Alienating the base

In my last post, I wondered how much Foleygate was going to chip away at the Republican base. It now seems that the chipping may become a true chopping. Foley himself may be enough to make the religious base people sit on their hands on election day. But it is looking more and more like he is not wreaking all the havoc on his own. If it is proven that Dennis Hastert et al. are guilty of a Foley coverup, we can expect to hear a very loud crash. Already Richard Viguerie, the grandfather (since 1965) of that conservative superweapon known as Direct Mail, has pronounced his anathema. Listen for the crash, folks.

In the meantime however, we have got a communication problem on our hands. The huge around-the-clock coverage of Foleygate is taking a lot of media space away from Darfur (where genocide is accelerating in the wake of 450,000 killed and 2.5 million driven from their homes), from Iraq (where the insurgents are now attacking US troops four times every hour of every day), from Afghanistan (which is now the biggest illegal drug source in the world) -- and on goes the list.