by hilzoy
From theAP:
“A senior congressional aide said Wednesday he told House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office about worrisome conduct by Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record) toward teenage pages more than three years ago, long before officials have acknowledged becoming aware of the issue. (…)
Fordham said he was serving as Foley’s chief of staff when he was told about the lawmaker’s inappropriate behavior toward pages more than three years ago. He said he had “more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene” at the time.”
Well, well, well. As Josh Marshall notes, if this is true, then the House leadership has been flat-out lying about this. We shall see.
Josh also writes:
“There have been a number of signals through the course of the day that the last gambit of the GOP House leadership will be to blame the Foley debacle on a cabal of gay staffers who hid and/or enabled Rep. Foley’s behavior for years. The idea being that they are to blame rather than the leadership.
That may sound like a plot turn out of a bad novel. But with the times we’re living in I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.
Fordham, the staffer who just turned on Hastert, is openly gay, as is at least one other central player in the drama. Fordham’s word now threatens to take down the whole House leadership. So they’re going to throw everything at him.”
This could be about to get very, very ugly. It’s not as though there haven’t already been all sorts of people — not just bloggers but, for instance, the Wall Street Journal — who have a hard time wrapping their tiny minds around the thought that this episode has no more to do with being gay than the Monica Lewinsky affair had to do with being straight. If the House leadership decides to use this tactic for their own political gain, I do not think it will help them — after all, it will be hard to make the case that some gay cabal was able to deflect attention from all this if that cabal did not consist mainly of Republican staffers who were in a position to run interference between Foley and people who were in a position to do something about him, which House Democrats were not. If the alleged cabal does consist mainly of Republicans, then Republican candidates for office are going to face new questions about how well they chose and supervised their employees — after all, ‘the people we hired turned out to be intent on letting sexual predators run amok among the House pages’ is not normally a winning message, nor is ‘Poor innocent us! we have nourished a viper in our bosom, and we didn’t know a thing!’ a good way to rebut a charge of negligent management.
Besides that, the specific people who hired the members of the alleged cabal would have to explain themselves to their base, which in many cases includes some pretty homophobic people. If David Corn is right — and Josh links to him on this topic, which I take seriously — then the people who employ cabal-members “include Representative Katherine Harris and Henry Hyde and Senators Bill Frist, George Allen, Mitch McConnell and Rick Santorum.” Possibly the only even vaguely amusing thing to come out of all this would be listening to Rick Santorum trying to explain how he came to employ a member of a homosexual cabal, and whether he let him near the family dog.
But I wouldn’t want to go down that road if I were Dennis Hastert.
But let’s be completely clear what it would mean if he did. It would mean that rather than admit that he didn’t handle this right — which seems pretty clearly true, cabal or no cabal — and taking the consequences, he’s prepared to wreck people’s lives and play on the worst kind of homophobia. We already know that he’s willing to sacrifice teenagers for the sake of politics; we’ll just be able to add that he’s also willing to sacrifice adults whom he knows, some of whom are presumably his friends and comrades, and who have, rightly or wrongly, supported his party and his allies for years; along with civility, decency, tolerance, and any principles he might have left.
I really hope he doesn’t go there.
***
Other people have already tossed basic decency overboard. There is one right-wing blog, to which I will not link, that has outed one of the ex-pages — name, picture, employer, university, the whole nine yards. This is completely and totally out of bounds. We’re talking about someone who was the victim of a crime, and an unusually embarrassing one at that. The person who outed him claims that he will explain why he did so, but doesn’t deliver, and there’s no obvious reason I can see why he would have thought this worth doing. It would have been despicable and vile even if outing the ex-page had provided some new and relevant information; as things stand, it seems to be not just despicable and vile, but completely pointless.