Maybe Repubs Use a Different Dictionary

Representative John Shimkus (R-IL) has been chairman of the Congressional page program since 2001. Yesterday he said he was “unaware of previous complaints about Mark Foley”. Maybe “complaint” has a different meaning to Shimkus than to reasonable Congressmen who don’t longingly ogle teenage boys. Maybe to Shimkus “overly friendly” is a compliment and whoever said Foley was overly friendly got a high mark on the Shimkus FoleyBoys List. Maybe to qualify as a complaint, a page would have to tell Shimkus that Foley ignored him, or told him he was the kind of page that Democrats would want to have around. We don’t know. The New York Times reported this morning, “A longtime adviser to Mr. Foley has testified that he asked Mr. Hastert’s office to intervene at least three years ago, an account that the speaker’s aides have denied.” Maybe to Hastert the definition of intervening, didn’t mean “coming between”, but “jumping into the middle of and wallowing in”. We don’t know. Maybe to these guys “creepy behavior” means, “oh man, this guy is great”. How do we know? So now that they understand the meaning of complaint, intervene, overly friendly and creepy in the huge world that exists outside of Republican politics, the Congressmen involved in the FoleyBoys Follies truly can swear they weren’t aware of any of it. At least, by my lights, that’s the only way these Republican assholes can claim plausible deniability or avoid blowback on this latest scandal. We know that “failure” means “success” to George W. Bush. But before the Republicans commit the United States to even the teensiest new legal agreement, we should find out what the GOP means by “Christian morality”, “safe and secure” and “democracy”. Because it surely looks like the Bush administration thinks those words mean, “screw anything that’s warm and rob everybody blind”, “keep the folks scared” and “we rule, you obey”.