Have You No Sense of Decency?

Good God. I take a couple of weeks off my blog-writing chores to (1) move to Brooklyn, (2) play catch-up at my real job, and (3) entertain my mother and sister while they are visiting New York.

And all hell breaks loose.

The entire argument over whether the USA should legalize torture was demoralizing enough, but, now, here we are debating whether or not (and which) House leaders have been enabling--and there is no other word for it--the abuse and/or harassment of teenage pages. On the one hand, it makes one's blood boil that two former high school teachers like Denny Hastert and John Shimkus either (at best) couldn't recognize the not-very-subtle signs on display by a lecherous predator or (at worst) cared less about the welfare of these kids than they did about their respective positions in Congress. Cruelly incompetent or callously cruel--take your pick.

On the other hand, it's sure hard not to be gleeful that, finally, the GOP leadership has been exposed as wearing (ahem) no clothes, which certainly reduces the likely audience for their newly formed circular firing squad.

Maybe I should probably have written again rather than finally. I thought that Hurricane Katrina had permanently stripped our current government of its paper toga constructed from competence and caring. Instead, we had to work our way down the alphabet a bit for Hurricane Mark to remove the final tatters of GOP integrity. (And I haven't even mentioned the "new" bombshell revelations by Bob "Am I Too Late for the Party" Woodward.)

In a few short days, after several years of government malfeasance, presidential power grabs, and partisan posturing, we've experienced a modern-day rerun of Joseph N. Welch's exposure of McCarthy and Cohn as lying, conniving, self-serving hypocrites. Fifty years from now, historians once again will wonder what in the hell took everyone so long to see these bastards for who they really are.