Fux News

I was originally going to post about the whole buying a house/moving/soreness hassle, but everyone knows moving sucks and buying a home is stressful (though it is a lovely place).

I also considered posting a rant about the recent bill that was passed which allowsthe president o "reinterpret" the Geneva Convention, which gives the rest of the world a fantastic opinion of the United States.

But this whole Mark Foley thing is just too much.

If you've been paying attention to anything the past couple days, you're aware of the fact that Florida Republican Mark Foley and former chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children recently resigned after it was discovered that he was having illicit IM conversations with underage congressional pages, and that some of his colleagues in the Republican Party were aware of it, yet refused to take action.

The conservative right has been trying to cover their asses ever since, and they've been doing a hell of a job. Newt Gingrich actually declared on national television that the reason no one stepped forward about the scandal was because they would be accused of gay bashing.

Let us ignore, for the moment, that pedophilia, even homosexual pedophilia, is not the same as homosexuality and that most homosexual pedophiles are, in fact, white heterosexual males. What we have is an organisation who acknowledges its member to be a pedophile, yet refuses to do or say anything about it, thus enabling the pedophile's actions.

Sound familiar? The same thing happened with the Catholic Church a couple years back. You may remember this, as I do, and you probably remember the public outcry against the press for bashing the gay priests. Funny how I missed that.

But that's not the best part. The best part, as you may have gathered from the title of this post, is the interesting role that America's most trusted fair and balanced news channel has taken.

You may at one time or another have heard rumors to the effect that Fox News has a slight conservative bias. I know, it's all part of the liberal media's plan to subvert the truth, but hear me out. Fox News has been doing its damnedest to try to spin this story to make the Democrats look bad. First, there's the everso popular question mark. You may be familiar with this technique. By adding a question mark to the end of the sentence, you can make up all sorts of baseless stories and assumptions while at the same time washing your hands of any responsibility. Rather than saying, for example, "NGL rapes puppies", a statement that is not remotely true and has no basis in reality, they can pose the question, "Does NGL really rape puppies?" This way, despite never having any kind of sexual, prepubescent canine interaction, I am suddenly painted as a potential puppy rapist.

Similarly, Fox News doesn't actually come out and say, "Dems ignore Foley e-mails to preserve seat." That would imply that the Democrats had knowledge of the illicit communications and were sitting on it to use as part of their election strategy. Never mind, of course, the well-established fact that the Republicans did. Instead, they ask, "Did dems ignore Foley e-mails to preserve seat?" Now it's just an innocent question. Sure, there's no real reason to think they did, but now we have the conjecture out there, and for some poor miseducated folks, that's as good as a guilty verdict.

As if that wasn't low enough, the folks at Fox News are also trying to distance the Republicans from Foley by relabeling him a Democrat. That's right. No Republican would ever display any pedophilic tendancies, but those godless Democrats, well, that's a different story. There have been reports that Bill O'Reilly has repeatedly referred to Foley as a Democrat, and the network has literally labeled him as such.

And I thought my opinion of Fox News couldn't get any lower.

Fox News is to journalism what the WWE is to sports. Maybe we should start calling it news entertainment.

And now for the delicious icing on the cake: Mark Foley has blamed his penchant for boys on his alcoholism and prior sexual abuse. He recently checked himself into a treatment facility in Clearwater FL to deal with his alcoholism.

Can anyone guess what kind of treatment facilities they have in the quiet town of Clearwater? I'll give you a hint: Mark Foley is also the proud owner of a leatherbound edition of Dianetics.

- Noteworthy German Leper