The Heightening Foley Feeding Frenzy By Patrick J. Buchanan - October 10, 2006 Like the great white shark, a scandal must be fed, or it sinks to the bottom and dies. And the Mark Foley-congressional page scandal has not had a good feeding in 72 hours. On Saturday, the Washington Post revealed that Kirk Fordham, Foleyâs top aide in 2003, concerned about Foleyâs fixation with pages, went to see Scott Palmer, chief of staff to Speaker Hastert. According to Fordham and another source, Palmer, alerted to the Foley problem, confronted him. As Palmer shares an apartment with the speaker, it seems impossible that he and Hastert would not have discussed so volatile an issue. Thus we have a credibility question. For Palmer denies he had any 2003 meeting with Fordham to discuss Foley, or that he held any meeting with Foley himself. The speaker says that not until 2005, when the issue of the âoverly friendlyâ e-mail to a 16-year-old page came up, was he made aware of a Foley problem, and not until the day Foley departed did he know of the salacious instant messages. Yet Majority Leader John Boehner and Rep. Thomas Reynolds have said they alerted Hastert to the gravity of the situation months ago. Clearly, there is either a serious outbreak of Attention Deficit Disorder in the GOP caucus, or someone is lying. Fordham or Palmer, or Palmer and the speaker. While lying to the public is not unusual for politicians, lying to the FBI can get you a reservation at Allenwood. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Fordham is gay. On Saturday, the Post reported that the House clerk who oversaw the page program and was sent by the speakerâs office to admonish Foley in 2005 was also gay. Fordham, Foley and the clerk are now gone. We may be looking at the Little Big Horn of the Log Cabin Club. What, then, are the elements of this multiplex scandal? First, there is the deplorable instant messages of Foley, which all have condemned. Yet if Foley had had sex with pages, rather than write them lurid IMs, he would have violated no law. For under D.C. law, the age of consent has been dropped to 16. And there is no evidence Foley violated that law or had a sexual encounter with a teenage page. How can Democrats credibly denounce a 52-year-old gay man for sending dirty instant messages to a 16-year-old, when Democrats have legalized sex with 16-year-olds in D.C.? Isnât that a mite hypocritical? There are questions as well for the news media. If ABC was concerned about the Foley threat to the pages, why did ABC hold up the story until October? And if the St. Petersburg Times and Miami Herald knew of the first e-mail, and chose not to out Foley, why is Hastert condemned for reaching the same conclusion? In the Baltimore Catechism, detraction is listed as a sin against the Eighth Commandment, âThou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.â Detraction does not mean lying about oneâs neighbor; it means revealing a truth ruinous to the reputation that the listener has no right to hear â i.e., if a woman has had an abortion years ago, one cannot, in good conscience, broadcast that to the public without committing a grave sin. The problem with Washington is that detraction is what modern campaigns are all about: digging up dirt on oneâs opponent and feeding it to a cooperative press. Yet if Hastert and those two newspapers declined to destroy Foley for one indiscreet e-mail, did they not do the better thing? Would it not have caused a storm of outrage against the GOP and speaker if, after one e-mail, they had outed and ruined Foley? Would not the GOP have been fairly charged with a cruel act of homophobia over a single âover-friendlyâ e-mail? There are other questions. As it was a Democrat front group, CREW, that sent the instant messages to the FBI in July, were not Democrats aware Foley was prowling the page dorm, and did they not remain silent, preferring to await the politically propitious moment to release the IMs? Is the Democratic concern for the âchildrenâ genuine, or did they leave the pages vulnerable until they could drop their stink bomb on Foley and the House Republicans five weeks before the election? As of today, this is a Republican scandal. A GOP congressman was responsible for the sordid messages to pages. The House GOP leadership failed to investigate rigorously. And some GOP staff and members may have lied and may have covered up. Any Republican who is proven to have done so should be removed from any position of power. But to have the party of gay rights, many of whose leaders have marched in gay pride parades alongside the pedophiles of NAMBLA, acting âshocked, shockedâ at GOP torpor in outing and ousting its flaming gay member is, to put it mildly, unconvincing.
I must challenge you, or lose my Democratic standing. I have it on good evidence that Hastert himself is gay and pimps Page boys all over D.C. Now to be serious. The one thing I would absolutley disagree with is laying all of the blame on Democrats for the 16 year old legalization in D.C. That's a bi-partisan scandal, yes scandal, that both parties should be ashamed of. Other than that, the author pretty much has it pegged. Now I'm off to watch some FOX news, while listening to Rush, so that I may be further indoctrinated.
This is beginning to look like one of those situations where the media will not be satisfied no matter what Republicans did. Of course, if half the republican leadership resigned, then the NY Times would consider that a good start. Buchanan makes a good point. Democrat liberals who govern the city of Washington made the age of consent 16, so that Foley could have been having sex wth the pages without violating the law. We know that Democrats march in solidarity with NAMBLA, which champions man-boy sex. (Can you even imagine the outrage from the left if a Republican officeholder marched in a parade where a Klan leader was the Marshal?) So what exactly is it that they are so upset about? The possibility that a 17 year old would have gay sex? The possibility that an adult would have sex with a young person who was never the less legal? The stink of hypocrisy is beginning to rise over this manufactured scandal.
I guess hitting on young boys is okay with you... shame shame. Also, the shameless past keeps on posting... I thought we saw the last of his sorry bigoted dirty posts when the markets moved higher. However, he assumes a new alias and gives all those excuses to post his venom. Have some shame and stop posting.
Duplicity from the right. Ever heard of an "ethics committee?" LOL... Congress and the Senate govern themselves dimwit... So are the republicans now saying that because something is legal, then it is okay? Abortion...legal. Blowjobs in the White House...legal. Homosexual sex...legal. Does/did this stop the repugniklans from whining about the above, because it is legal? What a bunch of frigging freaks the repugliklans are... Who is in power? The republicans. Who sets the rule for conduct in the House and Senate? The republicans. What a bunch of dipocrites... The party of family values gonna tell some parents that they won't stand up to a guy like Foley hitting on their children because it is "legal?" Oh man, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic...
Wow... you might have extracted this sentence directly out of an Ann Coulter infomercial I guess something like... what... 1 in 10,000 Democrats would support NAMBLA, right? And apparently, there are one or two Republican men who are interested in having sex with teenage boys. But there's no point in letting the facts get in the way of a mind-numbingly partisan diatribe. I would address the charge that this scandal is 'manufactured', but there seems to be no point. The comment speaks for itself. Anyone who thinks that in this climate, with the right trying with all their might to jam their pseudo-Christian, anti-gay, anti-choice agenda down the throats of Americans, that a revelation of Republican homosexual pedophilia wouldn't be front page news is... well... is an ET right-wing P & R regular.
If Denny Hastert had marched in a "White Pride " parade and the marshal of the parade was a Klan leader, the Democrats and media would have been howling for his head. Nancy Pelosi can march in a gay pride parade with the marshal being a NAMBLA leader and no one is supposed to say anything when she is shocked, shocked, that Foley sent some emails to pages.
If Pelosi marched in that parade and knew that a NAMBLA pedophile was marshal, she's an idiot and deserves your censure. If she didn't know a NAMBLA pedophile was marshal, her staff is incompetent, she's naive, and she still deserves your censure. None of this changes the fact of your post, which indulges in the same sort of broad brush rhetoric that the right (at least the right on these boards) is constantly hammering Democrats for. Don't get me wrong, I see the kind of ridiculous broad brush charges made by the moonbats here, and they're foolish. The last thing you want to do is indulge in the same type of nonsense. Much better to keep your head above the muck. Once again, I find it unhelpful to say that the current scandal is 'manufactured'. I would reiterate - anyone who thinks that in this climate, with the right trying with all their might to jam their pseudo-Christian, anti-gay, anti-choice agenda down the throats of Americans, that a revelation of Republican homosexual pedophilia wouldn't be lead-off news is out of tune with the siren song of Shock TV. It is becoming apparent that a lot of people knew about Foley's predilections and flirting, but I don't blame any of them for taking a wait-and-see attitude. It must be horribly difficult to actually call the guy up and say 'You're becoming a liability and you're making an ass of yourself and everyone knows - you need to back off'. However, they should have known that these days it is very tough to keep this kind of thing secret and that the victim has a lot of incentive to go public.
Hmmm... let's examine this telling paragraph This is a classic bit of doublespeak. Buchanan associates the 'party of gay rights' with pedophilia in a ham-handed attempt to deflect attention away from the current scandal. I highly doubt that 'many' American Democratic 'leaders' have marched with NAMBLA members. Democrats are proclaiming shock that the Republicans, aware that they had a tumescent teeange-page-propositioning man representing them, were unable to corral him, the brokeback mountin' Foley, potentially putting teenage boys in harm's way. This is disingenuous because the Dems would have been equally unable to do anything about it. It is not disingenuous because the Dems are 'the party of gay rights'. Gay rights do not include the right to proposition juvenilles over whom one is in a position of power. Just goes to show that the left aren't the only ones capable of abusing the language.