Tehran, Iran - America is an endless obsession. It is difficult to find an American not passionate about or obsessed with something. Such obsession has been fruitful. It produced jet airplanes, men on the moon, the space shuttle, the microchip, computers, the Internet, skyscrapers, round-the-clock news broadcasts and Hollywood. Let's not forget credit cards and consumer debt, junk mail marketing and Las Vegas. Those certainly required passion.
Its whole legal system, searching for "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" sounds obsessive to me.
As a young, passionate nation, Americans have a unique perspective of sex and politics. There is an awe for sex scandals of a much milder version among America's Anglican cousins but its distant relatives in (northern) Europe do not hold the private sexual behaviour of a politician against him or her. Sex scandal news does not sell as well in Europe and many other parts of Asia and the Middle East.
The most recent sex scandal in Washington is Foley's reportedly criminal involvement with a minor, occurring over the past six years. An observer from abroad sees the sex scandals as a Washington-brewed recipe for "regime change" in American politics. As seen in the Clinton impeachment proceedings, it fed the obsession of otherwise disinterested voters. The sex scandal served as a tool to force a tectonic shift in the control of the Congress. The underlying obsession with such news stories may also explain why Washington is a one-topic town.
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