IF Drudge is right, this is not good.
THe Times, Washington's "Conservative" newspaper would support - -or at least give the benefit of the doubt - to Hastert if they believed the Leadership didn't know about those IM's.
If he was adding value to the conservative cause people would rally to his defense....thats why this could be a big problem for him. Politics just chews up and spits out good people. Term limits our first decry is the only answer.
Do you think there are more IM's/emails to other pages? This says there wEre lots of IM's sent to teenage "pages" ... with an 's'.
Foley's Showdown With ABC
On Friday afternoon, a strategist for Rep. Mark Foley tried to cut a deal with ABC's Brian Ross.
The correspondent, who had dozens of instant messages that Foley sent to teenage House pages, had asked to interview the Florida Republican. Foley's former chief of staff said the congressman was quitting and that Ross could have that information exclusively if he agreed not to publish the raw, sexually explicit messages.
"I said we're not making any deals," Ross recalls. He says the Internet made the story possible, because on Thursday he posted a story on his ABC Web page, the Blotter, after obtaining one milder e-mail that Foley had sent a 16-year-old page, asking for a picture. Within two hours, former pages had e-mailed Ross and provided the salacious messages. The only question then, says Ross, was "whether this could be authenticated."
The St. Petersburg Times last fall obtained the earlier e-mail, asking the 16-year-old for a picture, and interviewed the boy, who wrote a friend that he considered the message "sick." But the boy would not go on the record.
Executive Editor Neil Brown says the paper's policy against making accusations based on unnamed sources was a factor. "We just didn't feel like we had the story," he says. "We had a lot of stuff implied. . . . If I had it to do over again, I think we probably would have been more organized about pursuing it. But hindsight is 20/20."
The paper did interview Foley, who assured a reporter that the e-mail exchange was innocent, Brown says
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100587.html
There's nothing new here. As far back as I can remember, the Dims have ALWAYS tried to come up with something a few weeks before November to give them a boost at the polls. And whatever it is, they can always count on their friends in the media to keep up a constant drumbeat until election day.
Does anybody remember the Cuban missile crisis? JFK knew about the missiles LONG BEFORE October, but he cynically waited until two weeks before the election to reveal what the Communists were up to.
Republican Sen. Kenneth Keating had been warning the country months before that, and he didn't have access to the U-2 spy plane material! Yet Kennedy waited dangerously late, until the last possible moment, to go on TV because he knew the voters would rally behind the president in a crisis and maximize the Democrat vote.
From that time forward, the Dims have continually risked our safety just to get a few more damn votes.