I don’t want to spend too much time about the Mark Foley scandal in the United States House of Representatives, involving a resigned representative and his electronic communications of an explicit sexual nature with Congressional male pages. The scandal has been moving with great speed, and its aftermath is still unfolding, all of which could very well impact the 2006 elections in the United States and subsequent government policy decisions in this country and worldwide. There is one point connected to the scandal and its aftermath which I did want to mention here, which I think is worth mentioning for anyone concerned with efforts to promote positive social change. The Republican party, and the right-wing political apparatus in the United States has built and used an impressive media and public relations operations program — which both fosters public perspectives in favor of right-wing views, and also serves as damage control to salve at times where there is a crisis of legitimacy. For a brief time, the well-oiled American right- media machine had been caught utterly dumbfounded and even today it delivers "seemingly dozens of excuses". I point this out because it can illustrate the fact that things can happen very quickly and very suddenly, for which official explanations prove insufficient or perhaps absent entirely. When that happens, those of us who work on offering different perspectives and better explanations of current affairs have to always be at the ready to help people who are looking for different and better answers. You never know when opportunity will knock.
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