Personal Thoughts on Mark Foley
First and foremost, I want to say that Mark Foley deserves everything he has coming to him, and that had better be a lot.
Second of all, the House Republican Leadership, which seems to have nothing about this, is despicable. These pompous, strutting bullshit artists and their proclamations about “protecting the children of America blah blah blah”, while full cognizant that a predator was not only in their midst, while witholding that information from the only Democrat on the Page board, while allowing Mark Foley the sexual predator to run the Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, are all complicit. This is vile and they should not remain in power. In a sense, it’s just like their claims about protecting Americans in general: pretending to do something while doing NOTHING. They knew about this for a full year, and didn’t lift a finger, other than to keep things quiet.
I’ve been reading the whole shenanigans with a good deal of schadenfreude, but also with a personal sense of satisfaction, because when I was 12, one of my fellow Boy Scouts tried to molest me on an overnight camping trip.
John Mottram was an older scout, 16 or 17, and one of our patrol leaders. I thought he was super cool. He helped me learn my knots, including that godawful bowline that I’ve never mastered to this day, was an expert camper, and on more than a few occasions had protected me from Paul Dyl, another patrol leader and an anti-Semitic motherfucker who bullied any Scouts he found out were Jewish. I liked John, and looked up to him.
On this particular Scouting trip, John and I shared a tent. He had snuck some booze, pints of blackberry brandy and vodka, along in his backpack and during the night, by flashlight, he offered me some. I didn’t care for it: the brandy was cloying and greasy and the vodka just burned; besides, I was scared of getting in trouble with the Scoutmaster if we got caught drinking. In retrospect, I know what he was doing and I am SO glad I didn’t drink more than a sip of each. He was trying to get me drunk so he could have his way with me. But as it happened, he drank and I rolled over and went to sleep.
Later that evening, I woke up feeling a hand sliding down my leg and go reaching for my balls. Immediately I rolled over and punched Mottram in the head as hard as I could and began yelling at the top of my lungs for him to leave me alone. Our Scoutmaster came running and from outside the tent yelled at us to shut up, other people were trying to sleep. I scooted as far as I could to the door of the tent, where I waited for daylight to come. The fact that I would be spending the night with a fucking pervert was terrifying, and I woke up every hour on the hour after that. In the morning, when I confronted him, Mottram claimed innocence, that he had been drunk and didn’t remember anything from the night before. I asked for a new tentmate, telling my Scoutmaster that John and I had a fight and I didn’t like him anymore. I couldn’t say what had happened: it was so fucking embarrassing. Thankfully, I got put in another tent, and it didn’t matter to me that it was Beau Dorsey, the retarded kid with bad breath who snored like a jackhammer.
Many years later, in the late 1980s before I moved from Newport, Mottram was sent to prison for child molestation, and it was then that I realized, I was lucky. The guy never got to me. I never told anyone what happened: in fact, this is the first time I have thought about the incident in God knows how long. We knew his family: his mom Tina was my schoolbus driver, and her two younger children were both mildly retarded. Her husband had left her high and dry, and the family was poor. My mother was very sad for Tina, we all were.
Speaking as the father of a young boy, you cannot imagine how angry this makes me. And while it is probably unnecessary to say this (never mind that it could land me in guantanamo), if I found out someone was engaged in this kind of behavior with my kid, I would beat that person to death with a baseball bat. It would literally be one of those situations where it would take dental records to identify the body.
People like Mark Foley, who use their power and influence to sexually harass and molest teenaged boys (never mind teenaged girls) are scum, lower than the dog shit I scraped off my shoe this afternoon. So fuck him. He deserves everything he’s got coming to him, which I sincerely hope is prison, registry as a sex offender, and a permanent end to his political career and personal reputation.
Fuck you Mark Foley, and fuck you Dennis Hastert, Tom Reynolds, and John Boehner for protecting him. You fucking suck.
Update: While I realize this is crowding the disgusting and unconstitutional Military Commissions Act of 2006 off of the front pages, it’s just as well: there’s an old adage that the only thing that can take some incumbents down is being caught with either a dead girl or a live boy. This may be just the scandal, arriving a month before the election with Congress in recess and unable to change the subject, so laden with salacious and lewd details for scandal-loving reporters to fondle and finger, that will tip the scales in favor of Democrats simply due to public revulsion. Hey, things have been so bad lately, I’ll take victory where I can find it.
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