Essentially, the only thing that is being disputed is whether the pages were warned or not.
There appears to be no dispute over the fact that Foley sent sexually explicit messages to the page in question. What he did remains inappropriate and disgusting (to say the least).
Doesn't it say that "the Page" in question wasn't a page when he was contacted by Foley?
Let's follow this logically if this happened three years ago and after this young man was a page, and the young man in question is 22 years old today, he had to be nineteen when it happened?
The Sixteen year old number comes from when he was allowed to be a page, not when he stopped being a page but when he could become a page.
The lie here is one of omission, the media isn't telling us how old he was when he recieved the "IMs" or the e-mails, only that pages start at 16 years old.
Although this seems to clear up the question of whether the IMs were sent to a person while they were a page or not -- it looks like the IMs were sent to a person who had completed serving as a page.
Which means it's back to being an old gay guy hitting on a young man -- For all we know, the young man was actually 18 at the time.
Still glad he's gone, but it's hard to see how the republicans could be expected to "punish" someone for IMs they didn't know about sent to people who were not working for the House and who did not complain to anybody.
Did he cop to sending the messages to 'the page in question,' or to 'a person who used to be a page, who gave him his email and IM ID when he left the program?'
It's still creepy, but a whole different ball of wax if Foley was trolling 'of age' young men who were responding to his overtures.
I don't like the current ideas of what is acceptable behavior among consenting 'adults,' but that's what society is today...