Dateline: Kinko's at twenty cents a minute.
The DSL line crapped out last night so I didn't post because I thought I'd do so first thing this morning. To top it all off, the power went out at about 2:45 AM, and just came on about an hour ago, and the DSL is still not working. Meh.
On the upside, I went out for pancakes and got stuff for a new jewelry project I'm working on that involves pouring resin. OOOH, chemicals, and non-abrasive ones, for once. Still, I don't want to get any on me. Will show pictures of the finished project if it turns out as I envision it - right now this ideer is in the fact-finding stage.
Oh, couple more things: I haven't weighed in here on the scandal du semaine [that's scandal of the week, but couldn't resist the beastly pun]. I KNEW I remembered the horrid "congressmen like their pages bent over" joke from my days in high school in the early 80s. I will point out the 1983 scandal involved a 17-year-old boy, and this was pre-email/pre-internet era, so Al Gore's bridge to the 21st century didn't make an unholy alliance with Republicans to create a new form of child-exploitation - Foley was just re-hashing an old bit. Funny thing is, the media seem to view this as a badge of courage in the case of that Studds fellow. I don't get how the then-46-year-old Studds interfering sexually with a 17-year-old child is less morally repugnant than the current situation.
Oh, and what about that Kennedy guy who carried on an affair with the 16-year-old babysitter? He held a press conference and broke down weeping and went into the Betty Ford clinic or some such, resulting in a spate of resounding back-slapping and sympathetic forehead-wrinkling. I guess that was ok because it was a chick-- and of course - that's what we're here for.
Considering that I knew of the murky goings-on in D.C. involving young pages and interns when I was a mere lass in a suburban Texas town, I'm thinking it was ever thus that children sent to D.C. in such a capacity were pretty much there for the taking, and probably most parents who participated in such programs HAD to know their children would return much more worldly than they were when they flew the coop.
My point is that we can't give a pass to one politician or one political party, oh, say, a president, saying it's ok for him to treat the young interns on staff as a box of tissues but conversely declare it an outrage that lewd communications passed between an elected official and a barely- or not-quite-underaged page. This current bout of outrage seems obnoxiously disproportionate, unless it's going to come out that Foley inserted a cigar into the person of said intern and then smoked that cigar in the Rose Garden with Arafat. I'll be right here, not holding my breath waiting for that news bulletin.
"Oh, it's his private life." "It's between him and his wife." "It depends on what your definition of "is" is." "You conservatives love invading the privacy of other people's bedrooms because you are repressed." "Republicans' repression gives them a sick thrill out of keeping alive a scandal that's none of their business."
Wow, I suppose I'll never get rid of that ringing in my ears. Just sit back and enjoy the crashing waves of hypocrisy.
Y'all have a great week. Hopefully I'll be able to post as usual, but I want to maintain the habit of not blogging from work - slippery slope and all. Having the attention-span of a lit match, I already have enough of a challenge staying focused on business, so I simply avoid the blogging temptation.
7 comments:
Wise choice on not blogging at work.
I used to work, had a gov'ment job and all, and was a IT manager. I saw serveral people lose their jobs and some within 5 years of retirement over non-job related Internet use. The strangest involved IT personnel who knew "we" monitored their Internet visits. Sad.
'Couse most involved porn, but blogging would have been enough cause as well.
The weird thing is that I have no problem making what Foley did illegal and having his ass prosecuted. Politicians are not elected to go whoring with pages/interns in any capacity. But oddly enough it is the Democrat party who is the more reluctant to pass that type of legislation. So all the Democrat handwringing and rending of garments seems disingenuous at best.
It's as if the Republicans invented sin. The hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife. And this shit could only pass muster with a media that was agreeing to play along. Even bringing up Studds and Kennedy is considered an obstruction. "Are you now or have you ever been...?" Still, a lot of the problems the Republicans are now having are of their own creation. They failed to differentiate themselves enough from the others when it comes to too many things. Sad. The system corrupts all who touch it.
mushy - clearly, it does have addictive properties - it's weird when people throw a career away over something as stupid and common as porn. Strange.
zelda - I'm with you - it's just the eye-watering double-standard that's blowing my mind. And here, people are setting off nukes and we're talking about lewd text messages? C'mon!
fathairybastard - I think it's not that the system corrupts so easily, but that people are looking for occasion to abandon all propriety. Yeah, it's like the "when did you stop beating your wife" question - it's all effed up.
It's all about power - Oprah always said it's not the sex, and what a job you want if you want power?
Over here, the leader of teh now-defunct Christian Coalition is jailed for raping a 6-year-old (if memory serves me, w hich it doesn't often) but he's still emailing his former party faithfuls that "it was consensual". And he's tampered with heaps more girls. The leader of the National Party (roughly Republicans) uses the fact the Prime Minister (leader of Labour Party, roughly the Democrats) has been legally married but have not kids, to say the Prime Minister is anti-mariiage and her husband is gay, but he (of the National Party) was caught the second time having an affair - he left his first wife for the current one. I'd like to know what the religious right who backed him with millions last election think now - though that kind of hypocracy doesn't even embarass the Right, it seems.
I'm interested in what Zelda said, about the Democrats blocking these legislations. In the end, it goes back to power, rather than the party, then?
Annnddd, do you wear a funky welder face mask when you work?
meg - well, I suppose politicians are equally yucky the world over. It's sad that they are so predictable, isn't it? And there's hypocrisy all around, it seems.
Oh,and I wear safety glasses when I'm on the torch soldering or fabricating silver stuff, and I wear didymidium-coated safety glasses to protect my retinas when I'm making beads on the torch.
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