Posted on 10/04/2006 6:12:07 AM PDT by Dark Skies
If you believe that just a thin sliver of luck stands between us and further terrorist attacks in our major cities, and that only one political party can be trusted to be serious about national security, you have to believe that Rep. Foley’s sexual folly could endanger all of us.
Whether or not he was abused as a teenager is purely irrelevant: We are not turned into irresponsible zombies by childhood trauma. Rather than falling for Foley’s trendy excuses, we need to think about the clear consequences.
Soon, the suicide-murder cult of Ahmadinejad will have nukes; they might already have dirty bombs, since all it takes is some radioactive material and a truck bomb, which they know how to make. In Asia, China wants to snatch Taiwan, as soon as the United States looks weak enough. Pakistan is in danger of falling to Taliban types, which is why President Musharraf just surrendered Waziristan province to them. This is a serious time for serious grown-ups. We therefore have to be extremely concerned about any scandal that can put dangerous fools like Al Gore or John Kerry into power.
Jimmy Carter became President after the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon. Nixon was pretty awful in some ways, but he was completely serious about national security. Henry Kissinger was probably the most talented SecState of the 20th century, and it was Nixon who recruited him. After Nixon fell, so did Saigon—courtesy of the New York Times’ leaks of the Pentagon Papers—followed by the Killing Fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
How many human beings died because our Left figured out exactly how to overthrow a Republican president? Surely at least hundreds of thousands. We can place those bloody corpses at the feet of our Left, which is why they are never mentioned in our mainstream media.
After Nixon fell, Jerry Ford didn’t stand a chance in the next election. Smilin’ Jimmy Carter got into the Oval Office instead. Carter felt sure that Ayatollah Khomeini must be a fine, religious fellow, just a liberal Baptist with a Santa Claus beard— and much nicer than that nasty pro-American Shah.
So Jimmy the Fool allowed Khomeini to overthrow the Shah, leading some years later to one million deaths in the Iran-Iraq war. Had the Shah stayed in power, Saddam could never have waged war against a US-supported Iran. Meanwhile, Ayatollah Khomeini put together the first Islamofascist tyranny in the world, the model for all the others now incubating. The mullahs who succeeded him are now within a few years of getting nuclear weapons. That’s what happens when you put a Left-wing conehead in charge, in times of great national danger.
So this is about more than sex. It is about unbelievably gross irresponsibility. Foley’s sexual pathology could bring our Deludocrats to power —our Peter Pan Party that’s just never had to bother with growing up.
We know what they would do.
Domestically, the Dems would prosecute terrorists in Federal courts, making it legally mandatory to share sensitive intelligence with Islamofascist defense lawyers. The whole elaborate effort to gather better intelligence after 9/11 would immediately dry up, because spies don’t want to get killed.
Any convicted terrorists would get appeal after appeal, using each occasion to make domestic and international propaganda against the United States. The ACLU would become the Terrorist Defense Fund, and it would be lauded in our dreadful media for protecting our rights. Any released terrorists would go back home and blow up more Americans. The media would explain it all away and then consign memory of the culpability to the Black Hole, just as they did with Pol Pot and Khomeini.
Internationally, a triumphant US Left would retreat from Iraq, handing Tehran an enormous victory, and probably bringing Muqtada Al Sadr to power in Baghdad. Tehran would then extend its arc of control all the way from Lebanon to Syria, Iran and Iraq. The Saudis, Gulf States and Kuwait would be in mortal danger, along with the world’s oil supply. Israel would also be in mortal peril, and reluctantly would be forced to bare its nuclear fangs. A real nuclear exchange might become more likely than at any time since Stalin. We would see a new Persian Caliphate, as cruel and backwards as the Ottomans, but armed like the Soviet Union and much more dangerous. The Soviets never had a suicide ideology. Tehran does.
So this is serious stuff. If we had two responsible political parties, we could afford to throw one out. Unfortunately, we don’t. Our Deludocrats are incapable of governing in a time of war. If you can honestly believe that 9/11 is not a possible portent of future disasters, you shouldn’t even be elected President of your local Toastmaster’s Club. So we’re stuck—like it or not—with the best we have: Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and yes, George W. Bush. They are adults, with courage, humility and intelligence, as much as the leaders the United States was fortunate to have at the beginning of the Cold War—people like Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, and George Marshall.
War leaders always make mistakes. Churchill made dozens of them. If our leaders have integrity, they will change their actions as soon as they realize their errors. That is the best we can expect in an imperfect world. But they cannot be fools.
I fervently hope that the Democrats will come to their senses one of these days. They badly need to purge their party of incompetent hacks. But until they do, we are stuck with only one party of grown-ups. Fortunately we don’t have a firing squad operating in back of the Capitol building to shoot Rep. Foley at dawn tomorrow morning, and we should not behave as if we wished we did.
All we can do therefore is put his gross irresponsibility into perspective. We haven’t got a choice.
No kidding.
You really shouldn't advocate adding a new bureaucracy to the federal government to deal with a particular subject unless you understand the subject. Makes it awfully hard to keep the Feds from going out of control.
Mining public websites for information is a far cry from accessing private servers, which is where email and IMs are stored. It's the difference between a mailman glancing at your postcards before putting them in your mailbox and somebody having to get into your house to search your filing cabinet.
More accurate analogy: it's the difference between driving around looking at yard signs to see who's voting for whom, and searching people's checkbooks to see who donated to which candidate.
I'm of the opinion that we should THANK the Democrats for reminding Americans of how dangerous to the children gays really can be....
And how SUPPORTIVE Democrats are of the pro-homosexual, anti-family agenda of those very same gays!
Nickey,
I'm not going to get involved in a discussion of homosexuality as it is not a subject A) about which I have any concrete information; B) that, in my opinion, is a private matter (or should be) between consenting adults; and C) I have no personal bias against.
What I will say is Senator Foley is unstable for a variety of reasons -- most of which is a lack of personal responsibility. If someone can prove to me -- beyond a shadow of any doubt -- that being a homosexual is linked to pedophilia -- then I will be one of the most formidable foes of the practice in the world. Until that time, I will love the sinner, hate the sin and respect those I encounter for what is in their hearts, not the color of their skin, sexual proclivities or practices or religious beliefs.
At some point in time, you say to yourself, "It is what it is." It doesn't affect what I am or what I will do.
Representative Foley's folly was more self-inflicted (though I don't doubt the incriminating evidence was being held by a partisan hit squad until the right time came along). President Nixon was guilty of abuse of power, but his abuses were similar to secret methods that had been in use by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. It can't be ignored that there was a siege on his Presidency.
"Mining public websites for information is a far cry from accessing private servers, which is where email and IMs are stored."
But you DO understand that the email goes THROUGH different nodes of the Internet, and the traffic is open to public inquiry, you do understand?
The intermediate carriers are not the US Post Office and have no pledge to keep the individual packets 'private,' whatever that means.
It's like you asked a police officer to drop off a postcard for you - and you write on the postcared "I robbed a bank!" Then you sue the policeman for reading your mail.
You do understand that much about the Internet, perhaps so?
Of course. I'm not talking about privacy issues, I'm talking logistics. Collecting public information is much easier than collecting information that is only stored on private servers.
But you still haven't answered the questions. Shall I post them again?
"Yes he ran for public office (local) in Fla. as a Democrat."
I find that very interesting. I think former Senator Foley is a conflicted and compromised individual for yet another reason. He would appear to have many reasons (and those around him) for waiting until 35 days out of the election for this to hit the media. UNBELIEVABLE. Now I truly wonder what was in his heart.
How exactly that would have prevented Foley from coming on to teenagers is anybody's guess....
There's this idea that "internet speech" (e-mails, IMs, chat) are somehow less worthy of protection than other kinds of speech.
What happens in a witch-hunt is that everybody's freedom goes down the drain. Today it's "pedophiles" (an erroneous use of the term, as a 16-17 year old sexually mature youth is NOT a child, and in many states, including Wash DC, able to consent to sex, whether we think this morally OK or not), tomorrow it's political or religious speech.
Sounds like Big Brother to me.
You do George Orwell proud.
- John
Brilliant, brilliant...NOT.
We have a cocktail hour here too, but let's not get carried away.
The Dems will not take over Congress and the Prez will not be impeached.
In the meantime, wobble down the hall to the bar and squeeze another tomato into a glass...and follow that with a dash of Stoli...
We lemmings are staying up here on the cliff!
Thx for showing the world your magnanimity...worm.
ABC ONLINE GLITCH LEADS TO IDENTITY OF FOLEY ACCUSER; FEATURED IM EXCHANGE WAS WITH 18 YEAR OLDIt turns out as I more than half expected. It seems Foley's little paramour was eighteen, old enough to star in XXX gay porno. For all we know, maybe the kid's already been in a Boys Gone Wild video for money.
We can try this one more time or we are wasting everyone's time, thank you.
If you continue to avoid the questions, then that could be construed as wasting everybody's time, yes.
It probably isn't worth me posting them again, since you've dodged them every other time I've posted them. You know what they are, and when you want to provide answers we'll all be waiting.
"Precisely what kind of "monitoring" would have prevented Foley from soliciting boys?"
IM/EMAIL bulk sifting same as for terrorist keys.
There are two elements here that seem to escape you.
The first is that sifting through emails would not have prevented Foley from coming on to boys, as you originally claimed. Even if possible, it would only have made it easier to catch him after the fact.
The second is that his emails contained no "keys". You keep repeating "keys" and "sifting" like a mantra, but the filtering software needs to have something specific for which to search. Shall we set the filters to search for every mention of the word "picture?"
His IMs didn't help much either. If you're going to add the word "stud" to your list of search keys, then you'll have to add tens of thousands of new analysts to sift through the search results.
So you and I have two different responses to this problem. Yours involves a massive expansion of the nanny state, mine asks parents to take responsibility for their children.
In what way do you think your plan is smarter, wiser, more Constitutional or more conservative?
Of course.
But I thought that attcking his silly plan on Constitutional grounds would probably be futile.
People who advocate a Federal response to every problem aren't usually that concerned with, or interested in, the Bill of Rights.
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