October 4, 2006
Still looking for the perfect cover
The Republican Party is having quite a time trying to keep their house in order in the wake of former Florida Representative Mark Foley’s scandalous resignation. Foley stepped down after his online sex chats with teenage boys became public and apparently a number of high ranking Republicans had prior knowledge that something was up with Foley but looked the other way instead of dealing with the problem right away. Now every conservative in Washington is wildly pointing fingers at anyone who moves hoping to find a scapegoat and come out a winner in the blame game.
With all the constantly changing stories, convenient cases of amnesia and new revelations about who knew what and told it to who when it’s hard to keep the story straight. The following is a summation of what is clear:
- Foley has had creepy pedophilesque relationships with teenage House Pages going back a number of years.
- Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA) got a copy of a troubling e-mail Foley sent to a page from his district in the fall of 2005. The content of this message isn’t quite pornographic, but it shows some tendencies Internet safety experts tell people to watch for in online sexual predators.
- The staff of House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) is informed about this message, but little or nothing is done.
- Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., chairman of the Page Board, is informed around this time. Instead of telling the other members of his board about the issue, he keeps things quiet and conducts a thorough investigation himself. This investigation seems to consist solely of asking Foley about the issue and believing him when he said it was nothing.
- In the spring of this year Alexander tells Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-N.Y., chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) about the e-mail.
- Reynolds makes sure Hastert is told of the e-mail, but Foley is considered a solid bet to retain his seat this fall and neither man takes any action or apparently even bothers to read the e-mail. (I guess that shouldn’t surprise since so few members of Congress bother to read the bills they vote on.)
Now that Foley’s actions are common knowledge all the powerful people involved are evolving their tales of the past, moving forward not backward, upward not forward and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards the freedom of blaming someone else. Of course all that spinning is bound to make them dizzy and it’s starting to show as everyone’s story contradict’s everyone else’s.
The way I see the situation, it’s somewhat simple. Alexander, Hastert, Boehner, Shimkus and Reynolds all knew Foley was a potential danger to young boys and a huge liability to their political party and its trumped up morally superior reputation. None of them did anything significant to deal with the situation and take action against a potential pedophile. Maybe their actions were not criminal, but they could certainly be accused of looking the other way while Foley stalked young boys.
Now they are all playing at passing the buck and hoping it stops in someone else’s lap. Their cover-ups include the concept of not reading the e-mail, being unaware of the more salacious chat sessions, being told by other people that the problem was taken care of and other nonsense. Those stories only paint pictures of lazy, uninterested and uncaring politicians. It obviously wouldn’t have been too big a task to investigate as the chat session transcripts have surfaced quickly and in abundance.
Now the party is beginning to distance itself from Hastert and even conservatives are calling for him to step down as leader. He certainly has proven to be ineffective at wrangling his party’s skeletons and that is a key job for any political leader. Foley is busy blaming his problem on alcoholism, being the victim of sexual abuse as a teen himself and revealing a not so tightly held secret by coming out of the closet.
This whole mess would have been nothing but an interesting news blip had it been dealt with when The Republican leadership first learned of Foley’s issues. Instead, their choice to try to keep things hidden is making them the center of the scandal. This could have been about exposing one bad egg among the Republican caucus, but now it’s all about how the party leadership’s values place political power and partisanship far above protecting children and doing what is right.