Right Wing Nut House

To my legions of fans out there, I must apologize for once again failing to sit in the big chair and dispense my unique brand of wisdom, intelligence and mayhem from the studios here on the banks of the Fox River.

I am still fighting a chest cold. I was feeling much better on Saturday when I made the mistake of going outside and mowing the grass. By Sunday night I had a temperature again and was clogged up to the point where I had trouble breathing.

Hope to be back by Wednesday.

First, you absolutely must go to American Thinker and read this post from Clarice Feldman on the Foley scandal. It is, to put it mildly, flabbergasting in its implications.

In her article, Clarice mentions the website that started it all. Stop Sex Predators came on line in late July with one post announcing its intention to “serve as a clearing house for the public to report sex predators and as a resource for concerned parents and citizens.”

The next blog post wasn’t until August 17th where the writer listed in a rather desultory manner some more notable sex predators. After that, two posts on August 26, including this curious item:

HOLY MOTHER OF JESUS! On a whim, I googled “Congressional sex scandals.” WHOA! You hear stories about ‘things’ that happen along the gilded halls of power in Washington. But I was shocked to see how much of it goes on the record! From a Washington Post article, here are five…yes, FIVE members of Congress who had incredibly inappropriate relationships with minors. What’s worse is that some continued to serve in Congress and one of them is still in office!! How much more of this is going on??

How much more, indeed. The fourth and last post for the entire month of August was a cut and paste from Wikpedia of the Gary Condit affair. More “political predators” on a site dedicated to sex predators in general? Why?

This brings us to September and what could be construed - if one had a suspicious nature - as a “build-up” of sorts to the Foley emails.

After a short post giving a link to a safety website on 9/2, there is another Capitol Hill sex story about an issue that stirred the blogs a bit on 9/4; the “skintern” culture on the Hill that saw young women dressing provocatively in order to get ahead.

Then comes a post on 9/21 that mentions Foley for the first time:

I have been away for a while, so please accept my apologies for the lack of blog posts. BUT….while I was away, the blog has been noticed and some shocking emails have been received! I can hardly believe it! I’m posting each one below. It’s proof that the Congressional Corruption of the past is alive and well today. It’s up to us to expose it and stop this predatory harassment! Please promote the blog and email any further information to stopsexpredators@gmail.com . Together we will make a difference!

Why would anyone notice this blog? It has posted nothing original in its short existence. The rare postings means that it has not built up any audience whatsoever. The first Technorati reference to the blog is from two days ago. Even a Google search doesn’t show it on the first 10 pages when searching for “Stop Sex Predators.”

And yet, 3 separate people who had contact with Congressman Foley somehow found this website independent of one another and supposedly sent emails to the owner of this site to complain about Foley’s inappropriate behavior.

Possible? Yes. Probable? I’ll let you decide.

The question is, are they real emails from real former pages and interns? Does this sound plausible to you?

My dad who gives a lot of money to republicans got me an internship capitolhill. I thought that I was hot shit, having such a good internship after myfreshman year of college.After a few weeks, I was finally learning my way around DC and I wasenjoying my job.One night, I decided to go out with my new fake ID to my first gay bar.I went to this bar named Coblot.There was old guy who would not leave me alone. He kept following me around.I tried to get him to leave me alone by going to the bathroom.Instead he followed me in and tried to grope me.A few days later my boss had me run something over to another congressmansoffice. It turned out that the guy who groped me was Representative MarkFoley.

All three emails sent independent of one another naming the same Congressional pervert? That is really stinking up the smell test.

Finally, we get to the emails sent from Foley to the former Page. These are the emails that the House Republicans knew about and, after investigating the situation, ordered Foley to stay away from the boy and have no more contact outside of official Congressional duties. This was posted last Sunday, 9/24 - a full 5 days before the story broke:

This is absolutely amazing. I just received these emails. They were sent by Congressman Mark Foley to a 16-year-old male page. I have removed his name to protect his identity. But how shocking is this? I can’t believe this was emailed to me? There must be even more out there. Email me at stopsexpredators@gmail.com and let me know what we should do!! Something must be done!!

The emails are blurry - probably faxed and not, as the author claims, emailed. But the question is how did they migrate from an incredibly obscure website into the mainstream media? This is indeed a mystery. It is possible that an opposition researcher could have Googled “Foley” and found the tiny website. But search engine rankings being what they are, that would have had to have been one dedicated oppo researcher to find the emails on Stop Sex Predators, a blogspot blog with virtually no posts and zero incoming links.

Clarice informs me that an old friend might be behind the Stop Sex Predators blog:

One of the JOM (Just One Minute) posters who’s been paying attention thinks Jason Leopold is the owner of stopsexpredators. The only place we can find a link to the story is another site (from the desk of patrick J fitzgerald which we also think is Leopold) Leopold you may recall was writing all those crazy stories for Truthout including the one that Rove was indicted and the indictment would be unsealed in 24 hours.

Highly speculative, but it fits. Leopold would have been able to make CREW aware of the emails published on the blog. Here’s ABC News on the genesis of the story:

Yesterday, we asked the congressman about some much tamer e-mails from one page, and he said he was just being overly friendly. After we posted that story online, we began to hear from a number of other pages who sent these much more explicit, instant messages. When the congressman realized we had them, he resigned.

Instant messages not emails. As ABC makes clear, there are two different stories. The question is, how many sources?

Clarice picks up the narrative:

As soon as the ABC story ran, and organization called C.R.E.W., which said it had the original exchange which Hastert had heard of and the St Peterburg paper had seen, put them on their website .They said they’d earlier conveyed them to the FBI, were releasing them because of the ABC story, and asked for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Republican leadership.It is abundantly clear to me that C.R.E.W. and ABC communicated and may have coordinated the release of this story.

CREW is a liberal public interest group funded by George Soros and seems to have its fingerprints all over this scandal.

The question isn’t whether or not Foley is a lowlife pervert who belongs in jail. He does. The question isn’t whether the House leadership did a good enough job with the Foley case when it came to their attention. They probably didn’t.

The real question is if CREW sat on these emails for months with the knowledge that children were at risk on the Hill thanks to stalker Foley. And if CREW knew, why release the raunchy IM now?

For maximum political damage to Republicans, of course. And I would hope that some enterprising reporters and bloggers out there will ferret out the details of this story and bring to light everything that needs to be known.

UPDATE

Tom McGuire, doing what he does best, lays out what we know about this website and has some more information on how the former page’s emails migrated from SSP to the mainstream press:

The River City Mud Bugle has even more backstory:

In a previous Daily Kos diary about Foley, “WHInternNow” made an early attempt to draw attention to Foley’s peccadilloes.

So the Kos Kids acted pretty responsibily under the circumstances for which they should be praised.

Come to think of it…if the Kos Kommunity wasn’t buying Foley as internet stalker, maybe you liberals out there would like to explain to me why the GOP leadership should have been more skeptical about Foley than their most rabid opponents?

After posting my piece on Foley yesterday, I settled back into my recliner to watch a little college football and rest my still sick and weary bones, fighting a chest cold that is hanging on more fiercely than the unhinged left hangs on to the fantasy that Bush stole Ohio in 2004. I was prepared to relax for the rest of the day, napping in between the day games and night games, secure in the knowledge that Saturday’s on the blog are usually quiet and nothing of great import would occur.

What I was not prepared for was the mind boggling assault from lefty commenters that, at various times accused me of 1) supporting pedophilia; 2) defending Foley; 3) trying to “sweep the scandal under the rug;” 4) blaming Democrats for the scandal; 5) apologizing for the GOP leadership who were “obviously” covering up the scandal.

It was that last point that set me off. It appears to me that our friends on the left were guilty of a kind of intellectual flabbiness we’ve become all too familiar with over the last few years. Wild exaggerations, jumping to conclusions, practicing 20/20 hindsight, twisting what people say and write in the most grotesque ways imaginable, and getting the facts of the story so laughably wrong one wonders what matchbook cover school they attended to learn how to read.

From their point of view, it was “obvious” that the GOP leadership, when presented with emails from Foley to a former page and which were examined and evaluated by several newspapers, knew that Foley was an internet stalker of young boys and should have taken action. This despite the fact that those emails were so innocuous that the aforementioned newspapers - including the St. Petersburg Times - saw nothing improper in their content. The Editor for the Times issued a statement in which he said:

There was nothing overtly sexual in the emails, but we assigned two reporters to find out more. We found the Louisiana page and talked with him.He told us Foley’s request for a photo made him uncomfortable so he never responded, but both he and his parents made clear we could not use his name if we wrote a story. We also found another page who was willing to go on the record, but his experience with Foley was different. He said Foley did send a few emails but never said anything in them that he found inappropriate. We tried to find other pages but had no luck. We spoke with Rep. Alexander, who said the boy’s family didn’t want it pursued, and Foley, who insisted he was merely trying to be friendly and never wanted to make the page uncomfortable.

So, what we had was a set of emails between Foley and a teenager, who wouldn’t go on the record about how those emails made him feel. As we said in today’s paper, our policy is that we don’t make accusations against people using unnamed sources. And given the seriousness of what would be implied in a story, it was critical that we have complete confidence in our sourcing. After much discussion among top editors at the paper, we concluded that the information we had on Foley last November didn’t meet our standard for publication. Evidently, other news organizations felt the same way.

So what all my commenters were skewering Republicans for - not censuring Foley and having him thrown in jail - was exactly what several media outlets had decided as well; while inappropriate, there was nothing in those particular emails to that particular page that warranted any other action than what they ended up taking; telling Foley to leave the kid alone.

Now I know the left don’t do nuance but later, as other GOP leaders became aware of the emails and inquired about them, the parents refused permission to have their child’s privacy violated any more. The leadership should certainly be taken to task for being uninformed on this issue - Reynolds and Shimkus are fools not to have told Boehner and Hastert right away - but it appears to be a question of incompetence and not a cover-up.

None of this has anything to do with the dirty IM’s that were released by ABC on Friday. These are two separate and distinct issues - something that the dim bulbs among my commenters have just not been able to wrap their infantile brains around. They believe that since Hastert et al knew about the one incident that they “obviously” (there’s that word again) knew about the others. This flies against the facts as we know them now.

If, as I eventually tired of repeating, it turns out that Hastert and Co. knew of the dirty IM’s THEN OF COURSE THEY SHOULD ALL RESIGN OR BE KICKED OUT AND PROBABLY PROSECUTED FOR OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE.

Similarly, if Democrats knew of the dirty IM’s months ago and were sitting on them in order to release them when they would do maximum political damage, they too should resign and be prosecuted for obstruction.

I don’t imagine any of this will make a difference to those who have the reading comprehension of a Llama or the cognitive skills of a Tapir. They will continue accusing me of excusing this or trying to hide that or maybe of being a pedophile myself. All they’re doing of course is showing how truly clueless they are.

At least when Alice fell down the rabbit hole, she could be reasonably certain that the creatures she met were blessed with some kind of intelligence. Visiting this blog yesterday and reading the comments from leftist twits, I envy Alice her advantage in that regard.