand-by nobly and quietly while their opponents frag each other's viability. Businesses, too. They stand back and bide their time singing hymns and serving soup til the "Clock" resumes. Happens all the time. Especially when one side of the aisle always imputes and assumes the purest of motives to the other--treats them with dignity and competitive respect and whatnot.

Funny thing is, I remember when Newt offered his Luntz-influenced Language of Control Document back in the mid-90s. Know what it said?

Demonize, dehumanize and eviscerate your fellow citizens called liberals. Decimate their viability as feeling, capable moral beings like you and me. Do so using moral, caring words to describe "Us" and what he politely called "Contrasting words" to describe "Them."

The words for "them":

decay... failure (fail)... collapse(ing)... deeper... crisis...urgent(cy)... destructive... destroy... sick... pathetic... lie...liberal... they/them... unionized bureaucracy... "compassion" is not enough... betray... consequences... limit(s)... shallow...traitors... sensationalists...

endanger... coercion... hypocrisy... radical... threaten...devour... waste... corruption... incompetent... permissive attitudes... destructive... impose... self-serving... greed...ideological... insecure... anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs... pessimistic... excuses... intolerant...

stagnation... welfare... corrupt... selfish... insensitive... status quo... mandate(s)... taxes... spend(ing)... shame... disgrace... punish(poor...)... bizarre... cynicism... cheat... steal... abuse of power... machine... bosses... obsolete... criminal rights... red tape... patronage

Might as well highlight them all. Arguing for forebearance over an incident of a Jayvee chasing 54-year old? Hastert and Boehner and brethren offer a spectular, exploding, extravagnza of a product demo proving the Democrat's points of the last 10 years on many levels. They were stupid to let it happen, stupid to let it go, and now, their heads will deservedly roll for playing Charles the First one too many times. The moral choices stand on their own. The political ones seems to have odd interpretations.

That known Commie Party Organ, The Kansas City Star had this yesterday

Comments that Hastert made in a Chicago Tribune interview suggesting the scandal had been orchestrated by ABC News, Democratic political operatives aligned with the Clinton White House and liberal activist George Soros were considered a serious misstep in national Republican circles, an official said. Senior Republican officials contacted Hastert's office before his news conference Thursday to urge that he not repeat the charges and he backed away from them in his press conference.

"The Chicago Tribune interview last night - the George Soros defense - was viewed as incredibly inept," a national Republican official said. "It could have been written by (comedian) Jon Stewart. . . . He truly is the accidental speaker, and it now is showing. He doesn't have a seasoned staff around him."

When I was up there in DC, occasionally doing stuff like this issue and ads for the likes of Henry Hyde, I knew there wasn't "a dime's bit of difference" between any of the practicing politicans when it came to most of the issues they "argued" over. That worked, clumsily, for most of the post-WW II period. Most were decent folk. A lot were forced into whoredom and cartoonish positions by the system of cash and carry, pay-to-play--a thing perfected to high-art by Tom Delay and Grover Norquist's K-Street Project. Yes, it was Government bought and paid for better than any previous devilish Democrat's deepest darkest wet-dream. The refs, the players, the coaches and owners were all partying their asses off, together, rubbing each others shoulders and other bits, better than any Pete Rose wet dream. We fans were on our own.

And Democrats, for the most part, spent the rest of the decade locked out and rocked back on their heels. The ones who stuck to their principles got lonelier with their virtue. The ones who said "fuckit" like Lieberman and Biden, they adapted and adopted. It really became a defacto one party town, with the occasional snit-as-skit to feign some difference within the new establishment. That was the way to do it--to preserve one's life--in a town where ex-honchos of the College Republicans like Ralph Reed, Norquist and Abramoff had teamed with Delay, Rove and others to make politics much more Rollerball than Hardball. This was the management secrets Atilla and Calgula all at once.

That, like Foley's orientation or Hyde's homewrecking or countless abortions, rehabs, affairs and arrests WAS an "open secret" as the media is now phrasing it more and more. It was all happening behind the theater frame of "Democratic Decadence" that Newt loved, with Lewinsky as Exhibit A. That's when I bailed on bipartisanship. I saw too many naive Democrats repeatedly turn the other cheek only to have it slapped twice as hard with a Republican hand that I knew was covered in twice or three times or ten times more excrement. I knew, as in I knew from experience and witness. And I saw the same thing happen in the months after 9-11. The pattern was too vividly clear. It was the worst part of "human nature." And the denial of Human Nature's power--the strength of fear over reason, the pull of pride, and lust, for power or sex, lust for whatever--made all that has happened predictable. Not inevitable, just predictable. Why? Because so many of our leaders and "professionals" are vetically alligned to finite and ultimately entropic measures of power and leverage. Business schools can't teach it becuase they sap it. Politics as practiced can't create it because it can't hear it's call. Call it the Quarterly Reporting Syndrome of Soul. Call it's dividend, Soullessness.

Believe me, that's an apolitical statement. Bush, Newt or Frank Luntz don't have a franchise on the gaping void and its answer, resonance, any more than JFK, Lakoff or Barack Obama would. In fact, "ideology" is the enemy--of politics, of business, of us all--in this age of raging complexity and fungibility of what's "important" and what's "status quo."

Yeah, all you need is love. But nobody's making that in large quantities any more. Lust, Pride, Wrath, Gluttony--those are the "Balanced Scorecard."

Well, fair, and balanced, have been rode hard and put away wet a bit much for most to bear anymore. Open Secrets are soon to become just open truths. Get ready.

There are a lot of "values voters" who don't know many of the "open secrets" that waft through the air in Washington DC. They're going to learn a lot of them in the next few weeks. They ain't gonna like what the Party of Family Values and it's Business Roundtable backers has been doing, on and off the clock.