Posted on 10/04/2006 7:11:56 PM PDT by SolidSupplySide
North Carolina Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry called on Democratic leaders yesterday to testify under oath about when they knew of former Rep. Mark Foleys (R-Fla.) Internet communications with a House page.
Writing to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Chairman Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), McHenry questioned whether Democrats had a role in publicizing the e-mails, which broke in the middle of the fall election season creating a furor rarely seen in congressional politics.
Is the American public to believe that neither of you nor your staffs nor anyone associated with your staffs had prior knowledge or involvement with the release of Foleys e-mails and/or explicit instant messages? Is the American public to believe that ABC News stumbled haphazardly on this story without Democratic assistance? wrote McHenry, a freshman Republican who has emerged as an attack dog for the GOP.
He asked that Pelosi and Emanuel offer a yes or no answer as to whether they would go under oath to assure the American people that neither you nor your staffs had prior knowledge or involvement at the strategic or tactical levels with the release of Foleys e-mails and/or instant messages.
Spokespeople for Pelosi and the DCCC dismissed McHenrys demand as political posturing.
Republicans just dont get it; every mother in America is asking how Republicans could choose partisan politics over protecting kids, and the Republicans are asking who could have blown their cover-up, said Pelosi spokeswoman Jennifer Crider. If we had seen Mark Foleys horrific e-mails or instant messages, we would have immediately acted to protect these kids.
DCCC spokeswoman Sarah Feinberg said, Of course we did not have the e-mails or instant messages. Give me a break. If you recall, they also blamed us for indicting [former Majority Leader Tom DeLay [R-Texas]. Speaker Hastert and his staff have known about Foleys inappropriate behavior for years and their attempt to deflect their responsibility is absurd.
A handful of House Republicans have admitted that they knew about the original Foley e-mails in late 2005. In those e-mails, Foley asked a male House page for a picture of himself but was not overtly sexual. No member of Congress or congressional staff member has admitted to knowing about the more explicit series of instant messages that surfaced Friday and led to Foleys resignation.
Pelosi dismissed speculation that Democratic leadership knew about the e-mails prior to Thursday, when ABC News broke the story in the media.
Its absolutely not true, she said. The e-mails appeared on a blog, stopsexpredators.blogspot.com, earlier in September.
Democrats have called for a full investigation of when the Republican leadership was notified of the e-mails and what action they took, suggesting Republican leaders had covered up the e-mails to avoid political repercussions in a tough election cycle.
As the scandal ballooned this week, several House Republicans sought to gain control of the media frenzy by questioning whether Democrats themselves knew about the emails and had sought to use them to political advantage by waiting until just before the elections to give them to the news media.
Although political observers agree that the timing of the story could not have been better, ABC News reporter Brian Ross told The New York Times on Tuesday that his source was a Republican.
I hate to give up sources, but to the extent that I know the political parties of any of the people who helped us, it would be the same party, Ross said.
ABC News investigative producer Maddy Sauer worked on the story with Ross.
They were passed to a colleague of mine from a source, not someone from a Democratic campaign, a source on the Hill, Sauer told Democracy Now Tuesday.
At least two other news organizations, The Miami Herald and The St. Petersburg Times, knew of the email exchange but opted not to publish it.
Still, Republican operatives point out that an ethics watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) had a copy of the emails as early as July 21 and passed them on to the FBI. They note that several of CREWs staff members previously worked on Capitol Hill for Democrats.
But a spokeswoman for CREW, Naomi Seligman Steiner, told The Hill Tuesday that the group did not pass the emails to any other entity and was not the source of the ABC News story.
"Blame Foley for being a predator. And move on... No one else SHOULD be blamed"
EXACTLY WRONG......
We should RAM this thing back down the Democrats throats.
They have HANDED us a historic opportunity, and a SURE winner campaign issue:
GAYS
We should THANK them for exposing the shenanigans of Foley, and ask why they waited so long to tell us....
We should also THANK THEM for reminding Americans that many gays are PREDATORS, and gays should NEVER be allowed to hold positions of public trust, like teaching children, or sitting in public office....
We should remind EVERYONE that being a child predator while DEMOCRAT is simply not a crime to many people, while being one while REPUBLICAN is....
In short, I believe we have the chance to set the "Cause" of Gay Rights (and Democrats) back 20 years, and WIN AN ELECTION if we play this smartly.....
"I don't like that kind of thinking at all."
Welcome to life in the PC world....
We now have the opportunity to turn that BS on it's head, but we must do it FAST....
The Democrats have handed us a truly historic gift, and if we atteck them NOW, we win 2006....
Finally someone with a pair.
Yeah...no...the problem is that's what we always do and the Dems and MSM know that. That's why they're able to blurr the difference between emails and IMs. That's why they're able to take statements out of context and mischaracterize them.
No, I think it's about time we turned and fought. I don't subscribe to cut and run whether it's in Iraq or here. I'm tired of it and the best way to beat Democrats is to b!tch-slap Democrats.
This thread was started by someone who did little more than quote talking points and had no facts in which to back them up. He was proven to be a fool and now he doesn't respond. And that's because we didn't just move on.
We have always stood up in these little fights over issues that are not important. And every time we stand up someone says "It is about time we stand up". It mobilizes our base but turns away the majority of the country that are not GOP or Democratic partisans.
It's a trick we fall for over and over...and then a Wrestler is elected governor.
Really???? I don't think even a majority of Americans share your views, let alone most in our party.
What you are saying is a good way to mobilie a small core base and mobilize them strongly. But it will turn more people away....
Hook them up to a polygraph while we have them sitting still.
Or a slimeball from Arkansas becomes President..........
Beebe?? :0
Though that is correct. We bog ourselves down with these stupid issues and someone comes out of nowhere and snatches power away...
If the FBI was aware of the emails and did not elect to pursue anything, what was the Republican leadership to do? Well, yeah they could have attacked Foley and demanded that he so, despite the fact that he didn't break any laws in the emails. Yup...the GOP could have told a gay man to leave office because he's queer....yeah....that would have been a real smart move. Which is exactly the Catch 22 the Dims are trying to box the GOP into....and you are essentially endorsing that Catch 22 aren't you?
I'll leae this - but there were rumors Foley thought about not running for re-election. I wish, if this was true, for thee would be no issue now and his district would be safe GOP. He stayed in for his own gain at the sacrfice of his district and his party.
Well said....why does government have to be involved in this at all? Aren't parents able to intercede for their children anymore? The emails were not sexual at all....perhaps a little too familiar to a degree, but clearly something better handled by a parent to the email sender than tossing such nonsense to an already overextended law enforcement agency.
It's a trick we fall for over and over...and then a Wrestler is elected governor.
The Wrestler only gets elected when there's a third-party candidate. Same with the yahoo from Arkansas and his wife. The GOP has controlled Congress since the '94 elections.
Your position has no foundation.
The GOP base is much stronger and more numerous than the Democratic base. The MSM simply doesn't tell us about it. And the concept of the "undecided voter" en masse is a myth, a myth brought to us by the MSM to goad the GOP into believing it has to cowtow to those with more liberal positions. And you've bought into it.
Now now now...you are tossing facts into a Dim strategy....
I knew that! That'll teach me to try and do too many things at once. :>)
Its like no one has heard of the First Rule of Holes.
The First Rule of Holes says when you're in a hole, stop digging.
Let this thing die a natural death. It should have run it's course by no later than yesterday. But Republicans keep finding excellent ways to keep it in the news.
EXACTLY!!!
I couldn't agree more.....
I think this Rep. Rep. should pursue this like a starving dog after a bone and publish everything he finds. Nancy Baloney's posturing simply tells me that she's in it up to her most recent face lift.
From what I read, the level of what was said to pages was under represented and the real level of what was happening caught them off guard.
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