Great column in the SF Gate recently. At least for this here rebel vigilante:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2006/10/11/notes101106.DTL&nl=fixGay Republicans are All My FaultMark Moford, SF Gate
I secretly hoped for it. I secretly prayed for it. Actually, it wasn't a secret at all. I was shouting it from the cosmic rooftops, extolling its virtues to anyone who would listen, tossing shiny pennies of burning hope into karmic wishing wells. Couldn't help it, really.
And I'm here to say: I'm sorry for it.
See, for years, I've wanted in my heart of hearts for some sort of nasty and riotous and well-deserved scandal to rock the GOP, to shake it to its homophobic hypocritical core and reveal these jackals and warmongers and abusers of women's rights and gay rights and human rights as what they really are, to have their glistening masks of sweat and wax and false piety peeled away to expose the rashy psoriatic snakeskin underneath.
More than anything, I wanted all the country and the world to see the viciousness and the duplicity of this particular administration, though to be honest I was hoping at least one of the scandals might somehow involve Sept. 11 and its related conspiracies, for one or more of the many deeply disturbing, still-unanswered questions surrounding the tragedy to finally come to public light and reveal the Republican leadership to be far more complicit in some of those dire events than anyone imagined.
I know, it's not very nice. It's not all that tolerant, rational, cosmically magnanimous. It's also, in a way, sort of horrible, to wish such ugliness upon anyone, no matter how much they seem to deserve it and no matter how much they really were involved in such horrors as Sept. 11 (which, I must admit, I still truly believe they were).
This is why I'm offering up an apology, right here and now, for bringing this current rain of Mark Foley sex-scandal ugliness down upon the GOP's sticky little head.
Yes, I caused it. Well, I and the tens of millions of other progressive open-minded liberals in this wary and Bush-stabbed nation who, I am quite sure, have all been down on bended knee every day, just like me, offering up the vibes and praying for the true blackness of the GOP soul to be revealed so we may finally snap out of this horrific bleakness and move the hell on.
We all did it. Clearly, we pumped enough energy into the cosmos to cause the Foley scandal to erupt, thus pounding yet another nine-inch nail into the BushCo coffin.
Problem is, such fervent prayers tend to evoke some ugly karma. Sure, no one deserves a scathing, vaguely pedophilic sex scandal more than the violently homophobic, self-righteous GOP, but I know such energies have a nasty tendency to backfire, to swing the other way. And that's never a good thing.
Put it this way: If the Dems do indeed reclaim Congress and soon after the presidency, if they then take a bloodstained page from the thuggish Bush playbook and begin to steamroll the nation with their own lopsided agenda, well, the inevitable will happen and their power will become too great, and scandal will invariably erupt like a torrent of genital blisters and eventually take them down, too, and all desire for a progressive and diplomatic and integrity-filled spiritually open America will be lost.
Proof: Just look at what bilious right-wing hatemongers wished for during the Clinton years: a complete reversal of power, ultimate GOP control of everything. Well, they got it. And our nation has never been more corrupt, more divided, more globally loathed, closer to the edge of collapse. Translation: You gotta be careful what you wish for, even if you wish for Karl Rove's head on the hood of Satan's Cadillac.
Which is not to say that the prayers of us liberals haven't already been answered, in spades, well before Mark Foley proved himself to be the perfect icing on the cake of GOP doom, the money shot of poetic justice, the period in this never-ending Republican sentence.
Jack Abramoff was a damn fine answer to the prayer, though that beautiful firestorm dealt mostly with finance and slimy payoffs, and what good taxpaying American doesn't fully expect every member of Congress to be rolling in dirty lobbyist payoffs? But Abramoff did have one glorious outcome: It put a stake straight through the heart of Tom DeLlay, perhaps the nastiest and most thuggish political vampire in all of Congress, a worthwhile outcome all by itself.
Valerie Plame? Also a delicious scandal, given how leaked CIA info is always a powerful destroyer of faith in current regimes, and this one snared Scooter Libby and poked a sharp stick into Karl Rove. But still the GOP hobbled on.
The list goes on: WMD, Niger, bogus anthrax scares, Abu Ghraib, illegal wiretapping, gay male escorts hired to masquerade as sycophantic White House reporters -- hell, it's been a veritable fire hose of Republican scandals, indictments, violations, probes, investigations, arrests and abuses of power (not to mention all manner of sex scandals) lo these past years -- so many it takes entire Web sites and multiple books to keep track of them all.
Problem is, these scandals just don't seem to be having the satisfying effect of shutting down the nasty GOP machine once and for all. It's still hobbling along, weak and yet still incredibly nasty. Just last week we lost habeas corpus, a bedrock law of a free America, the right not to be taken into prison and have the key tossed away without any sort of representation, should the government deem you a threat to society. It's the one true mark of a fascist state. Translation: The November congressional elections cannot happen soon enough.
But now the end is near. Now Mark Foley comes along and is making almost all liberal dreams come true and seriously, I'm sorry for it. See, I believe in karma. I believe what comes around goes around and I know full well that it's just bad juju to wish such a level of turmoil and ill upon other humans, warmongering gay-hating maladroits or no, and that the real path of enlightenment is paved with forgiveness and progress and white-hot love and turning the other cheek and scotch.
In fact, Jesus said something about that, I do believe. He said, "Knock it off already with the warmongering and the hating of each other and let's all get some wine and party like it's 2012." Then again, he never saw Karl Rove stab the nation with the dull ice pick of bogus fear. He never heard George W. Bush describe brutal war and the death of tens of thousands as "just a comma" in world history.
Check that. Maybe I'm not so sorry after all.
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©2006 SF Gate
