Posted on 10/02/2006 7:27:43 PM PDT by Ooh-Ah
Yesterday I outlined the peculiar and suspicious genesis of the Foley matter which is the Dem-Media’s scandal of the day.
Now Speaker Hastert has asked for an investigation by the Department of Justice, while Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is asking for a House Ethics Committee investigation to find out what the Republican House leadership knew and when they knew it. (Not very original is it?)
She’s insisting the Republican leadership be placed under oath, and suggesting that by failing to act earlier they endangered children.
I think there should be an investigation, but the subject of it should not be the Republican leadership which—like the newspaper which had the comparatively mild emails between Foley and a former page — could not investigate further because the parents of the 16 year old who had initiated the correspondence wanted to protect his privacy. These emails, which led to a warning to pages to keep a certain distance from Foley, were of a far different character than the explicit IM messages, which were only revealed to the House leadership after appearing in the press.
Once the House leadership was appraised of the incriminating messages, Foley was in effect cashiered out.
The important matter requiring investigation is how a recently-created anonymous blogger got the email correspondence which the boy’s parents had insisted be kept quiet. And how the blog site, which had virtually no posts and no traffic suddenly caught the attention of Foley’s opponent who immediately asked for an investigation.
How it is that ABC ran with a story based on this blog when a year earlier even the BDS-afflicted Daily Kos rejected as improbable the story that Foley was a predatory troller of interns.
Is it at all believable that overnight after ABC broadcast and published the innocuous email correspondence it was suddenly sent years-old, salacious Instant Messages purportedly between Foley and men (ages and identities not disclosed)? Why were these IM messages ready to be sent off and published at a moment’s notice?
Is it believable that Brian Ross, who has written so many stories that didn’t hold up—including his insistent claim that Speaker Hastert was under DoJ investigation in the face of vehement denials from both Hastert and the DoJ—would write a fair account of the incident?
Is it believable that Soros’ C.R.E.W. did not share the email correspondence it had with ABC, and time the release of them and the announcement that they had forwarded them to the FBI for investigation, to coincide with the ABC story? The IM’s carried the far more salacious content, and their provenance is still murky. When and how did C.R.E.W. come into possession of the IM’s, and when did they contact the FBI?
The timing of the two-step release is critical to the political efficaciousness of the operation. The public is being led to conflate the different sets of correspondence (mildly inappropriate emails versus salacious IM messages), leading most people to believe the sexually explicit stuff was what Hastert had seen.
All that the House leadership saw was “overly friendly” emails. No smoking gun, but cause for concern. Had the leadership done more at the time, it might well have been accused of launching a witch hunt on the flimsy basis of too-friendly emails. This is perfect bait for Democrats anxious to portray Republicans as prudes obsessed with homosexuality and willing to launch attacks on anyone even remotely suspected of deviating from their uptight norms. Imagine the Saturday Night Live skits.
Keep in mind that Democrat Rep. Gerry Studds was re-elected five times to the House after acknowledging a sexual relationship with a male page who was a minor, receiving a censure from the House (not expulsion, as was demanded by Newt Gingrich, but voted down by the Democrat majority). The Democrats did not demand his resignation for conduct far more serious than the emails seen by the GOP leadership, and even the salacious IM’s.
Note that this 2-step pattern of conflation is similar to what we saw in the Plame case, where Joseph Wilson was interviewed as an anonymous source for 2 stories which made very sensational charges. He then wrote a far more muted Op Ed for the New York Times. The result was that everyone read the three pieces together, lending weight and audience to the sensationalism of the anonymously-sourced material, and allowing Wilson later to deny what had only appeared under cover of anonymity.
Can you conceive of why the leadership would have deliberately sat on something scandalous like the IM messages in 2005, knowing it could break in the following election year? I can’t. But unless you pay very close attention to press reports, that is the impression you get from the media coverage.
On the other hand, given all the circumstances I can easily see that people who are power hungry could have come into possession of salacious correspondence which might affect the Republican leadership’s decision not to act against a member on the basis of all they had—simply “overly friendly” correspondence—and hold it to make it public five weeks prior to the election. If this scenario is true, we have a most amateurishly implausible route, via an anonymous blog, taken to launder the information chain, and hide the fact that it was they, not their opponents, who cared not at all for the welfare of the pages and interns on the Hill.
Think that’s harsh?
Consider this helpful summary from Gateway Pundit when deciding which party has demonstrated a greater concern for protecting the young people who work in the Capitol:
Representative Foley did not have sex with the minor, did not have sex with the young man in the Oval office, did not put him in a high level security position he was not qualified to handle after a major terrorist attack on the country, was not married at the time, did not run a prostitution ring from his apartment, did not turn his back on Congress when he was accused of having sex with a minor, did not run and get re-elected several times in a democratic stronghold after this news broke, Representative Foley no longer sits in Congress, and the page did not disappear and end up dead after an ongoing relationship with Representative Foley…
For those concerned “quite rightly” about the mud slinging that has begun and will continue for the weeks leading up to the election, I have a very good suggestion:
Stop listening to the news. It’s going to be all trash. The Democrats know that you will not vote for a party with no program and no probity if you think about it, so they and their media enablers will be running round the clock smoke and mirror sideshows to distract you from thinking rationally.
Or you can ignore me, and fall for such dubious smears. In which case you can count on every election for the rest of your life getting sleazier and sleazier until only a handful of diehards will bother to vote. Oh, and if you stay home from the polls this time, Nancy Pelosi will be third in line of succession to the Presidency.
Clarice Feldman is an attorney in Washington, DC and a frequent contributor to American Thinker.
To sum it up: The DEMS play dirty and the Repubs are too dumb to wake up to that fact. They should have dealt with the 'Foley Problem' back when they FIRST got a hint of a double life. It should have been dealt with via a quiet, private meeting in which Mr. Foley decided he needed to 'pursue other private interets' and no longer had time to serve in Congress. And they (the Repubs) should have told him that if he opened his trap his balls would be busted for real. But the Repubs are always too nice. Makes me sick and I'm a Republican!
I have no doubt that is true. But, does do you really think that anyone cares much about how a political party played an issue for political gain compared to the underlying issue? Maybe they do. Maybe the people will rise up in arms about how, the poor GOP, yeah they had a homosexual pedophile in their ranks, but gee, they democrats played it beautifully. Let's get angry at the democrats!.
Sorry, I don't think it will work that way. I think the GOP screwed the pooch, and living in denial of that does not help us save the congress.
My dream, Pelosi is handcuffed and dragged out of senate for not reporting info on an active pedophile. That would be sweeeet.
Any body hear if Barny Frank has any comments?
As much as it stinks, there is zero chance of making this a crime. This is politics. People time their opponents bad news to correspond with elections. It simply won't happen. All having a full investigation will do is drag this thing out for the next five weeks, keeping the GOP off of whatever message it might come up with. And besides, we might not like the answers to the questions.
Yes, I think people would care that partisan hacks withheld information that could have protected others from falling prey to Foley. I think people would care about predator-enablers, especially ones who did so for calculated political gain instead of, say, fear of retribution.
And you think they care enought that it is worth making a story of a homosexual pedophile GOP congressmen (which the leadership MAY have known about) a front page story between now and the election?
So, you're going to convict someone before you have any certifiable evidence on the grounds that he has not made explicit denials. How sad to think that people like you sit on juries. That is really scary.
Try reading Hastert's statement. He knew of the original complaint from the page and his parent about over friendly emails. It was looked into, and the parents declined further investigation, Foley was spoken to and warned. End of story. But not for Moss Jennings (the guy who originally outed Foley, following the Clinton impeachment, and also took a lead on the push for the Valerie Plame investigation, as well as a lot of other sleazy partisan acts), who made the sure the story got sent to a couple Florida papers. Still, it wasn't enough, not until another anonymous source appeared on some newly created web site. It's all just too pat. Sure the guys a creep, but it's not against the law to be a creep. There are a whole lot of creeps in politics.
Good one! Thanks
I don't disagree.
But I think that after Foley goes to jail (a disgraced retirement is more likely)... I want the names of whoever played this dirty trick. Because that is also a part of this debacle.
POLITICAL DIRTY TRICKS. And I think that the Dems have more to lose than us if those tricks are revealed.
This is the type of sh!t that the Dems and their MSM apologists claimed was enough to warrant bringing down Nixon.
The means to find out who did this is within our grasp.
So let's have it.
You are saying that people will want to slam the GOP on the basis they "may" have known. So, what makes you think they wouldn't slam the Dems for knowing? The big issue here is the Dems trying to smear the GOP by saying they knew, and instead, that is blowing back right on to them in the "who knew" battle.
If you are maintaining that people will hold those who knew and failed to act accountable, you must hold that if it turns to in fact be the DEMS, then consequences will follow.
Did Foley think it was a page or a former page? It does matter because if most pages are 16-17 years old, this former page could be 18 years old. That would make it a private matter between consenting adults. Obviously something's not right here because Foley's resignation and skulking off to rehab suggests he did SOMETHING wrong but I don't know that we have the whole story yet and playing fast and loose with evidence does little tho further the investigation.
Cindie
Mature voters will discern between those with and without character, regardless their party affiliations.
Even the youngest voters grew up during the reign of IMPOTUS and are able to discern the differences in character between the two parties.
Those who don't so discern, are part of a much larger political problem which begins with respect of legitimate authority. Solving that problem IMHO, isn't as simple as an election year campaign operational art, but is likely to be a more pressing problem for future generations of Americans.
Considering the political party of Barney Franks, the Kennedy Klan, The Klintoon Kapers and San Francisco city government is rather associated with perverse sexual behavior, the charges by the Democratic socialists are merely the pot calling the kettle black.
Methinks there is something deeper/ulterior involved here such as an attempt to influence Internet monitoring or government control of free speech over the Internet.
No, I am not going to convict him of anything. We are not a jury with the power to put him in jail, therefore we do not have to follow the rules of evidence. So your comment about sitting on juries is totally irrelevent.
In any event, and I don't mean to be rude, I think that your passions are seriously affecting your ability to think logically on this issue. I don't want the GOP to lose the house either. I do not, however, see the benefit in living in denial. EVEN HASTERT SAYS HE DID THIS. Would you say to Hastert "how sad that people like you sit on juries"? Please, just answer that. Hastert, like I, does not doubt that Foley did this. Are you mad at Hastert, too?
I don't know, but that wouldn't change my personal view of him very much.
I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. What I meant by that is that we might not like the results of the investigation. It may turn out that they did in fact know.
That is really scary. You mean these same people that claim that the gov't can't monitor suspected Al Qaeda calls, can just spy on anyone that they want?
This really offends me, because I have been the victim of someone spying on my communications for about a year, and it is really spooky. They have disabled two different virus protections and dismantled my firewalls. I first noticed something was strange when old emails from my home computer started showing up as text messages on my cell phone, and the next day, the emails to and from my husband's work computer started showing up on my phone as well. After that, every time I shut down my computer, I got the message that other people were logged on.
to read later
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