FoleyGate: Quote of the Day

Glenn Greenwald does it again:

If the term "moral degenerate" has any validity and can be fairly applied to anyone, there are few people who merit that term more than Rush Limbaugh. He is the living and breathing embodiment of moral degeneracy, with his countless overlapping sexual affairs, his series of shattered, dissolved marriages, his hedonistic and illegal drug abuse, his jaunts, with fistfulls of Viagra (but no wife), to an impoverished Latin American island renowned for its easy access to underage female prostitutes.

Yet that is who Hastert chose as the High Priest of the Values Voters to whom he made his pilgrimage and from whom he received his benediction. The difference between Rush Limbaugh and Mark Foley, to the extent there is one, is one of hedonistic tastes, not moral level. Rush Limbaugh isn't just tolerated within the party that stands for religious piety and moral strength. He is a leader of it, arguably the leader of its most righteous wing. Is it really all that surprising that a political movement that has chosen a moral degenerate like Rush Limbaugh as one of its most revered and morally respected leaders is not all that bothered by -- and therefore actively harbors -- the Mark Foleys of the world?

And just think, Republican incumbent candidate Heather Wilson (NM-01) is a proud member of that wing of the party (unless it's election time and she's claiming to be "independent"). And she still refuses to urge Hastert to step down. As Wilson said yesterday, she doesn't have enough of the facts yet to take that plunge. She must be hanging with rest of the Bush bunch who have been viewing the trainwrecks they are causing from the artificial safety of a big, fat denial bubble. I don't think any of them have truly gotten it yet -- that their masks have fallen away at last and their house of cards is quivering violently. Meanwhile, voters seem more and more aware that Republican Party hypocrisy is breaking out all over. Even many Republican voters. Is the jig finally up?

I can't help myself. One more quote from that Greenwald piece

We have been barraged with laws, programs, sermons, demagoguery and all sorts of moral demonization from a political movement whose most powerful pundit is a multiple-times-divorced drug addict who flamboyantly cavorts around with a new girlfriend every few months in between Viagra-fueled jaunts to the Dominican Republic. It is a political movement whose legacy will be torture, waterboards, naked, sadomasochistic games in Iraqi dungeons (or, to Rush, "blowing off steam"), with all sorts of varied sleaze and corruption deeply engrained throughout its DNA -- all propped up by a facade of moralism and dependent upon the support of those who have been propagandized into believing that they are voting for the Party of Values and Morals.

Tell it, Glenn.