A group of Republican members of Congress, with family and staff members, took a trip to Israel, not at taxpayer expense. Ho-hum. During the trip, several of them went swimming in the Sea of Galilee. Yawn. One of the Congressman did so without a bathing suit. Sound the alarm! Censure by the Republican House leadership! Investigation by the FBI! :eek:
:rolleyes:
News story. Another news account.
Why the bloody fuck is this news? And why was one moment of one FBI special agent’s time wasted investigating something that (1) may not be a crime at all, (2) if it is one, it’s an exceedingly minor one, (3) “committed” IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY!?!
IMHO, the reason this story exists is because the dip was in the Sea of Galilee. Would it be any kind of news if a Congressman went skinny-dipping late at night, even in a gender-mixed group, in some backwoods lake in the States? I seriously doubt it. Isn’t skinny-dipping seen – in red states as well as blue ones – as a common rural pastime, an innocent youthful “good old days” activity?!
No, this is news because this guy sullied a “sacred” lake in Israel. Well, I’ve got a newsflash, too: Israel isn’t some frozen-in-time Biblical theme park, nor is it all one big church (or synagogue, mosque, etc.). :rolleyes: It’s a modern country with cars, and trains, and electric lights, and television, and the Internet and all that. People live there, and they work there, and they drink booze there, and they (gasp!) fuck there. More to the point, the Sea of Galilee is a major source of drinking water and a resort area. Cite. It’s no more sacred than Lake Michigan or the Croton Reservoir, and I’m quite certain even without specific evidence 
that this Congressman wasn’t the first or last person to go swimming in the Sea of Galilee without bothering to change into a bathing suit. 
Is skinny-dipping even a crime is Israel under these circumstances? To clarify that question for the Republican congressional “leadership”, who seem to need the clarification, I mean under Israeli law, the legislatively-adopted legal code of a modern republic, not the Biblical law of the ancient Israelites. :rolleyes:
The news stories discuss how congressional leadership is wary of scandal. It seems to me that they’ve made any scandal here by blowing a molehill up to Evererst-ian proportions and more specifically by involving the FBI. IMHO, people aren’t shocked by the tale of the skinny-dipping Congressman, they’re alternately laughing at the prudishness and apparent religious fervor of congressional “leadership” and cringing at the waste of public resources on an FBI investigation.
