The Congressional Chicken Coop

And the foxes just keep taking more chickens

In American Prospect Online there is a great post written by Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect. ( The Same Old Song ) It originally appeared in The Boston Globe. Kuttner makes the case that the Foley scandal is indicative of a larger phenomena in the GOP:

Mark Foley was chairman of a House caucus on missing and exploited children. This was a party that literally put a pedophile in charge of pedophilia.

Does that have a vaguely familiar ring? It should. It’s the same party that put the oil companies in charge of energy policy, and invited the drug and insurance industries to write the Medicare prescription bill for their own maximum profit. As investigations have revealed, it put lobbyists for polluting industries in charge of environmental protection. So there is a consistent theme here of the fox guarding the chicken coop.

He points out that the foxes need help in gaining control of the chickens:

The Cheney-Bush-Karl Rove governing coalition has always been an uneasy alliance between Wall Street elites, who benefit from the financial foxes lusting after the economic chickens, and social conservatives who have a genuine concern for families and traditional morality. There are just not enough votes of multimillionaires and K-Street lobbyists to keep the coalition in power, so the party depends heavily on its social base.

Until the Foley scandal, the Bushies have been able to keep the social conservatives fooled about their real priorities. It's the Democrats' duty to enable the Republican religious base to see how they have been cynically exploited. After all, the GOP leadership was willing to sacrifice 16-year-boys under their care to keep the chickens coming for the foxes. It's time to put someone else in charge of the hen house!