"Foleygate", the cooked-up "scandal" purportedly involving a Republican cover-up of Mark Foley's sexual dalliances with underage Congressional pages, is starting to come apart at the seams.
We are all glad that Foley resigned, and I don't know anyone who feels sorry for him in any way. Even if the incriminating instant messages at the heart of this story were part of a prank, Foley's participation in them was both voluntary and eager. And his immediate resignation signals that he knew he had been doing something wrong. The only thing to Foley's credit is that, unlike Gerry Studds and Mel Reynolds, so far we have no evidence of actual sexual contact between Foley and underage teens.
That being said, let's look at what we know so far. Clarice Feldman at The American Thinker has summed things up nicely:
As time passes, it is increasingly clear that the ABC News report which started the Foley firestorm is odorous—and I’m not talking Chanel.
(1) It dealt with the emails which the FBI and many media organizations considered as innocuous as the Republican leadership did. Who circulated these reports is not yet clear.Foley’s spokesman said his opponent, Mahoney had been shopping the story to the media for some time.
(2) ABC was the first to run with the story which every other media outlet, of the many which had received the email story, had passed on as unsubstantiated and not newsworthy. The only new tag for the story was that Mahoney, Foley’s opponent, called for an investigation, a demand he said was impelled by a report on a newly created, barely trafficked utterly fake website designed solely to hide the source of the emails. How did he happen to come across this website?
(3) The emails on that site, in any event, are themselves demonstrably fake.
(4) Almost simultaneously with the ABC report, C.R.E.W. placed on its blogsite a .pdf file purportedly of the same emails. It has refused to disclose to the FBI their provenance. And an ex-page, Jordan Edmund, later determined to be one of the ex-pages involved in an IM exchange, posted notification of the story on the now removed (but screen saved) page website run by an another ex page, Matthew Loraditch. See post #264 here.)
There is a suggestion, I think, that he’d been anticipating this story. Did Ross, or someone acting with him or on his behalf, have contact with the ex-pages before the initial story ran? Or is this another of the many curious coincidences which surround this story?
(5) Ross reports that overnight after that story ran, he received racier IMs from other ex pages. Loraditch, who ran the page website, was quoted by ABC as saying he’d seen some steamy IMs in which Foley purportedly had been involved. After considerable ducking, ABC has finally admitted that the IMs came not from the ex-pages themselves , but from “other pages”.
Were those other pages Loraditch and Edmunds? And were they alerted by someone to fax them to Ross as soon as the first story ran? If so, why? If not, had they given them—wittingly or not—to third parties who provided them to Ross? Was the second story designed to conflate in the public mind the notion—utterly false—that Hastert had seen them, too? Or was it just to keep the story alive?
Read it all. Feldman fails to mention the likewise demonstrably fake "StopSexPredators" blog that pushed the story to DailyKos at the same time that CREW and ABC were "breaking" the story. There is much more, and as details continue to emerge this story looks less and less beneficial to Democrats.
Speaking of which, it looks like the Democrats' biggest objective of the Foley smear -- driving evangelicals away from the Republicans -- has backfired. If the New York Times is reporting this, things can't be good.
Also, I don't think that the strategy of "outing" gay Republicans or threatening the party with "a list" (remember that guy, Joseph McCarthy? "I have a list...") is going to help things either.
Finally, there are so many hypocrisy angles to this story that it is difficult to count them all. I have written at length about the red carpet treatment given to Gerry Studds by the Democrats twenty years ago. Jonah Goldberg notes the about-face given to women's rights issues and sexual harassment when prominent Democrats are accused. JayTea at Wizbang notes how quickly the Democrats turned on Joe Lieberman for not following their flop-flop on Iraq. And The Hatemongers Quarterly notes that the cult play The Vagina Monologues, long championed by feminists and liberals, includes a scene describing the statutory lesbian rape (um, sorry, sexual awakening) of a 13 year old girl by an older woman who gets the young girl drunk before deflowering her. Was Gerry Studds the inspiration for this story?
Perhaps the Left believes that they can avoid charges of hypocrisy by simply believing in everything (or nothing, depending on your point of view). But the way that they abandon core principles and smash those who question party leadership, all in search of votes, is frightening. If I were gay, and especially if I was gay and thinking about a career in politics, I would keep a vigilant eye on the Democrat party.
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