Hastert Channels OJ
House Speaker Dennis Hastert held a press conference in front of a cemetery today and told America that he will fire anyone on his staff who is found to have covered up Mark Foleys sexual approaches to pages. Hastert, who is roommates with his Chief of Staff, believes his staff handled the Foley situation well but in hindsight could have done a little bit better.
The Speaker of the House claims he met with his staff and concluded they acted appropriately. But he also issued them a warning, "If they did cover something up, then they should not continue to have their jobs." No reporters asked him whether or not his staff held up a mirror at that point.
Hastert believes the House Ethics Committee investigation will get to the bottom of the scandal, but hopefully not all the way to himself.
"But if there is a problem, if there was a cover up, then we should find that out through the investigation process. They'll be under oath and we'll find out. If they did cover something up, then they should not continue to have their jobs. But I didn't think anybody at any time in my office did anything wrong."
Meanwhile, across the country, Arizona Republican Jim Kolbe revealed that a page came to him in 2000 regarding inappropriate messages sent from Foley.
"Some time after leaving the Page program, an individual I had appointed as a Page contacted my office to say he had received e-mails from Rep. Foley that made him uncomfortable. I was not shown the content of the messages and was not told they were sexually explicit. It was my recommendation that this complaint be passed along to Rep. Foley's office and the clerk who supervised the Page program. This was done promptly."
The clerk of the House is Hasterts Chief of Staff. That now makes four people who claim to have told either Hastert or his Chief of Staff about Foleys emails. John Boehner, the Majority leader, Tom Reynolds, the Chair of the NRCC, and the ex-Chief of Staff for Foley and Reynolds, Kirk Fordham. All claim to have told the Speaker or his office last spring or in fall 2005.
Check out the Foley blame chart.
Family Research Council Blames Predatorgate on "Diversity"
The Family Research Council, the same organization that brought you the "war on porn" and pushed hard for the Clinton impeachment debacle, is now blaming the folly of Mark Foley on - what else? - the cutlural influences of liberals. When you can't blame a Clinton, it's the old conservative standby.
Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins released the following statement:
"We are all shocked by this spectacle of aberrant sexual behavior, but we shouldn't be. This is the end result of a society that rejects sexual restraints in the name of diversity. When a 16-year-old boy is not safe from sexual solicitation from an elected representative of the people, we should question the moral direction of our nation. If our children aren't safe in the halls of Congress, where are they safe? Maybe it's time to question: when is tolerance just an excuse for permissiveness?
"Both political parties need to be more serious about protecting children from sexual predators. We need public policy in our country that protects marriage, respects parental authority and aggressively polices boundaries around our children."
Who exactly, besides NAMBLA, hardly an organization with much political clout, is pushing for a rejection of sexual restraints in the name of diversity? What does it even have to do with diversity? The landmark Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which is the best I can decipher Perkins' words to imply, had nothing at all to do with diversity, but was about privacy and the what the scope of government can be in people's personal lives. Which, by the way, has been a staple cause of libertarian-influenced conservatives since time immemorial.
Crooks and Liars has a different take on what the real problem is with the entire Foley scandal, however:
Many on the right are starting to turn this into a gay issue. This is a gay issue. What is at issue here is the fact that a gay man in the United States of America can not be open about his sexuality in the year 2006. Having to hide his chosen life style is what causes someone to sink to the low and possibly criminal levels that Foley did. If Foley could have been openly gay and possibly even had a companion in life then we very well may not be having this discussion today.
Tough to say - being gay does not equate with pedophilia, which is a fallacy that Christian conservative groups have been pushing for decades. So even if Foley had been out of the closet the result may have been the same - repressed pedophilia manifesting itself in creepy IM conversations. However, the fact that so many conservatives have been fixating on the gay aspect of this rather than the pedophilia aspect suggests that homosexual advocates still have a long way to go before openly gay politicians can expect to be accepted. Will and Grace can only accomplish so much.