"Would Americans really be so superficial?"

In the magazine THE WEEK, there's a regular feature called "How they see us," in which press opinion from around the world regarding some aspect of the American scene is pithily anthologized. In the October 30 issue, the subject is the Foley scandal, and the little anthology closes with this paragraph regarding what was said by the Spanish newspaper EL PAIS:

Would the American really be so superficial, asked Spain's EL PAIS in an editorial. Given the massive failures of this administration, "from the invasion of Iraq, with its disastrous human and economic effects, to the mismanagement of the hurricane Katrina crisis," it should be a foregone conclusion that the party that enabled and abetted Bush should be punished at the polls. Yet most commentators seem to believe that only the Foley scandal has tipped public opinion definitively away from Bush's Republicans. No further evidence is needed that "the tradition of democracy in America' is in decline.

So what is the story here about Americans? It does seem as though those commentators are right, that it's the Foley scandal that's changed the dynamic of public opinion. What does it mean that Bush's poll numbers were gradually climbing back while he's been twisting arms in Congress to give him the right to torture and to give him all those powers that our Founding Fathers put habeus corpus and a half-dozen amendments into the Constitution to prevent any president from exercising. It does seem as though --before the Foley scandal broke-- the tide was slowly turning the Republicans way, while the Bushites were telling one DEMONSTRABLE lie after another, and while their blunders were making an ever more dangerous mess of the world.

And then comes this tawdry business of the Republican who has the hots for the young male pages, and the leadership that kept it all under cover to protect their power rather than to protect the young men or the values of decency about which they've made a big show of their supposed devotion all these years.

Yes, it's a juicy scandal, and the cover-up is especially important for what it reveals about the utter hypocrisy of the Republicans, about how power is really their only true value.

So I don't think it's so terrible that the American people respond with revulsion to this Foley scandal.

But why did it take this scandal, with its sexual dimension, to get the people's attention? Why wasn't it enough, for so many Americans, that these Bushites are visibly assaulting the Constitution that defines what this country stands for, that they have our friends around the world to recoil with revulsion from this Bushite America, that they lie about everything, that they are quickly creating the very kind of unchecked and unprincipled power against which this country stood in opposition?

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