There are bigger things to get upset about than Mark Foley's behavior

It's outrage overload time. Thanks to Mark Foley, the former six-term Florida congressman and serial flirter with congressional pages, the country has had another outrage to be steamed about. With the airwaves abuzz with the moralizers tut-tutting about Foley's e-mails to House of Representative pages and with legal experts pondering whether his privacy rights have been invaded, the public is being instructed: Get outraged, this is a Big One.

I'll pass, thanks. On a list of current events that should or could rise to the level of collective national outrage, I'd rank the Mark Foley episode about as trivial as any of the other overreported sexcapades involving members of Congress. There was Rep. Wilbur Mills of Arkansas who found relief from the strains of chairing the House Ways and Means Committee by cavorting with Fanne Fox, the fetching Argentine stripper.

His House colleague, Rep. Gerry Studds of Massachusetts, had a consensual affair with a 17-year-old page. And then came Gary Hart, the presidential candidate, who was discovered yachting off to the Caribbean on the good ship Monkey Business with the winsome Donna Rice.

At worst, these were moments of minor character defects that had little negative effect on public policy. No crimes occurred. The Foley case is no different. Yet the same week that the resigned congressman was taking cover and the media concluding that he must be guilty of something or why is he hiding, it was revealed in Bob Woodward's State of Denial that Henry Kissinger was a White House regular counseling George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on how to wage war in Iraq: Stay til you win. He gave that foul advice to Richard Nixon during Vietnam, at a cost of tens of thousands of Vietnamese and American lives. It is costing uncounted Iraqi and American lives now.

If anything is worth a burst of outrage, it ought to be the specter of the vile Henry Kissinger back at the White House peddling his dreams of violent conquest to a president who is as dimwitted about international issues as Richard Nixon was devious.

The revelation passed almost unnoticed. Unsurprisingly so, when it's remembered that much of the establishment media goes along with Mr. Kissinger's projection of himself as the sage elder statesman. With no sense of shame, The Washington Post has long published a monthly 2,000-word Kissinger column, laced with plodding Germanic prose of foreign policy preachments that justify continued American domination of the world.

If the Foley story is about a seduction of pages, what of the actual seductions of congressmen by the predatory Jack Abramoff? The-effects of that sordid tale of bribes, payoffs and deceit was a hundredfold more damaging to American politics than the e-mails of the indiscreet Foley. The full story of the Abramoff hustle has yet to be told. With Congress having little interest in cutting off the money flow from lobbyists, and free golf outings to St. Andrews seen as essential to international understanding, it's improbable that it will be told.

Iraq. Global warming. AIDS. The national debt. Secret prisons. World hunger. School gunplay. Pedophile priests. Illiteracy. Corporate crime. Negative campaigning. Pension failures. Trans fat.

Pick your outrage. Or outrages. Most people have the emotional energy for one or two, and then outrage overload sets in. If you're steamed about Mark Foley, your circuits are about to blow.

[Colman McCarthy teaches peace studies at four universities and three high schools in the Washington area.]

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