how low can you go?

According to an article in Newsweek, Republicans are doing so badly in the court of public opinion that if elections were held today, the Democrats would regain control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Bush's approval rating stands at 33 percent, only one quarter of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country and more than half believe House Speaker Dennis Hastert was aware of former congressman Mark Foley's peccadilloes and tried to cover them up to avoid scandal. On Iraq, 58 Americans out of every 100 believe that the administration deliberately misled voters in the leadup to the war, 64 percent believe we are losing the war, two in three believe it has put as at greater risk of terror attacks, and 53 percent believe the entire war was a mistake.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, incidentally, has a lower approval rating than Bush, at only 33 percent, with nearly half of all Americans believing he should resign.

As Newsweek puts it:

Democrats now outdistance Republicans on every single issue that could decide voters’' choices come Nov. 7. In addition to winning— for the first time in the Newsweek poll— on the question of which party is more trusted to fight the war on terror (44 to 37 percent) and moral values (42 percent to 36 percent), the Democrats now inspire more trust than the GOP on handling Iraq (47 to 34); the economy (53 to 31); health care (57 to 24); federal spending and the deficit (53 to 29); gas and oil prices (56 to 23); and immigration (43 to 34).

It's so bad that France has become Bush's closest ally.

Read the entire story.


Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The shamelessness of Mark Foley

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm outraged that Mark Foley is trying to play the gay card right now.

Foley, who until last week was a congressional representative from Florida, two days ago said through his lawyer that he is gay. The timing of this announcement is questionable, to say the least.

After all, didn't he resign under a cloud of scandal for sending inappropriate e-mail to congressional pages? What's the message he's trying to send here, "Don't blame me for chasing underage males; I couldn't help it, I'm gay"? If he had sent explicit messages to female pages, would he have asked his attorney to announce that he's heterosexual? Good grief.

The issue isn't that he's gay. The issue is that he allegedly was sending explicit e-mail to male pages. That's it. Trying to give this the "I'm a victim, feel sorry for me" spin is shameful, and it should be offensive to every other gay man and woman in this country, since he's essentially saying that being gay made him sexually predatory.

It seems in some ways like Foley's trying to follow the lead of former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevy, who managed to turn his resignation two years ago into "I had to resign because I'm gay" rather than "I had to resign because I used my position as New Jersey governor to grant my lover a Cabinet-level position he wasn't qualified for."

I know from the misery that some of my friends have gone through that being closeted is hell, and that being open about a gay sexual orientation often isn't much better, and I'm sure that having to live in the closet -- particularly for a public figure -- is unimaginably worse. But let's not use sexual orientation as an excuse for criminal behavior. That's just an insult.

Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.


(Whaddya know: The Palm Beach Post agrees with me.)

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