Post-Gazette Editorial – 10/5/06

This page was last updated on October 9, 2006.

The Foley scandal / Hastert and the GOP have a lot of explaining to do; Editorial; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; October 5, 2006.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject editorial.

“Republicans in Congress and elsewhere are agitated -- one might say scandalized -- that Democrats have seized upon the revelations concerning newly resigned Rep. Mark Foley of Florida, to press a political advantage five weeks before the general election. But nobody should be distracted from the real scandal, and that is Mr. Foley’s behavior and how it was allowed to go seriously unchallenged by his party in the person of House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

“As for the politics, what has occurred is a variation of the biblical wisdom that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. In this case, those who have lived by being the party of family values, those who have gone out of their way to court the religious right and suggest that they alone uphold traditional morality, are naturally going to be undone by a scandal that has to do with impropriety involving young congressional pages. At least Monica Lewinsky wasn’t 16 years old.”

[RWC] True. Ms. Lewinsky was 22 years old and fresh out of college. Oh yeah, and President Clinton actually had sex with her, multiple times and in the White House in a room adjoining the Oval Office.

“To be sure, Mr. Foley has not admitted to sexual contacts with the two teenage boys at the center of the scandal. He resigned last week with expressions of regret, but he did not speak directly about the e-mail exchanges once he was confronted with them by ABC News. Since then, Mr. Foley’s lawyer has said the congressman ‘never attempted to have sexual contact with a minor’ and that his behavior was influenced by alcoholism and his own molestation while a child.

“Yet a similar abuse of position and trust lurks in the page scandal as it did with President Clinton’s affair, even if Mr. Foley never touched the boys. For while these messages may have been ambiguous as to what exactly transpired, they were also creepy and very disturbing. These e-mails were more than inappropriate; they were disgraceful.

“Unfortunately, the problem apparently did not disturb Speaker Hastert enough to take any serious action, although Majority Leader John Boehner and New York Rep. Tom Reynolds, who heads the House Republicans’ re-election campaign, both say they told him about it last year. Mr. Hastert says his staff was informed but he wasn’t.

“To be fair to Mr. Hastert, an element of what did he know and when did he know it clouds this scandal. But where does the buck stop with the House leadership? The highly conservative Washington Times, in an editorial calling for Mr. Hastert’s resignation, made a telling and damning point: It said the speaker was either grossly negligent ‘or he deliberately looked the other way in hopes that a brewing scandal would simply blow away.’

“Many Americans will assume the latter -- that the Republican speaker played the politics of cover-up and evasion. They have no reason to believe President Bush, who once again prized loyalty over responsibility and reflexively backed Mr. Hastert, saying, ‘I know that he wants all the facts to come out.’

[RWC] In case you didn’t catch it, “[m]any Americans” includes the PG.

“As it is, the facts already known are pretty damning. They show the self-proclaimed party of traditional values doing little or nothing while those values were being mocked. The facts also paint a picture of gross hypocrisy -- a congressman who pushed legislation against sexual predators who prey on children when he himself had sent messages to minors that make the skin crawl.

“The politics of this sordid mess can easily be decried, but it will be up to the voters in November to demand accountability.”

[RWC] As just about everyone, I find the alleged actions of Mr. Foley pretty disturbing. Given what we know so far, he was right to resign and should have been booted out of Congress if he hadn’t resigned. Beyond this, however, all we have are sound bites and accusations and certainly not enough information to make further judgments, either about Mr. Foley or House leadership. The truth is, I don’t believe anyone knows the full story yet and probably won’t for a while.

I was tempted to do a point-by-point critique of the editorial, but that would make me as bad as the PG. As I already noted, at this time no one has sufficient facts to make the allegations in this editorial or to refute them.