"Just to be clear, the president is not backing off in any way from the comments he made last night. It is not his role as president to pass judgment on every local project."

Said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

What's the worst thing about Burton's statement?
	It disrespects Ground Zero to characterize it as just another "local project."
	The President really did change his position, and it's a lie to deny that.
	The President dips into local matters when he wants to, such as Skip Gates and the Cambridge cop.
	It's legalistic hair-splitting again instead of saying something clear that people can understand.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: I almost feel sorry for Obama and the Democrats for their misfortune that this is the issue that has come to the fore at this time.

At least one Republican, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, seized on the confusion. “Mr. President, should they or should they not build a mosque steps away from where radical Islamists killed 3,000 people? Please tell us your position. We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they? And, no, this is not above your pay grade,” Palin wrote on Facebook....

Democratic aides say that, at the very least, the president has again knocked his party's candidates off local messages and forced them to talk about a national issue that doesn't appear likely to play well with important swing voters.

These officials planned to spend this weekend talking about Social Security’s 75th anniversary....

"The main reaction is 'Why? Why now?’" said one House Democratic leadership aide. "It's just another day off message. There have been a lot of days off message.

The chief of staff to one politically vulnerable House Democrat said it "probably alienates a lot of independent voters" and "it's not a good issue to be talking about right now."

He said he suspects "there are a lot of (Democrats) who are spooked in tough districts today" and "a lot of Republicans licking their chops right now."

Almost. The Democrats would love to do the same thing to the Republicans. They wouldn't hesitate to exploit something that captures the public's attention and provides leverage for the political arguments they like to make. Remember the Mark Foley incident in 2006.

"Whatever short-term political gain there is [for Democrats], it can only have a negative impact on gay men."

Camille Paglia on the Mark Foley scandal:

When a moralistic, buttoned-up Republican like Foley is revealed to have a secret, seamy gay life, it simply casts all gay men under a shadow and makes people distrust them. Why don't the Democratic strategists see this?.......

The Foley scandal exploded without any proof of a documented sex act -- unlike the case of the late congressman Gerry Studds, who had sex with a page and who was literally applauded by fellow Democrats when they refused to vote for his censure. In the Foley case, there was far more ambiguous evidence -- suggestive e-mails and instant messages... What does it mean for Democrats to be agitating over Web communications, which in my view fall under the province of free speech? It's a civil liberties issue. We can say that what Foley was doing was utterly inappropriate, professionally irresponsible, and in bad taste, but why were liberals fomenting a scandal day after day after day over words being used? And why didn't Democrats notice that they were drifting into an area which has been the province of the right wing -- that is, the attempt to gain authoritarian control over interpersonal communications on the Web?....

And with the Democrats' record of sex scandals, what the hell were they thinking of? For heaven's sake, after we just got through the whole Clinton maelstrom! What Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky was far worse than any evidence I've seen thus far about what Foley did with these pages.... There was a time when feminists were arguing, in regard to sexual harassment in the workplace, that any gross disparity in power cannot possibly produce informed consent. All of a sudden, all of that was abandoned for partisan reasons in the Clinton case.

Well ranted.

Lots more at the link (on many subjects).

UPDATE: Paglia's statement about Studds is incorrect, as a commenter pointed out. Studds was censured, with only 3 Democrats voting against it. As for the Democrats' attitude at the time, here's the 1983 NYT article:

... Mr. Studds walked to the well, where he stood facing the Speaker with his back to the other members as the censure was read. He appeared grim but stoic as he turned without a word and sat down in the front row where colleagues from Massachusetts shook his hand....

The emotional debate echoed with appeals for morality and mercy. Supporters of the milder penalty argued that the two members had suffered irreparable harm already, and did not merit further humiliation.

''They must live with their shame, their actions indelibly recorded on this nation's history,'' said Representative Louis Stokes, the Ohio Democrat who heads the Ethics Committee....

''The idea of a reprimand was not strong enough for the American people,'' said Representative Bill Alexander, Democrat of Arkansas. ''After all, these guys molested minors. I was out in my district over the weekend and I was overwhelmed. The reaction was brutal.''

Some lawmakers who supported the milder penalty were bitter at the House action. Later, one California Democrat called the vote ''disgusting'' and said the representatives were ''trying to show how pure they are.'' Another West Coast Democrat added that a vote for the harsher penalty would be ''easier to explain'' to constituents.

"The whole idea is . . . that I did something that he did not like, but at the time he did not say anything."

Says the priest who admits to what ex-Congressman Mark Foley said he did.

"We had some kind of friendship. I was very friendly with him and his family," said [Anthony] Mercieca. "Then almost forty years passed without him saying anything. . . . And now because he got caught he recited these things."

In Brazil "they skinny dip all the time and no one gets scandalized. It is part of the culture. It is natural," Mercieca said. "They don't make an issue out of a skinny dip in the park or a massage."

"It was not what you call intercourse. . . . There was no rape or anything. . . . Maybe light touches here or there," said Mercieca.

Oh, those priests, with their subtle reasoning.

The Foley scandal didn't hurt the GOP but that's exactly why the GOP is hurt.

Follow the logic of the NYT's Andrew Kohut:

Surprisingly, after all the headlines and prurient melodrama over Mark Foley, national polls indicate that the scandal did not change voter opinion very much. Yes, some surveys found respondents saying it made them less likely to vote Republican, and others found that the G.O.P. leadership got low marks for the way it handled the problem. But the needle has not moved very much on the Congressional election’s bottom line – voting intentions.

If you are rooting for the G.O.P., you might find that comforting, but beware, because it suggests voter attitudes are so locked in that they are not likely to be easily swayed in any direction. And if the polls do not change, the Republican party is going to take it on the chin come Election Day.

Get it? The scandal didn't change things, which means things aren't changeable, and since the GOP needs some change to win, it's going to lose.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Karl's confident.

Monologues dialogues.

David Brooks's column yesterday began this way (TimesSelect link):

This is a tale of two predators. The first is a congressman who befriended teenage pages. He sent them cajoling instant messages asking them to describe their sexual habits, so he could get his jollies.

The second is a secretary, who invited a 13-year-old girl from her neighborhood into her car and kissed her. Then she invited the girl up to her apartment, gave her some vodka, took off her underwear and gave her a satin teddy to wear.

Then she had sex with the girl, which was interrupted when the girl’s mother called. Then she made the girl masturbate in front of her and taught her some new techniques.

The first predator, of course, is Mark Foley, the Florida congressman. The second predator is a character in Eve Ensler’s play, “The Vagina Monologues."

Foley is now universally reviled. But the Ensler play, which depicts the secretary’s affair with the 13-year-old as a glorious awakening, is revered. In the original version of the play, the under-age girl declares, “I say, if it was a rape, it was a good rape, then, a rape that turned my [vagina] into a kind of heaven.” When I saw Ensler perform the play several years ago in New York, everyone roared in approval. Ensler has since changed the girl’s age to 16 — the age of Foley’s pages — and audiences still embrace the play and that scene at colleges and in theaters around the world.

Today, we get the letters to the editor. Gotta defend the iconic monologues, you know. The first letter says Brooks "misses a key point, and that is power":

Mark Foley, a congressman, had a certain amount of power, and many of the pages were responding to that power. Most were afraid to offend him or to break off communication because Mr. Foley might become an important ally in a future career.

In my mind, this is more a story of abuse of power and covering up that abuse of power by the Republican Party.

But power is always the problem when an adult goes after a child!

The second letter makes the big art/life distinction. "The Vagina Monologues" is a play:

Does David Brooks mean to suggest that it is not the job of the theater to provoke us, to be equivocal, to reflect our best and worst selves, then leave it to us to choose good behavior when we exit the lobby?

If so, then Mr. Brooks is asking for the ostensible rectitude of propaganda.

But "The Vagina Monologues" is presented as propaganda, isn't it? Brooks made a point of the audience's approval. And consider the extreme enthusiasm for producing this play, which is out of all proportion to its artistic value.

The third letter notes Brooks's omission of the "simple point" that what Mark Foley did was "real" and "The Vagina Monologues" is "make-believe." But, again, the enthusiasm for "The Vagina Monologues" is very real.

IN THE COMMENTS: Some blogger's minions come by en masse to call me (and Brooks) idiots for not knowing the difference between real life and fiction (rather dimly redoing the NYT's letters that I'm writing about in this post). Palladian says something really smart:

No one's pointed out that the Foley's instant messages are, in one way, exactly analogous to a monologue-style play in that they were written words; dramatized sexual conduct rather than physical acts. This is not a defense of Foley, merely an observation that Brook's analogy (yes, he was making an analogy!) is not as far off as the suddenly fundamentalist, literalist "liberals" are suggesting.

And a couple comments later, on seeing a sexist insult hurled at me by one of the liberal blogger's minions:

Wow, not only do we have "liberals" on a moral crusade against a gay man, and asserting that art is meaningless, but now they're making sexist insults toward a woman with whom they disagree.

Have I fallen into some weird alternate dimension? What the hell?

ADDED: This post is getting a lot of attention, and I feel bad that you can't read Brooks's whole column. I wish the NYT would have some way to release a TimesSelect piece for general viewing once there's a big blog discussion going on. It seems unfair to Brooks that everyone can read the letters (and blogs) criticizing him, but they can't see exactly what he said. I'm not going to reprint any more than I already did, but let me summarize what he says.

Brooks wonders why the sexual predator in the play makes people cheer when Mark Foley brings hoots of disgust. Noting first that female predators tend not to scare us, he observes that in the play, we are seeing things from the minor's point of view and that she presents herself as breaking free from social conventions and finding personal fulfilment doing something that society tries to suppress. She's the feisty rebel who evinces the "moral code" of "expressive individualism."

The news about Mark Foley is told in terms of a more old-fashioned moral code that defines people by their social roles. (We certainly don't hear the teenager's point of view.) This code categorically rejects adults in sexual relationships with youngsters. In this way of thinking, there is never a rebel to cheer on. Our reaction is to feel ever more strongly committed to preserving the moral order. Since the real significance of the Foley story is as a reminder of the grave threat to the conventional moral order, Brooks thinks, the way for a party to benefit from the scandal is to present itself as the champion of the moral order.

Now, what's my reaction to that? First, I don't think people (or parties) have to adopt one or the other of these "codes." Like many from my generation, I am very strongly dedicated to the ethic of individual expression. That does not, however, in any way make it hard for me to acknowledge the absolute rule against adults doing anything sexual with children. I think you can flatly reject what Foley did and still believe in the value of individuals finding their own way around conventional morality and making their own rules about what is good. Obviously, social conservatives are the big champions of the moral order, but that doesn't mean that to oppose what Foley did requires you to become an all-out social conservative. A responsible, freely expressive individual recognizes the need for some rules.

But I do think there is a danger that liberals are getting so jazzed up about making political progress over Foley's folly that they carelessly present themselves as champions of the moral order, something they really don't want to do in the long run. They surely ought to pillory the social conservatives whenever they get caught violating their own moral code. Pointing out hypocrisy is usually an excellent move. But they should be careful not to stumble into hypocrisy of their own by overdoing the sanctimony about sexual morality and making it seem as though they are the social conservatives. Ugh! I'd like to end up with less social conservatism through this episode, not more.

"I've been warning my people to stay away from this story because you just don't know what will come back to bite you."

Some Democrats are rightly worried about getting too enthusiastic about using the disgrace of Mark Foley to make political progress.

This little interlude in the history of sex.

Mickey Kaus notes the "Densepack Theory": "the anti-GOP media have launched so many damaging GOP stories... that they are all arriving at once and, like fratricidal incoming ICBMs, are knocking each other out of the news rather than destroying their target." This made me have to stop and think what was that thing we were all focusing on before Mark Foley paged us? Oh, yeah, it was the Woodward book. Kinda more substantive, no? Good thing a sex scandal came along to relieve us of the ordeal of agonizing over the war.

I arrived at Mickey's wisdom via Glenn Reynolds, who said: "A bigger risk is that with this many GOP scandal stories, the press will feel obliged to run with at least a couple of Dem scandals, too, to preserve the illusion of evenhandedness." And now that the Foley scandal has so graphically demonstrated power of nasty email and IMs, you've got to expect more of those things to surface. In fact, I assume this is the sort of thing the MSM have declined to publish in the past. Unfit to print and all that. Now, they have to print or face denouncement for imbalance. So, come on, everybody, forward to MSM all those evil cybermessages the various politicos have been sending you over the years. Let's see how MSM handles it, and let's sit back and enjoy the hijinks.

An incredulous Andrew Sullivan asks: "Who saves and records IM exchanges for posterity?" LOL. How many folks are just now getting their mind around computers? You mean the writing is actually somehow permanent? I wonder how many politicians (and others) are sweating out this little interlude in the history of sex.

Let's talk about sex.

"Former Pages Describe [Rep. Mark] Foley as a Caring Ally," the NYT reports:

Ashley Gallo, a 21-year-old former page who is now a senior at Western Michigan University, said on Sunday that many of her friends had viewed Mr. Foley as one of the few lawmakers who made a real effort to reach out to young people.

“You didn’t have a lot of interaction with the members because most of them treated you like a kid, but he was pretty friendly,” said Ms. Gallo, who served as a page in 2001. “He would talk to people,” she said.

“He would say, ‘Here’s my e-mail address if you want to keep in touch.’ I don’t think anyone thought anything of it. They saw him as a mentor or a reference.”

How sad for a young person to hear that the one adult who was nice to them was actually more cruelly selfish that all the aloof ones. What a harsh lesson! People are cold, and anyone who isn't is out to take advantage of you. Unfriendly is the norm, so you should assume a friendly adult wants sex.

Foley has checked out of Congress (and into rehab -- in that classic plea for sympathy and understanding). But the Foley story maintains its grip. It breaks so soon before the election. How can -- why should? -- Democrats resist doing everything they can to hurt Republicans with this? A good Washington scandal becomes a big swirling whirlpool that excites us onlookers as each new victim topples in and flails. Of course, there's profuse salivating over on the pro-Democrat blogs. Democratic leaders in the House have made their moves:

...Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, called on Republican leaders to be questioned under oath by the ethics committee about their handling of the case....

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, also called for an investigation by the Justice Department. “The allegations against Congressman Foley are repugnant, but equally as bad is the possibility that Republican leaders in the House of Representatives knew there was a problem and ignored it to preserve a Congressional seat this election year,” Mr. Reid said. The public deserves “a full accounting for this despicable episode,” he added....

“Its been a time bomb from Day 1,” said a Republican strategist who is close to the party’s Congressional leaders and the White House and who was granted anonymity to speak freely about internal party concerns. “Now, it’s sad for the whole House.”

The Democratic National Committee seized on the scandal, sending out a scathing statement that raised pointed questions about Mr. Hastert and other Republican leaders. In bold red type, the dispatch asked: “What did Coach H and his buddies know and when did they know it?”

So it seems in the run-up to the election we won't have to talk about Iraq and terrorism and detainees anymore. Let's talk about sex.

"What the closet does to people - the hypocrisies it fosters, the pathologies it breeds - is brutal."

Andrew Sullivan on Mark Foley:

[T]he news about Mark Foley has a kind of grim inevitability to it. I don't know Foley, although, like any other gay man in D.C., I was told he was gay, closeted, afraid and therefore also screwed up. What the closet does to people - the hypocrisies it fosters, the pathologies it breeds - is brutal. There are many still-closeted gay men in D.C., many of them working for a Republican party that has sadly deeply hostile to gay dignity. How they live with themselves I do not fully understand. But I have learned you cannot judge someone's soul from outside. That I leave to them and their God, and some I count as good friends and good people.

I know this is a religious scruple -- "Judge not, that you be not judged" -- but I hear very harsh judgment in what Sullivan writes about those who choose to keep their sexual orientation private. Sullivan's prose is flowery, but it's not much different from the familiar -- and comical -- way some folks spout criticisms and then tag on the phrase "I'm not judging." And "I leave to them and their God" -- how far is that from saying "Go to hell"?

What I do know is that the closet corrupts. The lies it requires and the compartmentalization it demands can lead people to places they never truly wanted to go, and for which they have to take ultimate responsibility. From what I've read, Foley is another example of this destructive and self-destructive pattern for which the only cure is courage and honesty. While gays were fighting for thir basic equality, Foley voted for the "Defense of Marriage Act". If his resignation means the end of the closet for him, and if there is no more to this than we now know, then it may even be for the good. Better to find integrity and lose a Congressional seat than never live with integrity at all.

But I'm not judging! That's God's job.

Sullivan's hypothesis is: Keeping information about your sexual orientation private will corrupt you. His proof -- can you challenge it? -- is that he knows so many people and has seen so much. He's making a strong political argument: If you are gay, you must be open about it, and once you are open about it, you will be forced to support gay marriage. To make this argument, he's willing to imply that Foley's behavior toward a young subordinate is a manifestation of homosexuality. But many heterosexuals also pursue young subordinates. They are fully open about their sexual orientation, but somehow they do bad things too.

Day two.

Today is the second day of the new Spring semester, and the first day of Constitutional Law I (aka conlaw), my only first year class. It meets at my favorite time: 11! It's in my favorite room: the Foley & Lardner room (aka the trial courtroom). Why is the trial courtroom your favorite room? Because the part of it where the class sits is backed by a wide and tall set of windows that look right out onto Bascom Hill, the beautiful heart of the UW campus. The students have a lot of light coming in over their shoulders (possibly bad for looking at computer screens) and the teacher has a great view. There is also an immense white board that rolls out and divides the class seating area from the courtroom setup, and you have to have experience with various sized whiteboard/blackboard arrangments to know how nice is it to have a truly huge whiteboard. You never run out of space, and you can write so much more freely with marker on whiteboard than with chalk on blackboard. I'm telling you, the different level of friction is genuinely liberating. Sometimes one gets carried away talking without writing, and, with a blackboard, it seems so hard to stop and pick up the chalk and grind some calcium into the slate. But with whiteboard and juicy marker, it's not hard at all to illustrate a lecture with lines and loops and arrows?

So, yes, I'm happy with the room. It will be packed to capacity: I resisted a proposal to move us a larger but lesser room as the class size edged up in the last few days. There will be overflow tables. But surely the overflow few students (five, I think) will flow out of the class after the first day or two, perhaps when they learn I give a closed-book exam. I won't do a seating chart on the first day, so there's no need to worry about getting your favorite seat today. I want to let the enrollment settle down. There are other first year conlaw classes to switch to and other second semester electives to put off conlaw altogether, which might be a very good idea. (I'll probably do a summer conlaw1 course, and that's a good option for conlaw.) I'm sure the 1Ls will compare notes and try to make some good decisions about what will really be best for them after everyone's had a taste of the first year electives.

Is Professor Althouse like her blog? What do you think, dear reader?

Not having had a first year class last semester, I look forward to meeting some of the 1Ls, even if they are all jaded and broken in. After one semester of law school and one run in with law school exams and grades, the real IL feeling is gone. They're all 2L now. Grades? Mentioning grades draws attention to the fact that I have not finished my grading. Today is not just day two of the semester, it is the day grades are due. I'm well aware of that!