The Mark Foley dog and pony show

Anyone who was not living under a rock this past weekend knows that Florida Rep. Mark Foley, a Republican, resigned after ABC News broke a story that Rep. Foley had sent sexually explicit Instant Messages to teenage boys.  Foley entered alcohol rehab today.  (Yes, alcohol rehab.  I just report these things, I don't explain them.)

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Before I continue with this post, I want to say right now, for the record, that I am in no way condoning or dismissing Foley's alleged attempts to troll underage males for sexually explicit talk and possibly hookups.  If these charges are true (and Foley's immediate resignation seems to be a flashing neon sign saying "YES, THEY ARE TRUE") then Rep. Foley should be held accountable for his actions.  If these allegations are true, then Rep Foley is a perverted individual who needs our prayers, but he should not be pardoned or exempted from prosecution.

ADDED: Now Foley is saying that he was molested by a priest.  I guess it's only a matter of time before the obligatory visit to the Oprah show.

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Yet the story goes beyond the perversions of a US House of Representatives Member.  Democrats are now calling for the resignation of the Speaker of the House and an independent counsel investigation into the conduct of the House Republican Leadership -- the same Democrats who remained curiously silent when Rep. Mel Reynolds, one of their own, was convicted in 1995 of 12 counts of sexual assault, obstruction of justice, and solicitation of child pornography in an investigation stemming from accusations that he had sex with a 16 year old campaign worker and then pressured her to lie about it, and was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton.

The reason for all this Democrat grandstanding is that Speaker Hastert was allegedly given copies of emails (that's EMAILS, not INSTANT MESSAGES) that Rep. Foley sent to a 16 year old Congressional page last year.  The emails allegedly "creeped out" the page (in one email, Foley asked the page to send him a photo of himself) and officials sent the emails and a written report to Hastert, asking him to keep an eye on Foley.  Allegedly Speaker Hastert told Rep. Foley to cease contact with the page who had filed the complaint.  The material in these emails was hardly actionable, though, and if this is all the information that Hastert had about Foley then he was right not to push the issue any further.

The charges levied at Rep. Foley by ABC News were supported by copies of Instant Messages obtained by a liberal activist group CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington).  These newer INSTANT MESSAGES -- not the EMAILS sent to Speaker Hastert -- contained the sexually explicit conversations between Rep. Foley and several underage males.  Again, these communications were NOT the emails given to Rep. Hastert last year. (Correction: it appears that some of these IM's were up to three years old.  Who was sitting on them for so long, and allowing Foley to prey on underage boys for all that time?)

But no matter, the Democrats are already tasting blood.  They even have a strategy worked out to take political advantage of this situation.  (And these are the guys who continually accuse President Bush of "politicizing" 9/11?  It is to laugh.)

They are using this situation to do as much damage to the Republican party as possible, and damn the poor kids that Rep. Foley allegedly preyed on.  Who needs them anyway, right?  Let's go straight for the Speaker of the House. 

That in itself is as disgusting as Rep. Foley's alleged behavior.

The Foley incident set off some distant alarm bells inside my head: "Where have I heard this guy's name before.  And haven't gay and liberal blogs been threatening to launch devastating "outing" campaigns against the Republicans?"

My hunch was proved right by Gatewaypundit, who found the site that specifically threatened to out Rep. Foley.   

And I did a little Googling as well, and found this post from post from "Eric's Blog" dated May 2003, Wrestling Alligators:

If Congressman Mark Foley is going to come out of the closet; it seems that he's not going to do it willingly, or gracefully. After a recent report in the New Times Broward-Palm Beach, the Washington Blade picked up the story (guaranteeing that Capitol Queers like me would pick up on it). Suspicious that the Sun-Sentinel would report on the story; Foley decided to head off mainstream media coverage by... calling a press conference!

... FOLEY: "I'm declaring today that I have a right to privacy, like anyone else in this country. The fact that I'm not married has led many people to speculate, but I'm not going to be dragged into the gutter by these rumormongers" (Smith, St. Petersburg Times, 5/23).

Of course this doesn't prove or disprove the veracity of the various emails and IM's that Foley is alleged to have sent, but it further illustrates that Foley has been a target for "outing" for some time.

But what about Speaker Hastert?  Did he do the right thing?  Think about Hastert's dilemma.  If he came down hard on Foley last year, maybe asking him to resign, then Foley would have instantly been turned into a gay rights martyr.  (Don't doubt me on this; even though they were gunning for him, radical gay rights leaders would have cast him as a victim if someone else outed him first, especially a Republican.)  Now, Democrats are saying that Hastert didn't do enough to take down Foley.  It's a lose-lose situation.

And the Democrats themselves are not in the clear on this.  If further investigation shows that Democrat operatives like CREW had access to the sexually explicit IM's that proved Foley was preying on underage boys, and deliberately withheld them in order to create a politically devastating "October Suprise," then they are guilty of breaking the law as well.

In the days of yore, the Democrats could count on the news media to act as an unpaid press release service for them.  But now there are blogs, and behind the blogs is an army of pajama-clad Davids, examining stories like this one and publishing their work online.  If there is more to this story that needs to be reported, blogs will report it.

It's times like these when it's nice to be a blogger.

Macsmind also has a good post about the apparent Democrat feeding frenzy surrounding this story.  WizBang and Michelle Malkin are on this too.

The Wall Street Journal weighs in on the Foley issue this morning, echoing what I wrote last night:

Florida Republican Mark Foley's sexually explicit emails to a Congressional page certainly warranted his resignation from the House, and they may well merit prosecution. But this being five weeks from an election, the GOP House leadership is also being assailed for not having come down more strongly on a gay Congressman for showing a more than friendly interest in underage boys. That's a different issue altogether.

At least this seems to be the essence of the Democratic and media charge against Speaker Dennis Hastert, who admits his office was told months ago about a friendly, non-explicit 2005 email exchange between Mr. Foley and another page. In that exchange, Mr. Foley had asked the teenager "how old are you now" and requested "an email pic."

In our admittedly traditional view, this was odd and suspect behavior, especially because Mr. Foley was well known as a homosexual even if he declined to publicly acknowledge it. And Mr. Hastert was informed that fellow Illinois Republican John Shimkus--who oversees the page program as part of a six-member board--spoke privately with Mr. Foley, who explained that the email was innocent.

What next was Mr. Hastert supposed to do with an elected Congressman? Assume that Mr. Foley was a potential sexual predator and bar him from having any private communication with pages? Refer him to the Ethics Committee? In retrospect, barring contact with pages would have been wise.

But in today's politically correct culture, it's easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert's head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts' decision to ban gay scoutmasters? Where's Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on that one?

As Gateway Pundit explains, "there are 2 issues here:  There is the sexual predator issue that is abominable, and then there is the skunk issue, those that waited with their reports while children were in jeopardy until 6 weeks outside of an election to release their 'news'!"

Again I'll repeat: if, during his investigation, Speaker Hastert possessed copies of the sexually explicit IM's and knew that Foley was a dangerous pederast -- yet failed to take appropriate action -- then he should resign.

But in this day and age, we refer to character assassination without credible proof as "McCarthyism."  Any elected official in a leadership position knows that before they take any action that can be interpreted by the opposition as "McCarthyism," they had better be damn sure that they have enough evidence to present an airtight case.  And without the explicit IM's, Hastert certainly did not have enough evidence to present an airtight, unimpeachable case that Foley was a pederast.

If, as more and more evidence seems to suggest, the Democrats knew that Hastert was investigating Foley and purposefully withheld the explicit IM's in their possession in order to drum up a phony "Hastert didn't do enough" charge, then they should be held responsible for allowing a sexual predator and pederast to continue to prey on teen boys.

Comments

Crew had the I Ms but they immediately forwarded them to the FBI.
The FBI sat on them not Crew. Other republicans have also brought the accusations forward. What democrats are harping on is hypocrisy and stomewalling. It is clear that Hastert knew there was a problelm and did nothing, Do your homework, please.