according to Drudge. From the 10/3/06 edition: “House Speaker Dennis Hastert must do the only right thing, and resign his speakership at once… Mr. Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation, an investigation that must examine his own inept performance…”
UPDATE: Editorial HERE.
White House records show George Tenet “did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday. The account by Sean McCormack came hours after Ms. Rice…said it was ‘incomprehensible’ she ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.”
Tonight on ABC, investigative journalist Brian Ross suggested there may be other members of Congress who engaged in inappropriate behavior towards congressional pages:
BRIAN ROSS: So far, Foley is the only member whose overt sexual approaches have been documented. Charlie?
CHARLES GIBSON: The only one to be documented, but are there other shoes to drop?
ROSS: We’re hearing quite a bit from former pages. They’re sending us all sorts of messages about possible other members.
Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, says he told Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) of Mark Foley’s inappropriate emails early this year.
In an interview today with CNN, Hastert said that Reynolds presented him with information about Foley’s behavior in the context of “other things that might have affected campaigns”:
REPORTER: Congressman Reynolds put out a statement on Saturday saying that he told you in the spring. Do you think he’s lying?
HASTERT: No, I’m not saying. I just don’t recall him telling me that. If he would have told me that, he would have told me that in the context of maybe a half a dozen or a dozen other things. I don’t remember that.
REPORTER: Other allegations of improper e-mails?
HASTERT: No, just other things that might have affected campaigns.
Watch it:
Transcript: Read more
Prominent conservative pundit Bay Buchanan appeared on CNN this afternoon and lit into Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and the rest of the House leadership. Buchanan said that the email that Hastert was informed about — and described as “overly friendly” — “had predator stamped all over it. No one in the country can suggest otherwise.” Buchanan said that Hastert and others “failed the parents of this country.” Watch it:
Transcript: Read more
Some leading conservatives have tried to excuse, justify, or downplay the scandal surrounding Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-FL) predatory behavior towards underage pages. We debunk their claims below:
EXCUSE #1: Foley’s initial e-mails seemed harmless, “over friendly”.
Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) said he dropped the matter when Foley told them, “When I was a young person, an adult (who) became my mentor inspired me to be a congressman, and that’s all I’m doing.” Foley said if he was guilty of anything, Shimkus said, it was of being “overly friendly.” [St. Louis Tribune, 10/1/06]
“[T]he actual notes were relatively innocuous — there was nothing sexual in those notes.” [Newt Gingrich, Fox News Sunday, 10/1/06]
FACT: At least 11 House members and staff, all Republicans, knew of the inappropriate emails sent by Foley to a page in 2005. In the e-mails, Foley asked the page to “send me a pic of you” and said about another young page, “he’s in really good shape.” The boy told House officials that Foley’s messages “freaked him out” and were “sick, sick, sick, sick, sick.” Dr. Timothy M. Osberg, a psychologist and professor of psychology at Niagara University, said that the e-mail, coupled with the boy’s reaction to it, “should send up red flags.”
……
EXCUSE #2: The parents didn’t want the matter pursued.
Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY) said Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA) “told him that he had spoken with the page’s parents. They didn’t want the matter pursued, he said, ‘so I thought it had to be pretty well satisfied.’” [Buffalo News, 10/1/06]
FACT: The House leadership had an obligation to protect the dozens of pages who are under their care. At the very least, Foley’s emails should have been passed on law authorities, and the full House page board should have been informed. Read more
“The fierceness of the tactical dispute over the best methods by which an activist federal government should solve all social ills may,” writes my man Julian Sanchez of the mutual loathing between contemporary liberals and today’s big government GOP, “more than anything else, reflect the narcissism of small differences.” As a former philosophy major just like Julian, let me suggest that what it actually reflects is something a philosophy major is likely to ignore — the relative unimportance of very abstract ideas to politics.
Actual American politics — as opposed to political theory — is structured around the competition of various organized interests to capture the power of the federal government and use it to advance their ends. These groups, in turn, are to some extent meta-organized into two somewhat enduring competing teams aligned with the two major political parties. That these teams sort of agree that, in the abstract, “seize control of the levers of government and use them to advance our interests” is a sound political program is really neither here nor there in terms of making the differences between the teams “small.” Both the gay rights movement and the gay-repression movement agree, for example, that the coercive authority of the state ought to be deployed on behalf of a given conception of homosexuality. Gay rights groups want, for example, not only to end the state’s discrimination against gays and lesbians, but also want the state to force private actors to stop discriminating against gays and lesbians (via, for example, employment- and housing-discrimination laws) in their capacity as private citizens.
It would be silly, however, to describe the disagreement about whether the state should be used to actively discriminate against gays and lesbians or should be used to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians as a “small differene” or some kind of trivial quarrel. Obviously, these are directly opposed agendas, and supporters of each agenda have eminently good reasons to fear and loath the advocates of the other agenda. Simply put, the practical stakes are rather high for most people even if the disagreements exist at a relatively low level of abstraction.
Obviously, I agree with Sebastian Mallaby that I wish Democrats had been a bit more vigorous in their opposition to the torture bill. That said, let’s get real. Does anyone seriously believe that if the Democrats had done that Mallaby would have written a column saying “Democrats are great, the GOP sucks, go out and put Pelosi in the Speaker’s office?” Mark me down as a “no,” on that one. Instead, we would have had a column about how Democrats are right about torture, but somehow “soft” on terrorism nonetheless. Or else he would have made something else up to complain about.\
A certain number of our elite pundits — Mallaby high among them — are just constitutionally incapable of being nice to the Democratic Party or to American liberals. As the right’s rule proves itself to be worse and worse, they’ll become increasingly critical of Bush. But that merely forces them to devise ever-more complaints about the opposition. And one of the Democrats’ very worst instincts is a tendecy to care about what these kind of people think.
From Fox News:
According to ABC News, pages in the 2001-2002 class were warned about Foley by a supervisor in the House Clerk’s office.
Further thoughts on Eric Posner’s broader argument against humanitarian intervention, which I said I mostly disagreed with earlier. Basically, I do agree that Iraq should make people (like me) who were humanitarian intervention enthusiasts in, say, 1999 somewhat more cautious. But there is a baby/bathwater issue here and I think it’s hard to say anything super-general about the matter. Circumstances vary, and there’s a lot of “it depends” factors here. But what does it depend on? Some scattered bullet-points below:
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