"The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." --W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"

It seems that Republican Representative Mark Foley, former chair of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, likes teenage male congressional pages. Does that seem hypocritical? It's nothing. Surprise, surprise, we were wrong when we thought that the Republican leadership conflated family values with homophobia and intolerance. In fact, these guys are less intransigent then you might think. They're willing to overlook what some of them claim to believe is an abomination against God--when a congressional seat is on the line. That's mighty impressive open-mindedness.

Still, it's small beans on the hypocrisy scale. Take a look at how Democrats, other Republican opponents and the mainstream media are falling all over themselves to turn Foley into a campaign issue, many of them lining up behind the vaguely homophobic, protect-our-children banner that, until recently, Foley wrapped around himself in alluring toga-fashion. Let's manufacture some outrage, put on our scandalized faces, and call a press conference! We'll denounce our opponents for placing political purpose before the needs and vulnerabilities of our children! Let's poll that, see if it'll work!

In fact, the ads are already running, no doubt launching a deep, wrenching, 30-second national dialogue about child exploitation. Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy is airing an ad attacking incumbent Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-OH) whose "friend Mark Foley [was] caught using his position to take advantage of 16-year-old pages." Democratic Rep. Baron Hill (D-IN) likewise is attacking Republican Mike Sodrel for accepting money from GOP leaders "who knew about but did nothing to stop sexual predator congressman Foley." Then there's Patty Wetterling, a Democratic Congressional candidate from Minnesota, who got the ball rolling with the first Foley-related ad a few days ago, one that was all the more poignant because her own son Jacob was kidnapped 17 years ago and has never been found. She also gave the Democratic response to President Bush's weekly radio address on October 7, allowing herself to be used, allowing the memory of her son to be used, for political purpose.

It would seem, then, that you can hardly go wrong exploiting--I mean, protecting--children. Who's going to disagree with President Bush, for example, when he bravely uses the occasion of yet another school shooting to clarify his principled position on violence in schools? It turns out that he's opposed to it. "See," he told an elementary school audience (what a nice touch!) on October 5, "it is imparamount [sic] that the federal government work with the state government and local governments to make it clear that our schools are places of learning, not places where there be violence." (It is perhaps less imparamount that our schools work as places where there be English learningness.) The Prez even forcefully backed up his daring and much-needed clarification by announcing that the US Attorney General and the Education Secretary would be dispatched first thing next week to a decisive meeting on this pressing issue. Moms and Dads, sleep easy tonight. George "Man of Action" Bush won't resort to mere tokenism when it comes to protecting your children.

So let's splash the headlines with our macabre voyeurism, with the not-just-hypocritical but nihilistic pomposities of our so-called representatives and leaders. It's certainly better than focusing public attention on the Abramoff scandal, a multi-million-dollar money-laundering scheme extending from the White House (where Abramoff had almost 500 contacts, including ten with Karl Rove) through the Congress (remember the now-indicted Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, anyone?) to Christian crusader Ralph Reed (responsible for organizing the "wackos," as former DeLay aide Mike Scanlon eloquently put it) and tax reformer Grover Norquist (who kept taking larger cuts than Abramoff expected). No, no, it'd be a terrible waste of time to think--or talk--too much about any of this. As it would be to analyze the contents of a detainee bill that explicitly suspends habeas corpus for "alien unlawful combatants" (whatever they are--it's up to the President to decide), eviscerates the Geneva Conventions, rubber-stamps torture, and consolidates yet more power in the hands of the Executive. And who could seriously believe that the brutal, criminal, and failed prosecution of not one but two wars, coupled to war profiteering on an unimaginable scale by close allies of the White House, merited serious public debate--much less the recent disclosures that the Bush Administration ignored high-level warnings of the impending September 11th attacks, or the ongoing preparations for a third invasion, of Iran?

No, let's line up the two parties and find out which one secretly supports pedophiles. In the process we can pretend that the demonstrable, mind-boggling, metastatic corruption of one of the parties means that the other one is, at least comparatively, honest. And while we're at it, we can shrug off the pervasive nihilism of our leaders, people who have so little imagined tragedy that they can see it only as an opportunity for themselves. Let us adopt this policy of apathy and indifference, which affords us at least the comfort of knowing that, however feckless and self-interested, those who lead us also represent us.

In the face of such hypocrisy, in the stunning absence of outrage, the most pressing question before us now is not whether our political leaders have a sense of decency, but whether, at long last, we ourselves have left no sense of decency.