This post is going to look like just another Mark Foley story, but his sordid tale is used only for setting up the topic.
Abuse of power is not a partisan condition, merely one in which one party has so much power that the other cannot limit its exercise. When Lord Acton issued his famous dictum, he could easily have had the current political power elite of the United States in mind. They certainly have committed enough sleazy acts while the dominant party to fill a book. In fact, they did!
As I'm sure even your deceased Aunt Matilda knows by now, Rep. Mark Foley had to resign over morals issues. It's a shame that he can't be prosecuted for hypocrisy, for on September 12, 1998, the St. Petersburg Times quoted Foley declaiming about Bill Clinton thusly:
"It's vile," said Rep. Mark Foley, R-West Palm Beach. "It's more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction."
What goes around, comes around, Foley!
The good news for those of us who don't believe that the Bush Administration is divinely blessed enough to walk upon the roiling waters while simultaneously ridding the world of Satan's Agents is that Foley will prove to be only the beginning.
House Majority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) knewaccording to the Washington Post - and did nothing. Nothing, that is, except to block Nancy Pelosi’s investigation resolution.
Rep. Tom Reynolds, who claims that Hastert knew about Foley for months, may have cashed in himself by extorting $100,000 from Foley to keep quiet about the emails.
Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-LA, says that he notified Reynolds, so Reynolds has no way to deny any knowledge anyway. His party operatives are saying privately that he's trying hard to not be the one who goes down for not taking more action concerning Foley.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert originally said that he had learned of the Foley matter only last week, but his staff was told last fall. Are we to believe that the staff wouldn't inform Hastert of a potentially explosive scandal such as this prior to last week?
Male Bovine Excrement! Mr. Foley's interests were so well-known that pages reportedly warned each other to watch out for him. The USA Today editorialized that Hastert's actions regarding Alexander's notification to him of Foley's actions required that "at least once in a while, integrity should trump politics."
As California Democrat Jane Harman puts it, "I gather that basically nothing was done except that Foley was warned," so clearly some authority figure Foley would listen to knew about the emails. There is thus no credible way to believe that Hastert didn't also know back then. We could have someone ask Rep. John Shimkus, R-IL., who heads a panel that oversees the House page program, what Hastert knew and when he knew it. While we are at it, we might well ask him the same question.
Article comments
1 - bob johnson
a person should be who they are,but at the same time you can`t appear to be against the very thing that you are.most reliable journals put homosexuality at around 30% in this country.its hard to nail down because most bi-sexuals don`t consider themselfs gay.if gays could assimilate into society without being ostracised there would be much ado about nothing,but these social conservatives want to dictate to everyone how to live their lives.if a complete history of homosexuality were to be released it would be astounding and the people on the right would vent daily and deny vehemently.homosexuality goes back to the beginning of mankind,as does incest.if you believe the bible that adam and eve were the only people existing and they had children,boy and a girl,its obvious how the rest of us got here.if one is gay they shouldn`t overplay it or underplay it.using my statistics,30% of the u.s. is gay,that means that 30% of the 535 members of congress are gay,that means 160 people in our govt.are gay.so what!just keep it legal and your business.
2 - Nancy
Excellent post, Realist. The most important & salient question is the last: what other evidence of other crimes are the Republicans hiding? This is just the tip of the iceburg, as the author as said above, IF someone can manage to circumvent the incessant lying, posturing, false morality, and towering hyposcrisy of the Republican congress, who apparently have been stonewalling on this and god knows how many other issues & crimes for god knows how long - at least since 2000. There needs to be a mass hanging, at the least. At this point, anybody voting Republican is deliberately & knowingly voting for continuance of corruption, coverups, cronyism, lying, hypocrisy, influence peddling, simony, pederasty, & conspiracy.
3 - Matthew T. Sussman
Hey, I think I see room for another link there, right over .. no wait, that's an ad.
4 - Arch Conservative
Realist you're name is very inappropriate.
The right leaning s posters on here have condemed Foley and anyone who covered up for him.
However one almost never sees the left leaning BC posters taking Democrats to task when they committ crimes or behave inappropriately.
Look at what Nancy just said about people voting GOP
Well what can be said for people voting dem
what about william jefferson taking bribes?
what about sandy berge stealing nat security documents?
what about patrick kennedy drivign drunk on drugs and getting away with it?
What about jim mgreevy
what about cynthia mckiney hitting a capital police officer?
what about haliburton getting no bid contracts under clinton?
what about the dubious campaign financing of hillary clinton, harry reid and other dems?
yeah the dems are angels huh nancy
5 - Nancy
The Dems may be spineless, but at least they don't go around posturing & proclaiming themselves to be the party of Morality and Family Values, all the while engaging in lying, selling their votes to lobbyists, conspiring to steal elections, and engaging in various sexual escapades with underage pages. I'm sure the Dems do all these things, too - the major and telling difference is, they don't pretend they don't, while the Republicans do. The Republicans as of this date have become the party of Seth Pecksniff (look it up if you don't recognize the reference; yes, it's extremely insulting) and Elmer Gantry: posturing hypocrites and pharisees extraordinaire.
6 - Nancy
The Dems may be spineless, but at least they don't go around posturing & proclaiming themselves to be the party of Morality and Family Values, all the while engaging in lying, selling their votes to lobbyists, conspiring to steal elections, and engaging in various sexual escapades with underage pages. I'm sure the Dems do all these things, too - the major and telling difference is, they don't pretend they don't, while the Republicans do. The Republicans as of this date have become the party of Seth Pecksniff (look it up if you don't recognize the reference; yes, it's extremely insulting) and Elmer Gantry: posturing hypocrites and pharisees extraordinaire. And THAT is why the GOP is getting slammed like this.
7 - Dave Nalle
The Dems may be spineless, but at least they don't go around posturing & proclaiming themselves to be the party of Morality and Family Values, all the while engaging in lying, selling their votes to lobbyists, conspiring to steal elections, and engaging in various sexual escapades with underage pages.
Nancy, all of these complaints are just as true of the Dems as of the GOP. Their posturing is just about a different morality - they call it 'social justice', and it's still a set of moral values. And they certainly lie and sell their votes as fast as they can. For every Tom Delay there's a James Trafficant. As for page scandals, the democrats have had theirs too. Ever heard of Dan Crane?
Dave
8 - Nancy
Yeah, but the difference is, the dems haven't been in power all the past 6 years, so there's no one to blame for this mess but the GOP themselves. And I still maintain the Dems don't set themselves up as Elmer Gantry. The party as a whole doesn't go around pontificating that they're better than everyone else, like the GOP does.
9 - Arch Conservative
The party as a whole doesn't go around pontificating that they're better than everyone else, like the GOP does.
Liberals don't claim to be better than everyone else Nancy?
Are you fucking kidding me?
Liberals/Dems promote the idea that it is not appropriate for anyone to make a moral judegment about anyone else. They pretty much accept all of the immoral behavior of people because no one is allowed to judge anyone else. Then when people do make judgments of others and thier actions they get called narow minded or ignorant by libs touting thier own "tolerant of everything and everyone" moral superiority.
Not to mention that the Dem establishment claims to be the party of tolerance and then they have a former klansmen in thier ranks, they have hillary clinton making remarks like "ghandi owned a gas station" joe beiden saying you can't walk into a 7-11 without seeing an indian running it.
You want hypocrisy Nancy? Turn your head to the left.
10 - Dave Nalle
Sometimes Arch actually makes sense. As in #9.
Listen to Air America sometime. The condescension and elitism is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
The basic principle of government as the democrats see it is that government should make choices for people because they're not competent to run their own lives. What could be more elitist than that?
Dave
11 - Nancy
THIS ex-GOP liberal does not believe in not making moral judgements, as a cursory read of any of my postings on any of these blogs will tell you, and I'm not alone in that. You're talking the far-left PC crowd, a pox on them anyway. But I maintain that the GOP AS A GROUP certainly does trumpet their moral superiority, loudly and frequently - that's what the entire GOP platform is: the GOP is the party of family values etc etc. ad nauseam. It ain't the press saying that, & it sure as hell ain't the Dems - it's the GOP. Yeah, they DO; which is why when they are revealed for the two-faced, no-better-than-the-rest-of-us-sinners they are, they get lambasted for it. And we aren't discussing the Dems, anyway: we're talking about Foley & the REPUBLICAN leadership. The Dems were kept out of this deliberately by these same people. Which is what makes it even more amusing & appropriate. In doing so, they saved the Dems a lot of headaches, and hoist themselves with their own petards. Don't you dare insinuate the Dems into this one, Arch: this wallow belongs ENTIRELY to the GOP.
12 - Arch Conservative
No one is trying to blame this Foley fiasco on the Dems Nancy.
It's just that there is a double standard when it comes to republicans and democrats and scandals.
Every time a Republican is caught in a scandal they must resign but every time a democrat is caught in a scandal they are allowed to deny it and blame it on racism, homophobia or a "vast right wing conspiracy," and go on holding office.
I have no problem with Foley and anyone that knew what he was doing and did nothing being pressured to resign.
I do have a problem with Cynthia mckinney hitting a cop and then blaming it on racism and getting away with it because she's a dem.
I have a problem with people asking for trennt lott to resign because of his strom thurmond comments but then saying nothing when joe biden says "you can't walk into a 711 without seeing an indian" or when hillary says "ghandi ran a gas station."
I have a problem with people going after Delay for campaign finance but ignoring all the dems who have committed campaign finance fraud.
So you can bash the GOp all you want nancy. The fact is that mark foley is just one man. He's not the whole party. There are scumbags on both sides of the aisle and always will be but I still assert that the GOP still has a long way to go to catch up the unethical behavior that is being committed on the left.
13 - Nancy
According to his own quotes Weds., Hastert spent a few minutes trying to foist this off onto a "Democratic conspiracy" to hold the info until just before the elections. Then he gave it up until he got on the air with Rush Limbottom & started repeating it again, but since then he's apparently thought better of it & dropped it - again - tho for how long is anybody's guess. If it were a Dem plot, I'd say the timing is bad: I'd have waited until a lot closer to election day, like, say, 2 weeks before, to make sure the issue was really hot while voters went to the polls. By releasing it now, there's every possibility the GOP leadership will be able to delay any findings of that so-called joke, the Congressional Ethics Committee, until AFTER the elections, since 3 of the 4 members are Republicans. Therefore, Dem plot is unlikely. Hastert may as well try to claim it's Clinton's fault. Actually I'm surprised no one has come out with that one yet. Well, give it time....
14 - Arch Conservative
It looks like Hastert took a page out of the Clinton playbook huh Nancy?
When you get caught doing somethign wrong blame it on a conspiracy being carried out by your political opponents.
15 - Nancy
Pffft-! They ALL seem to do that; probably inborn political instinct. How come politicians all seem to be drawn from the most amoral lowlifes whose first instincts seem to be to lie, cheat, & steal? Zoology books really ought to be revised. Instead of amoebas, they should be teaching that politicians are the lowest life forms.
Still, what would I do for entertainment if they didn't exist? *sigh*