Monday, October 09, 2006

Fantasy Football and Congressional Fantasies, Both Gag-worthy

Sometimes your fantasy NFL team tanking yet again takes on the same significance as the Foley-Kolbe phantasm. Not often. Actually, I'm so used to it that today is probably the last day it will register. Oh, swell. The Broncos just picked off yet another pass. Good thing I'm not in this for cash.

When this happens (not the demise of my team, so much, although it's an apt metaphor for the rest of the world at the moment), I like to pop open a bottle of Red Truck and go through the last month's worth of Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke.

I confess to not paying inordinate attention today to the newest Foley developments. Apparently Jim Kolbe (recently retired representative from Arizona), another inexplicably Republican gay man, knew as far back as 2000 that Foley was behaving inappropriately with the pages. Nothing that's come to light so far suggests that Kolbe himself did anything wrong with the boys (reports indicate he was friendly and generous, but no hints of smoking guns yet), but his minimal actions to rectify the situation (notifying the House clerk) are damning.

Note to the remaining gay Republicans in Congress: knock it off, already. If you get so much as a whiff of impropriety involving one of your gay colleagues and an underage kid, you are obligated to go all Avenging Angel on the guy's ass. Doing the bare minimum that you think will stand up to clear you in court or preserve your committee chairmanship only makes the rest of us--who, by the by, are overwhelmingly interested in getting laid by People Our Own Age--look really, really bad. The Focus on the Family people have the stereotype of the gay sexual predator up there in stark relief. Look in the mirror and see if your actions are perpetuating that stereotype or protecting someone else's efforts to perpetuate it in any way. If so, knock it the hell off.

There.

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