A tale of two perverts: Fiddling (with children) while the world burns

I am going to post my editorials from the archives of the SSU Star. I'm the Editor in Chief, so I can do that, right?

For fans of the trials, tribulations and public humiliation of sexual predators, last week represented something of a bellwether in the world of pedophilia. Between the story of a sad, middle-aged Republican House member's attempted peccadilloes with hot young pages, and the release of John Mark Karr - the man who did not murder Jon Benet Ramsey - there was a little something for everyone, both on the national and local stages.

The dominant story in the mainstream press last week was that of Representative Mark Foley, R-Fla., and his alleged taste for the tender flesh of underage males.

It appears that the man appointed as chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children - who introduced H.R. 3132, the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act of 2005, intended to crack down on Internet stalking and made into law as the Adam Walsh Child Protection Act of 2006 - was using the Internet and his access to nubile young congressional employees to satisfy his predilections for teenage boys.

Foley's participation on the committee follows the logic of Bush administration appointments, as a pedophile was put in charge of the office charged with cracking down on pedophiles. The story brought to mind oil companies in charge of energy policy, or drug manufacturers creating a Medicare drug plan that has siphoned billions of taxpayer dollars into their own coffers. This might be a good place for a gag about "insider's knowledge," but I'll refrain out of a sense of propriety.

A series of e-mail and instant messages between the Foley and some of the boys became public last week, and were plastered all over the newspapers and teevee news shows. There was even a dryly amusing, if disturbing, reading of a few of them on ABC news by Brian Ross, who would be well-advised to stick with reading the news, as he would never make it as a phone sex operator. (Thank you John Stewert).

House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other top Republican leaders spent the week scurrying around pointing fingers and playing the "blame game" in an attempt to deflect criticism to the pages, the Democrats, or anywhere else but the pedophilic Republican, or his prevaricating enablers. I'll forego the sordid details here, as I'm sure that unless my reading audience has been holed up in a cave in Afghanistan or detained somewhere without a warrant, we are all familiar with them in repulsive detail.

In a story that's closer to home here in Sonoma County, the dismissal of child pornography charges against the man who did not murder Jon Benet filled the empty space left over from reportage of the Foley circus.

As we all should know by now, Karr was arrested in Colorado on Aug. 17 for allegedly murdering the little girl the day after Christmas in 1996. There were many questions about the veracity of his guilt, and massive holes in the case against him, but the story took over the front pages of every newspaper in the Western Hemisphere.

Karr's embarrassing debacle made the Sonoma County District Attorney's office look incompetent when it became clear that he was not involved in the Ramsey murder, and the evidence for the child pornography case turned out to be highly suspect, if not nonexistent.

The bigger story, though, was not what was trumpeted on the front pages during the course of the week, but what was not. The same week the Foley story blew up to epic proportions, a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) informed us we are losing the war on terr'.

The NIE lays out the case that Iraq has become a training ground - and the Iraq war a recruiting tool - for a fresh-faced batch new-generation Jihadists. The Foley scandal also helped obscure the fact that the situation on the ground in Iraq is deteriorating by the day.

The Bush administration's new torture policy - which reinterprets the Geneva Conventions - and the rollback of habeas corpus for anyone deemed an "enemy combatant" by the president, were stories of equal if not more import.

Additionally, the Karr arrest made the headlines on the same day that a federal judge in Detroit ruled the NSA wiretap program unconstitutional and illegal.

Much like Orange Alerts, or the "number two man in Al Qaida," Karr and Foley appear to have served to obscure the fact that the trillions of dollars we've spent fighting terr'rists have for the most part been wasted.

I'm not saying that it's unimportant for pedophilic leaders of the Republican Party to be held accountable for their actions, or that these stories aren't really news. The point is, there's a lot of obfuscation going on in the halls of our government, and Karr and Foley were offered up as sacrificial lambs on the altar of misinformation.