Right Wing Nut House

Rush Limbaugh should be royally ashamed of himself.

In a shocking display of insensitivity, not to mention gracelessness and incivility, Limbaugh accused actor Michael J. Fox, who carries on a daily battle with Parkinson’s disease, of exaggerating the symptoms of the disease in several political commercials for Democratic candidates:

To Rush Limbaugh on Monday, Michael J. Fox looked like a faker. The actor, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, has done a series of political ads supporting candidates who favor stem cell research, including Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin, who is running against Republican Michael Steele for the Senate seat being vacated by Paul Sarbanes.

“He is exaggerating the effects of the disease,” Limbaugh told listeners. “He’s moving all around and shaking and it’s purely an act. . . . This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting.”

Limbaugh went on to say that it was the only time he had seen Fox exhibit symptoms of the disease and that “he could barely control himself.”

Limbaugh must have realized how extraordinarily stupid and insensitive his remarks were because he apologized for them later in the show. What possible good that did except highlight the broadcaster’s utter contempt for common decency is beyond me. Apologies don’t get it done in this case.

Perhaps Limbaugh should be sentenced to a class on how Parkinson’s progresses and what the afflicted must deal with every day just to get out of bed. Here’s a description of the disease from the National Institutes of Health:

The four primary symptoms of PD are tremor, or trembling in hands, arms, legs, jaw, and face; rigidity, or stiffness of the limbs and trunk; bradykinesia, or slowness of movement; and postural instability, or impaired balance and coordination. As these symptoms become more pronounced, patients may have difficulty walking, talking, or completing other simple tasks. PD usually affects people over the age of 50. Early symptoms of PD are subtle and occur gradually. In some people the disease progresses more quickly than in others. As the disease progresses, the shaking, or tremor, which affects the majority of PD patients may begin to interfere with daily activities. Other symptoms may include depression and other emotional changes; difficulty in swallowing, chewing, and speaking; urinary problems or constipation; skin problems; and sleep disruptions. There are currently no blood or laboratory tests that have been proven to help in diagnosing sporadic PD. Therefore the diagnosis is based on medical history and a neurological examination. The disease can be difficult to diagnose accurately. Doctors may sometimes request brain scans or laboratory tests in order to rule out other diseases.

Limbaugh’s reference to Fox being off medication fails to take into account that even if the patient is on one of the many drugs that help alleviate some of the symptoms of the disease, that each day is different for the Parkinson’s patient. Altering dosage as well as changing medication is a frequent necessity in order to allow the Parkinson’s sufferer to live something close to a “normal” life.

The left, of course, is having a field day with Limbaugh’s ignorant and ill tempered remarks as well they should. But perhaps they should also be wary of casting the first stone in this case. The shameless exploitation of people like Fox and the late Christopher Reeves in pushing embryonic stem cell research in a political context is dishonest, appealing as it does to a voter’s pity when the only basis for deciding whether such research should be funded by the government must be the quality of the science that could be achieved.

And in that case, there is much room for disagreement.

Speaking purely as a secularist, the scientific argument over the efficacy of using embryonic stem cells vs. adult stem cells (which, in fact, have no restrictions when it comes to funding), has yet to be resolved. In fact, the evidence suggests that even the so called “undifferentiated” embryonic stem cells supply little additional value to the cause of research given the enormous strides made in recent years using adult stem cells.

The scientific debate has taken a back seat to what many pro-life advocates see as using the fruits of abortion to advance human knowledge. While some of their arguments are compelling, the fact remains that under the law, an embryo is not a person and therefore can be treated as any other body part that is donated to the cause of science. Embryonic stem cell research is perfectly legal. The question is whether or not the government should fund it.

To determine whether or not our tax dollars should go toward this kind of research, the exact same criteria we use to decide whether to fund other scientific projects should be used. And in that respect, advocates for embryonic stem cell research have failed so far to make the case that using embryos is different than using adult tissue. It’s that simple. And for Democrats to play to the pity of voters by showing a wheel chair bound Christopher Reeves or a palsied Michael J. Fox and hint that if only those evil, mean, nasty Republicans could be defeated, Reeves would walk and Fox would be cured is nothing more than a disguised attack ad which uses a disgusting appeal to emotionalism. It is dishonest. It is exploitive. And Limbaugh was correct in calling attention to this shameless display of political tomfoolery.

But in typical Limbaugh fashion, the broadcaster had to go beyond the mundane kind of criticism levelled here and seek out controversy. It’s one of the reasons I stopped listening to him years ago. As his fame has increased, so too has his need to stand out. And sometimes - like yesterday - he goes too far out on the limb and he’s forced to make a hasty retreat.

Except in this case, the branch broke before he could scramble back to safety.

Limbaugh owes Fox more than an apology. If he were an honorable man, he would have Fox on his show to discuss the ravages of the disease and help his audience understand how cruel a life becomes when suffering from such a debilitating illness. Perhaps then, both Rush and his listeners will understand how truly despicable his comments about Fox were and why such a storm of condemnation has so righteously broken about his head.

Lynne Stewart probably believes she has put another one over on the American government after receiving a mere 28 months for facilitating the activities of terrorists. But the fact is, her career as a “civil rights” attorney has, if anything, proven Ms. Stewart to be far more than an attorney for bombers, killers, and terrorists. Lynne Stewart is a con artist of epic proportions, hurling bunkum at her leftist colleagues and the American public like a carny barker all the while laughing up her sleeve at the stupidity and gullibility of ordinary people.

Her attitude toward the public can best be described in this revealing piece in the Middle East Quarterly:

The defense maintained that the charges against Stewart and her codefendants were an assault on free speech and argued that Stewart enjoyed a lawyer-client privilege. They further argued that the George W. Bush administration hyped evidence against the defendants. Stewart and her defense knew what would play on campuses and in leftist forums across the country. Her website billed the trial as a manifestation of an Orwellian fear that, in the wake of 9-11 and armed with provisions of the Patriot Act, the U.S. Department of Justice was going to criminalize political dissent.

And yet, here’s a quote from Stewart that would seem to make her a liar about her love of free speech:

She described her position in an interview as “a strange amalgam of old-line things and new-line things. I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people’s revolution. The CIA pays a thousand people and cuts them loose, and they will undermine any revolution in the name of freedom of speech.”

For the record, Mao murdered between 20 and 60 million of his own countrymen whose only crime was dissenting from his ruthless dictatorship. And the fact that Castro routinely locks up dissenters doesn’t seem to bother her although her perspective might change a bit after she spends a year or so in the slammer.

Some of the evidence against her reveals a breathtaking contempt for her own word, freely given, not to pass messages from the blind Sheik to his followers:

Stewart and her coconspirators flouted their agreement with the Justice Department and helped the sheikh circumvent the communications ban. According to government recordings of their prison visits, Yousry, who also served as an adjunct lecturer in Middle East studies at York College of the City University of New York, conveyed messages to and from the sheikh while Stewart created what the prosecution called “covering noises.” On some surveillance videos, Stewart could be seen shaking a water jar or tapping on the table while Yousry and the sheikh exchanged communications that were then later disseminated to the sheikh’s followers via the former paralegal. The prosecutor argued, citing a letter written by the U.S. attorney’s office to Stewart after she delivered the message to Reuters, that it was not in the sheikh’s legal rights “to pass messages which, simply put, can get people killed and buildings blown up.” They argued that the case was equivalent to a “jail break,” in which the defendants extracted Abdel Rahman from prison, “not literally, of course, [but] figuratively, in order to make him available to other terrorists.”

One of the most incendiary communications was a message Stewart herself gave to the Reuters news service in June 2000 in which the sheikh announced his withdrawal of support for a cease-fire between the Egyptian Islamic Group and the Egyptian government. The truce had been in place since 1997, just after his followers in Egypt had opened fire on tourists at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, killing 58 foreigners and 4 Egyptians. Subsequently, high-casualty Islamist terrorism resumed in Egypt on October 7, 2004, with a series of bombings that killed 34 in and around the Egyptian Sinai resort of Taba. On July 23, 2005, three bombs exploded in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing at least 64.

The sentencing judge who handed down the 28 months sentence pointed out, in obvious ignorance of the facts, that there was no evidence anyone had been harmed by her actions. This is after the same judge said basically that she’s no better than a terrorist:

But Judge Koeltl said there had been “an irreducible core of extraordinarily severe criminal conduct” in her actions on behalf of the client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind fundamentalist Islamic cleric who is serving a life sentence for plotting to bomb New York City landmarks. Ms. Stewart was convicted on Feb. 10, 2005, of conspiring to provide material aid to terrorism by smuggling the sheik’s messages encouraging violence by his militant followers in Egypt.

So why the light sentence?

While agreeing that Ms. Stewart had flouted the law and deceived the government by breaking prison rules to publicize the sheik’s messages, Judge Koeltl broadly rejected the prosecutors’ portrayal of her as a serial liar and terrorist conspirator who would be a danger to society if she remained free.

Instead, he focused on her past service as a lawyer. “She has represented the poor, the disadvantaged and the unpopular,” Judge Koeltl said, adding that Ms. Stewart had demonstrated “enormous skill and dedication” in her legal work and earned little money from it.

Oh really? The poor bomber? The disadvantaged murderer? The unpopular terrorist?

Here are just a few of Stewart’s cases:

* The 1981 robbery of a Brinks truck that killed two policemen and a guard carried out by radical leftists. The killer’s defense? Stewart and her colleagues described the prosecution as “an effort by the government to prosecute political activists who rob from the rich in order to give to the poor.” To this day, several of the defendants refuse to say they did anything wrong or apologize for the murders. One of the perpetrators, Susan Rosenberg, had her sentence commuted by Bill Clinton as he was leaving office.

* Defended Luc Levasseur of the United Freedom Front, a domestic terrorist group that bombed the US Capitol in 1983 as well as several other targets.

* Defended Sunni Ali, a member of the Black Liberation Army, a violent offshoot of the Black Panthers, who was accused of several bombings. The Fraternal Order of Police says the BLA is responsible for the murder of 13 police officers. Also participated in the Brinks robbery.

* Defended two recent cop killers.

Do we see a pattern? It seems that Stewart has a soft spot in her heart for cop killers. Now even cop killers deserve the best defense our system can give them. But her defense of these men always centers on the fact that they were acting in self defense given the known “brutality” of the police. And she asks the jury to dismiss her client’s actions on the grounds that they are fomenting revolution and are therefore exempt from “unjust laws.”

What is her attitude toward jihadists like the Shiek? The government caught Stewart’s true feelings on tape:

In May of 2000, according to the prosecution, tapes indicate that Yousry told the sheikh and Stewart that the Abu Sayyaf group had kidnapped tourists in the Philippines and was threatening to kill them if the sheikh and Ramzi Yousef were not released. Stewart commented, “Good for them,” although she said that while she believed that Abu Sayyaf would not succeed in winning Abdel Rahman’s release, its efforts were nonetheless “very, very crucial,” since the demand would raise his profile among jihadists. Even bin Laden, a self-professed admirer of the sheikh, had considered hijacking airplanes to free the sheikh and Yousef. In September 2000, the Al-Qaeda leader reiterated his threat to wage jihad on the sheikh’s behalf.

Stewart also endorsed the sheikh’s ghostwritten fatwa, calling for the murder of Jews and Americans. When Sattar told Stewart that Ramsey Clark had concerns about the fatwa, she responded, “Does he really think that the American government can completely put this man in an iron box and cut him off from the whole world?”

When asked about 9-11, Stewart told The New York Times that she thought the attacks were a predictable response to U.S. aggression. “I’m pretty inured to the notion that in a war or in an armed struggle, people die,” she said. “They’re in the wrong place; they’re in a nightclub in Israel; they’re at a stock market in London; they’re in the Algerian outback—whatever it is, people die.” Citing the U.S. use of a nuclear weapon against Hiroshima and the World War II firebombing of Dresden, she added, “So I have a lot of trouble figuring out why that is wrong, especially when people are sort of placed in a position of having no other way.”

Then, after thumbing her nose at the government for so long, when it comes time for her to face the consequences of her conscious and deliberate actions, she chickens out and throws herself on the mercy of the court like any common cowardly criminal:

In a brief statement to the judge before the sentence, Ms. Stewart, shaking and barely suppressing tears, refrained from political comment or discussion of her case, but noted that she would never be permitted to practice law again.

“The end of my career is truly like a sword in my side,” she said. “I don’t want to be in prison,” she pleaded. “Permit me to live in the world and live out my life, productively, lovingly, righteously.”

Ms. Stewart’s lawyers, citing her recent bout of breast cancer, had asked the judge not to give her any prison time.

The fact that she didn’t use her statement to further her goal of revolution only shows her to be the craven opportunist she has always been. This is a hero of the left? This God forsaken, broken down old side show barker elicits encomiums of praise and poetic tributes from radicals?

Almost as cowardly as Stewart was the judge who praised Stewart for her past work while releasing her on bail pending appeal because he believes that there is a chance that the verdict will actually be reversed.

Let’s hope the appeals court has a lot more gumption than this Clinton appointed judge. Otherwise, Stewart may yet walk out of court a free woman.

How much trouble are Republicans in with the voters?

At the moment, it appears that it may be more efficacious for some Republicans to change their party affiliation to “Independent Wiccan.” At least that way they could probably get the pagan vote. And they may even be able to siphon away some votes from the hedonists, although it’s a tough sell what with the Hollywood crowd overwhelmingly Democratic.

When Tom Reynolds, the Chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee trails in his own race for re-election by 15 points a month before election day, you can take that as a sign from heaven that there will probably be a lot of new faces sitting in the House on January 6, 2007 - the day the new Congress will convene for the first time.

And very few of those new faces will be Republican.

Political analyst and polling guru Stuart Rothenberg (a Democrat but a respected professional) believes the dam has already broken and a Democratic tidal wave on election day is almost a virtual certainty:

The national atmospherics don’t merely favor Democrats; they set the stage for a blowout of cosmic proportions next month.

No, that’s not a prediction, since Republicans still have a month to “localize” enough races to hold onto one or both chambers of Congress. But you don’t have to be Teddy White or V.O. Key to know that the GOP is now flirting with disaster.

Let’s forget all of the niceties and diplomatic language and cut to the obvious truth: From the White House to Capitol Hill, Republicans look inept. And that assertion is based on what Republicans are saying. Democratic rhetoric is much harsher and, therefore, easier to dismiss as partisan claptrap.

[snip]

You can be sure that the Foley mess will percolate for a while, as Democrats and journalists ask House Republicans what they knew and when they knew it. Instead of being able to focus on their accomplishments in office or their challengers’ warts, Republican House Members running for re-election will have to spend too much of their time answering questions about the scandal.

Indeed, this WaPo piece highlighting the problems of long time Congressman Clay Shaw from Florida seems to confirm Rothenberg’s analysis while pointing up the potential difficulties for even safe Republicans:

Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.) was trying to talk about security Friday at bustling Port Everglades, but with planes roaring overhead and containers slamming onto trucks, nobody could hear him.

That’s a common problem for Shaw and Republican candidates around the country these days — trying urgently 30 days before Election Day to frame a winning message but finding their efforts drowned out by the furor over former representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.).

“It’s sucking all the air out of the room,” Shaw said in an interview after his news conference at the port. “It’s a tough time; there’s just total saturation right now.”

Back in Washington, Republican strategists acknowledge privately that, even under their best-case scenario, Foley’s sexually charged messages and allegations that House leaders were too passive in responding to them will remain an all-consuming distraction for GOP.

The constant drip, drip, drip of revelations, charges, counter charges, and thundering denunciations from Democrats (who seem more interested in reading the private messages of a pervert than they do in listening to the phone calls of people who want to kill us) are political stilettos thrust into heart of the GOP, disgusting decent people everywhere from both parties not only for their content but for the cavalier attitude of Hastert, Reynolds, et al to Foley’s cyberstalking. With each new revelation, people are reminded that Foley could have - should have been stopped. Any kind of investigation would have revealed the raunchy IM’s and perhaps even Foley’s contact with pages after they left the program.

I predicted here that a page would come forward by Friday acknowledging that he had sex with the Congressman. I was off by less than 48 hours:

A former House page says he had sex with then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) after receiving explicit e-mails in which the congressman described assessing the sexual orientation and physical attributes of underage pages but waiting until later to make direct advances.

The former page, who agreed to discuss his relationship with Foley with the Los Angeles Times on the condition that he not be identified, said his electronic correspondence with Foley began after he finished the respected Capitol Hill page program for high school juniors. His sexual encounter was in the fall of 2000, he said. At the time, he was 21 and a graduate of a rural Northeastern college.

I don’t think there is any doubt that if proper procedures had been followed, Foley would have been discovered long ago as a member who was using the page program as a sexual bullpen, sizing up potential lovers (online or in person) while they were still teenagers and then soliciting sex after their graduation.

The question really isn’t whether his behavior was illegal in the strictest sense of the word. Despicable conduct knows no boundaries of legality when it is practiced against children of 17, 18, or 19 years old. And some conservative bloggers seem to think that it is possible since no law was broken, the entire scandal is a trumped up effort by Democrats to elicit outrage at Republicans for their actions in the matter.

I have no doubt that much of this scandal has been orchestrated by Democrats to gain maximum political advantage. I think one would have to be brain dead to think otherwise. But Foley and his enablers (consciously or unconsciously ignoring the signs of trouble and warning bells for years) don’t need Democrats to make themselves look negligent or worse, like a bunch of calculating, back room politicos more concerned with the electoral impact of Foley’s misdeeds than in protecting the children whose safety had been entrusted to them by their parents.

Foley was a bomb waiting to go off. Whether some Democratic operatives nudged the scandal along by feeding the media is really not the point, although I find it fascinating in a historical sense to trace the origins of the information to expose the creeps who apparently wish to out gay Republicans regardless of whether or not they wish to have their sexual orientation made public. These low lifes are the hypocrites not the gay Republicans. To browbeat the GOP for supporting a President whose anti-terrorist measures they believe violate American’s privacy while looking on with satisfaction and cheering as the most personal, private details of a person’s life are plastered all over some bottom feeder’s website is where the real hypocrisy in this whole scandal resides.

As it now seems likely that the GOP will be given the boot by voters on election day, America will turn toward the Democrats looking for leadership on budget issues, entitlements, the War on Terror, and other vital issues facing the country.

It says volumes that the American people will not find any new ideas or solutions from Democrats - only the promise that they will “drain the swamp.”

Given the Foley mess and the culpability of the GOP leadership in failing to act on it, that should be more than enough to keep the Democrats busy for a while.

While it may change the dynamic of the scandal, news that one of the young pages who was a recipient of raunchy instant messages from Congressman Foley set up the lawmaker as part of a prank doesn’t really change the facts of the matter.

Drudge:

According to two people close to former congressional page (name withheld), the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

According to one Oklahoma source who knows the former page very well, (name withheld), a conservative Republican, goaded an unwitting Foley to type embarrassing comments that were then shared with a small group of young Hill politicos. The prank went awry when the saved IM sessions got into the hands of political operatives favorable to Democrats.

The primary source, an ally of (name withheld), adamantly proclaims that the former page is not a homosexual. The prank scenario was confirmed by a second associate of (name withheld). Both are fearful that their political careers will be affected if they are publicly brought into the investigation.

The prank scenario only applies to the (name withheld) IM sessions and does not necessarily apply to any other exchanges between the former congressman and others.

Those facts are simple; Foley sent at least 60 IM’s to former pages, many of them sexually explicit in nature; that the Republican leadership knew of Foley’s interest in male pages for at least a year possibly more and did nothing concrete to address the problem; and that Democrats have orchestrated the timing and pace of the scandal to maximize its political impact.

Only a fool now believes that this scandal exploded when it did as the result of fate. This story from The Hill about the original source of the emails being a longtime Republican raises some interesting questions, not the least of which could the identity of the “longtime Republican” be none other than former Foley Chief of Staff Kirk Fordham?

The source who in July gave news media Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-Fla.) suspect e-mails to a former House page says the documents came to him from a House GOP aide.

That aide has been a registered Republican since becoming eligible to vote, said the source, who showed The Hill public records supporting his claim.

The same source, who acted as an intermediary between the aide-turned-whistleblower and several news outlets, says the person who shared the documents is no longer employed in the House.

But the whistleblower was a paid GOP staffer when the documents were first given to the media.

The source bolstered the claim by sharing un-redacted e-mails in which the former page first alerted his congressional sponsor’s office of Foley’s attentions. The copies of these e-mails, now available to the public, have the names of senders and recipients blotted out.

These revelations mean that Republicans who are calling for probes to discover what Democratic leaders and staff knew about Foley’s improper exchanges with under-age pages will likely be unable to show that the opposition party orchestrated the scandal now roiling the GOP just a month away from the midterm elections.

First, as former Chief of Staff, Fordham would certainly be in a position to know Foley’s logon information and password. Secondly, as the article says, the GOP staffer is no longer working on the Hill. Third, as Chief of Staff for Tom Reynolds, Fordham would have had access to the other emails mentioned in the article - the ones sent by the young page calling Foley’s emails “sick.”

Finally, Fordham has been chummy with one of the prime suspects in this whole orchestrated affair; John Avarosis of Americablog.

Fordham was semi-outed two years ago by The Washington Blade where he told the gay newspaper that he was “out in the community but not in the press.” This was just after he had been named on “The List” by notorious gay activist Michael Rodgers who has made it his life’s work to out gay Republicans, even if it’s against their will. “The List” names GOP lawmakers and staffers who Rodgers claims are gay. Both Foley and Fordham are on The List.

Rogers frequent partner in outing Republicans has been Avarosis. The blogger claims in this article from 2004 that Fordham told him that Foley was indeed gay.

Foley responded to the reports by initiating a telephone press conference among non-gay Florida media and called discussion about his sexual orientation “revolting.” He declined at that time to answer questions about his sexual orientation and subsequently abandoned his bid for the Senate, citing concerns over his father’s health.

Aravosis said he obtained the latest information about the five-term congressman from Foley’s former chief of staff, Kirk Fordham.

Fordham, who is gay, headed up fund-raising efforts for Foley’s aborted Senate campaign and is now the finance director for one of the remaining GOP primary candidates in that race: Mel Martinez, George W. Bush’s former Housing & Urban Development secretary. Martinez has come out in favor of the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Fordham denied ever speaking with Aravosis and said, “I just don’t discuss Congressman Foley’s personal life with reporters, but I’m not sure what their motive is in outing him, other than to draw attention to themselves. Foley has a good track record with gay issues and opposes the FMA.”

Why would Fordham hand over the emails last July to Rodgers/Avarosis who are believed by many - based on past history and boasts made in public more recently - to be hip deep in the campaign to orchestrate this scandal? Perhaps Fordham, a moderate gay Republican, decided to bring down the anti-gay GOP. Or perhaps he genuinely was concerned both for Foley and the pages and wanted to stop the Congressman before he got into real trouble.

Whatever the reason, the FBI will interview Fordham to determine his role in this scandal. There is also word that the FBI is looking very closely at Messrs. Rogers and Avarosis as well and the Soros funded CREW.

Macsmind:

Besides Foley two names that have come into play are Rogers and John Aravosis of America’s Blog. Both are gay activists who on many occasions have threatened not only Foley and Fordham with outing, but others as well. These guys are what we call “Political Thugs”, the only thing they don’t use is guns, but they do nearly as much damage. Others call it by it’s real name - blackmail.

Again, the FBI - and I have this on good source - are aware of both individuals and looking into their involvement as well. As I said before we cops aren’t so stupid as to just look at an IM log or an email and say, “Oh look at that?, case closed!”

You have to prove that they originated on a specific computer, from a specific individual. If they weren’t they you have to find out who did create them. In any case are evidence, and as such if they were, as is apparent at this point, withheld from authorities for five months, one year or twenty five minutes, that’s breaking the law and such individuals could be charged for that.

I wonder how hard the MSM will be working to get leaks on the case from the FBI regarding the Democratic activists who have nursed this scandal baby for so long and now see the fruits of their labors plastered all over the newspapers of the world?

Well here we are - another post defending pedophiles, excusing GOP coverups, enabling child rapists, and may I throw in a little gay bashing too, please?

You lefties are no fun at all…

Actually, the scandal involving Congressman Foley was in desperate need of some fresh outrage, what with most of us having reached the point of outrage fatigue about 48 hours ago.

Never fear. More dirty IM’s and this time…PRESTO! We Got Orgasm!

Former Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) interrupted a vote on the floor of the House in 2003 to engage in Internet sex with a high school student who had served as a congressional page, according to new Internet instant messages provided to ABC News by former pages.

ABC News now has obtained 52 separate instant message exchanges, which former pages say were sent by Foley, using the screen name Maf54, to two different boys under the age of 18.

Maf54: I miss you
Teen: ya me too
Maf54: we are still voting
Maf54: you miss me too

The exchange continues in which Foley and the teen both appear to describe having sexual orgasms.

I fully expect that by Friday, we will have solid evidence that Foley had personal, inappropriate sexual contact with a teenager. The revelation will occur when the story once again needs a boost to gin up the outrage, it not being enough that Foley is a criminally debauched scumbag who is now practicing the fine art of damage control by claiming 1) It was the booze; and 2) I was molested myself as a teenager by a priest. Excuse us while we collectively gag on the bile rising in our throats as we witness once again that time honored technique, honed to perfection by the high and mighty, who try and elicit sympathy for themselves by attempting to prove that their dastardly deeds were really not their fault.

It was Demon Rum or the Siren’s Song of Drugs or My Daddy Beat Me or My Momma Slept With Me or I Was a Victim Myself Once and on and on…

Predictable. And contemptible.

Speaking of contemptible, here’s a little bit of hypocrisy brought to you by that bastion of truth, justice, and the anti-American way at Daily Kos. Is it important in the scheme of things regarding Foley and the Republicans? Naw. But it sure is fun to make the left look more idiotic than they already are.

You may be aware that the Kos Kids have their very own liberal encyclopedia called “dKosopedia.” This saves them time and effort when needing to quickly identify what the party line is on any given historical event or individual in politics as well as giving them a shared narrative that surrounds them and binds their universe together. Kind of like the Force but without all those nasty religious overtones.

A good friend of this site who blogs at Superfun Power Hour has dug up some information that shows how very seriously the Kos Kommunity is taking this Foley business - so seriously that they have amended the entry in the dKosopedia describing the only similar incident in Congressional history - the Gerry Studds disgrace (or triumph depending on your point of view).

Here’s the original entry on the Studds Stud Scandal via a cached version:

On July 20, 1983, Gerry was censured for having an affair 10 years earlier with a male page. He turned his back as the charges against him were read. The anti-gay crew had worked hard to demonize him (as they would Barney Frank several years later over allegations of a male prostitute having clients in Frank’s apartment). Gerry held a press conference with the page and admitted to a relationship. They each firmly stated that what had gone on in their bedroom was their business, and absolutely no one else’s.

Now here is the version as it appears today after having undergone a slight revision - namely the highlighted section above disappears down the rabbit hole:

On July 20, 1983, Studds was censured for having an affair 10 years earlier with a male page. At the same time, Rep. Dan Crane (R-IL) was censured for having a relationship with a female page in 1980. Studds refused to apologize for his conduct and turned his back as the charges against him were read. He later held a press conference with the page and admitted to a relationship, and they each stated that what had gone on in their bedroom was their business, and absolutely no one else’s.

It seems that there are people who defend pedophiles like Studds by calling their accusers “the anti-gay crew” and people who condemn pedophiles like Foley unequivocally - except one of the groups gets to erase history whenever it’s convenient to do so. After all, it just wouldn’t do to apologize for one pedophile while putting on your outrage suit to condemn another.

Again, not particularly relevant to anything except its fun to catch the liberals with their pants around their ankles. And besides, its been 24 hours and no one has called me any vile names. I sorta miss it…

I might as well make this clear at the outset. If I’ve learned anything over the last two days about lefty commenters who visit The House it is that their attention span and reading comprehension skills leave much to be desired. Therefore, I will write about the issues that we can all agree on right up front so that I don’t get idiots accusing me of supporting Foley or abetting a cover up by the GOP House leadership simply because they don’t take the time or make the minimal effort to actually read what I write.

This is what we know and what we can extrapolate from the facts:

* Foley is a pervert. And I cannot believe that these raunchy IM’s published so far is the limit of his perversion. Not only am I sure that there are more victims out there but that I think it possible that he has had physical contact with pages of an inappropriate nature. I base this on the fact that he showed an inordinate amount of interest in the pages throughout his career which would give him the opportunity and that the IM’s demonstrate the desire for such contact. I understand that the age of consent in Washington D.C. is 16 so it is probable that no laws were broken. But that doesn’t mitigate against the horrific violation of trust if such acts occurred.

* The House GOP leadership - indeed probably many on both sides of the aisle - knew of Foley’s predilections and did nothing about it. Are you trying to tell me that if Republican House pages were warned about Foley 5 years ago that at least some Democratic Pages weren’t also aware? That’s laughable. I’m sure the FBI will have some interesting conversations with former pages that will reveal not only that the Democratic pages had heard the rumors about Foley also but that they had dutifully passed them on to Democratic staffers.

* Foley’s sick behavior through the years was suspected, never proven. For that reason, when the email exchange with the ex-Page took place last year, the House leadership dropped the ball by not carrying out some kind of an investigation. Would that have revealed the existence of the IM’s and perhaps other things? Maybe not. But any such investigation would have ruined his career and left the leadership wide open to attacks by the left that they were persecuting a gay man. In effect, it was a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation which makes the smug charges by Democrats today - some of whom may have known about Foley as well - ring a little hollow. Nevertheless, to out a potential sexual predator in their midst should have overrode any other concerns.

* There will be a torrent of revelations over the coming weeks as the FBI investigation reveals all the seamy details as well as the extent of knowledge by both Democrats and Republicans about Foley’s perversion. Look also for an investigation in just how those emails and IM’s came into the possession of the mainstream media.

And it is on that front that I will address the remainder of this post. Because like it or not, this has become a political story. And certainly a large part of the politics of it is the growing realization that this story has been an electoral black bag operation, that it may have been planned for months, and that it was timed to explode for maximum political effect.

THE STRANGE GOINGS ON AT STOPSEXPREDATORS

Yesterday, I gave a detailed analysis of the blog that started the whole affair by publishing the emails of a former page from Congressman Foley last Sunday.

Since then several amazing things have come to light. First, and least importantly, the formatting of the email from Foley to the former page sent last year is different on the SSP website than those displayed on the CREW website.

First noticed by Barking Mad who left a link in my comments about it, a full analysis by Just One Minute commenter JM Hanes shows the discrepancy to be interesting :

The Foley messages themselves occupy the next 5 pages, which is where it gets interesting. It looks like the first message (which would logically be e-mail 1), in which Foley verifies the email address, is the only one which has actually been forwarded in its entirety. The remaining messages appear to have been pasted into separate emails of their own (hence the subject lines listing e-mail 2, etc), and not forwarded. I.E. they contain the putative text alone, without any headers attached.

It appears that the STOP blog took the header from the first message (p. 4), cropped out the redundant [Maf54@aol.com] in the “From” line, and eliminated the “To” line altogether — and then spliced it onto each of the other individual texts.
In other words, there’s no way of knowing whether the incriminating text provided to the recipient in the CREW pdf represents actual emails at all. It could have come from anywhere. It’s also possible that the young man didn’t want to pass on the emails in their entirety, opting instead to extract and paste in relevant material alone. One might wonder who was determining what might or might not be relevant — as well as wondering precisely who the redeacted recipient of this collection on Aug. 31, 2005 might have been.

In any case, the only email which includes the Foley header is completely innocuous, and if you click on the individual emails at STOP, you’ll notice that, oddly enough, the jpeg titles include “cropped.”

(See the whole comment for links to the emails found on the SSP site and a pdf filed of the CREW version of the emails)

What makes this little more than an historical curiosity is the fact that reporters for several news organizations - including the St. Petersburg Times - confirmed the authenticity of the emails with the former page himself thus making any effort to cast aspersions on this or that version of them moot.

The authenticity of the IM’s may be a different story. But the emails that were reported to the House leadership last year have been authenticated so that any attempt to debunk them is doomed to failure.

But that’s not the only thing about the SSP website that is curious. The entire website has vanished as of today. All 8 posts (as Tom McGuire sardonically remarked of the site “which started in July and brought down the Congressional leadership with its sixth, seventh and eighth posts.”) are gone along with the emails and all the archives. The domain name “stopsexpredators.blogspot.com” seems to have been taken over either by a strawman or someone who is genuinely concerned about stopping sexual predators.

Of one thing we can be absolutely certain; Stop Sexual Predators had nothing whatsoever to do with the issue of fighting child pedophiles and everything to do with publicizing the emails from Congressman Foley to the former page. There can be no other explanation for its disappearance. Why would it close up shop just when it had scored a great coup that advanced its reason for being?

This means, of course, that at least as far as the publicizing of the emails, this was a clandestine Democratic/leftist effort to at the very least, raise questions about Foley’s behavior. And given what happened less than 24 hours after the emails were brought to the attention of Brian Ross at ABC News - the revelatory and raunchy IM’s being given to ABC news - a genuine dot connecting exercise can be undertaken to link both events. While not a certainty, it is compelling evidence that whoever published the emails on the SSP blog was either aware of the incriminating IM’s or had both in their possession.

NOTE: The link above is to the site “Stop Sexual Predators” not Stop Sex Predators. I apologize for the mixup. Someone sent me an incorrect link.

Obviously, that weakens the case that SSP was definitely set up to dump the emails onto the blogosphere. However, I find it strange that the person in charge of the website has not posted anything else since aknowledging his coup with the emails. Mission accomplished, perhaps?

THE KOS CONNECTION

Almost a month ago, a “two comment wonder” at Daily Kos known as WHInternnow revealed that it was an “open secret” that Foley liked the young interns and pages on the Hill and at the White House. Blog PI picks up the story:

They are probably also the same person: On Sept. 24, WHInternNow posted a dKos diary about the SSP posts almost as soon as the scans went up, but claimed to have innocently stumbled upon them via Google. Yeah, right.

And earlier this last week, before ABC’s Brian Ross obtained the more-damning Foley IMs and took the story national, Wonkette’s Alex Pareene took notice of SSP’s e-mails, and was uncharacteristically constrained in deeming the e-mails false…

One immediately wonders where Wonkette would have gotten a hold of the emails (or at least directed to the incredibly obscure SSP website). Even though they believed them to be fakes, given the enormous readership of the blog, it is likely that this is what triggered MSM interest in the story.

THE STRANGE GENESIS OF THE RAUNCHY IM’S

Questions about the IM’s authenticity are already arising as a result of the altering of the emails. However, the WaPo story seems to indicate that it was common knowledge among pages that Foley sent raunchy IM’s:

Also yesterday, a former House page said that at a 2003 page reunion, he saw sexually suggestive e-mails Foley had sent to another former page. Patrick McDonald, 21, now a senior at Ohio State University, said he eventually learned of “three or four” pages from his 2001-2002 class who were sent such messages.

At the very least, this would seem to indicate that even if the IM’s are fakes, others will testify that they received such raunchy IM’s from Foley. This is probably why he resigned from office.

But how do you “save” an IM? I’m sure there’s a way to do it but it can’t be easy. A better question would be why hang on to the IM’s for 4 or 5 years? My guess would be that such personal messages from a person of such power could have come in handy if questions ever arose about a relationship with Foley. Not blackmail but protection.

If the IM’s were in the possession of the left wing Public Interest Group CREW who then handed them over to ABC News, a legitimate question can be raised about how long they had those IM’s and why they didn’t notify the FBI sooner. If they had them for months (and since the SSP website went up in July we can assume as much) then CREW should be severely criticized for holding back information that placed young lives at risk. In the end - if they did indeed hold on to the IM’s for months - CREW can be singled out for the harshest criticism for the preferment of political gain at the expense of the safety of the pages.

How much of a story will this black bag operation be? Since it was done partly in the cause of ridding the Congress of a pervert, one perhaps cannot condemn it completely. However, it does demonstrate a nauseating cynicism on the part of the left when it comes to electoral politics and makes the hypocritical charges of “cover-up” resonate all the more with those who are disgusted by such tactics.

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.

Catchy headline, eh? The point of it is that the netnuts are either implying as much in their criticisms or are actually saying so.

Taylor Marsh: “MARK FOLEY: Just Another Republican Pervert”

John Aravosis: “GOP House page board chair may have helped cover-up Foley scandal.”

Oliver Willis: “Republican Pedophile Scandal: They Knew”

The Democratic Daily: “Got Values? Republican House Leadership Cover Up for Suspected Pervert in Congress”

Facts you say? You want facts? Why in God’s name do you want to ruin a perfectly good scandal 40 days before the election by muddying the waters with a bunch of facts?

Well, maybe we can start with the statement issued by the Chairman of the House Page Board, Representative Shimkus:

“As chairman of the bipartisan House Page Board in late 2005, I was notified by the then Clerk of the House, who manages the Page Program, that he had been told by Congressman Rodney Alexander about an email exchange between Congressman Foley and a former House Page. I took immediate action to investigate the matter.

“In that email exchange, Congressman Foley asked about the former Page’s well-being after Hurricane Katrina and requested a photograph. When asked about the email exchange, Congressman Foley said he expressed concern about the Page’s well-being and wanted a photo to see that the former Page was alright.< [> “Congressman Foley told the Clerk and me that he was simply acting as a mentor to this former House Page and that nothing inappropriate had occurred. Nevertheless, we ordered Congressman Foley to cease all contact with this former House Page to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. We also advised him to be especially mindful of his conduct with respect to current and former House Pages, and he assured us he would do so. I received no subsequent complaints about his behavior nor was I ever made aware of any additional emails.

“It has become clear to me today, based on information I only now have learned, that Congressman Foley was not honest about his conduct.

“As Chairman of the House Page Board, I am working with the Clerk to fully review this incident and determine what actions need to be taken.

The “jumping to conclusions” crowd has ignored this statement and the facts contained therein to accuse the Republican House leadership of covering up the actions of a known pervert. While by any stretch the contact with the page was inappropriate, it hardly rises to the level of “perversion” as it was reported to the Page Board last year and trying to make it seem so is the dirtiest kind of politics.

It disturbs me that the parents of the page did not want to pursue the matter at that time. There are many reasons for that but one that leaps out and begs to be investigated further is if there was pressure put on the parents by Republican members of Congress to drop the matter. Another perfectly logical explanation is that the emails were, in fact, innocent sounding attempts to inquire as to the youth’s well being and the parents were satisfied with the Congressman’s explanation.

But why let common sense or common decency for that matter spoil a good smear campaign? The muddy hoofprints left by Democrats over the last few years as they have dirtied the reputations of several Republicans who have later turned out to be innocent (Karl Rove in Plamegate for one) reveals a party so totally bereft of ideas that their only hope to take advantage of the monumentally stupid and disastrous Republican leadership is to pray for more Americans to die in Iraq and Afghanistan, hope that gas prices go higher, and wish for an economic downturn. Even with Republicans as weak and vulnerable as they have been in a generation or more, the Democrats still could lose thanks to a party so intellectually bankrupt and morally ambivalent that they can’t bring themselves to tell the American people the truth about their cut and run strategy in Iraq or that they fully intend to initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States at the earliest possible moment after they achieve power in the House.

It is clear from the polls that the American people are so fed up with Republicans that this summer, they turned toward the Democrats to see what they had to offer in the way of new ideas and new leadership. What they got was a blend of deranged Bush bashing, conspiracy mongering, and outright lies about their intentions. This latest Republican scandal will probably not amount to much (despite the efforts of the netnuts to make it into something larger than it is as they tried to do with the Gannon/Guckert affair) which means that as the American people continue to implore the Democrats to give them something that they can vote for, all they do is remind the country why they have lost so many previous elections in the first place.

UPDATE

As is usual when TBogg links here, the knuckledraggers with IQ’s smaller than their penis length swarm my site and spit vulgarity in the comments section with a regularity that makes me think they are either under 10 years of age or have the same familiarity with the English language than they do with the ideas of Proust or Kierkegaard - or Donald Duck for that matter.

I will brook no vulgarity (save mine) in the comments. If that doesn’t sit well with you, eat me.

Secondly, here is the sum total of what is known about GOP leadership knowledge of Foley’s perversion:

Shimkus recalled that when he initially questioned Foley about the e-mails, the congressman assured him that he was “simply acting as a mentor” and that “nothing inappropriate had occurred.”

Foley said he was e-mailing to find out if the teenager was OK after Hurricane Katrina and “wanted a photo to see that the former page was all right,” Shimkus said.

Foley was ordered to have no further contact with the former page and advised “to be especially mindful of his conduct,” Shimkus said.

“And he assured us he would do so,” Shimkus’ statement added. “I received no subsequent complaints about his behavior nor was I ever made aware of any additional e-mails.”

In his e-mails, Foley purportedly asked the page to send a picture of himself to the congressman, asked the teen what he wanted for his birthday and made comments about another former page in which Foley allegedly said he acted “much older than his age” and was “in really great shape.” (More details)

Some GOP leaders knew of contact

An aide to Rep. Tom Reynolds, the New York congressman who heads the National Republican Campaign Committee, said he knew about the matter a year ago.

The GOP panel coordinates election efforts for House Republicans, who now must find a candidate to replace Foley in Florida’s 16th District, six weeks before the election.

Majority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, learned about the contacts from Louisiana Rep. Alexander in the spring, said Boehner’s spokesman, Kevin Madden.

“It was Congressman Alexander’s opinion that the contact was not of a professional nature,” Madden said.

Now I realize how eager many of you are to connect all these dots and start accusing people of all sorts of conpsiracies to keep this thing quiet. And I will happily join you in hanging by their toes the entire Republican leadership if it turns out that they knew more than what is reported here and failed to do anything.

But people - there is no “there” there. All you have to ponder at the moment is the very good question of what did they know and when did they know it. Nowhere in my post do I say that we shouldn’t get to the bottom of this (as one idiotic mouthbreather suggested breathlessly in the comments - so pleased with himself that he could string more than 4 words together and make a sentence) and in fact, I open a whole other line of questioning that even you netnuts have failed to highlight - the possibility of obstruction of justice by GOP members who worked to keep the parents of the boy whose case came before the Page board quiet.

But the fact of the matter is all you are doing at the moment is engaged in a gigantic smear campaign. Period. There is no argument there because the facts are, at the moment, unknown. You have jumped the gun making the wildest of charges without any knowledge whatsoever of the facts and all it does is expose you for the brutish louts you truly are.

Keep it clean or begone.

UPDATE II

My good friend and fellow American Thinker contributor Clarice Feldman left a comment that deserves to be elevated for greater readability. It is, something of an eye popper:

Reportedly the St Pete Times had the same information in August 2005 and wrote nothing about it either, apparently because the emails do not constitute illegal conduct, they are just creepy, and the boy’s parents did not wish to pursue this.

Pardon an old lady’s suspicions. I’ve seen this dance too many times before.

I read this morning that a Monroe, LA newspaper also had the story and didn’t run with it because there appeared to be no impropriety.

And one more point that our dimwitted lefty friends can’t seem to wrap their miniscule brains around; the incident that was brought to the attention of the Page Board is unconnected to any of the raunchy, sick emails ABC news got from, as Clarice informs us, CREW.

Why the release of the emails and IM’s now is a question that answers itself 40 days before an election. And if it turns out that the GOP leadership is blameless in this - if Foley carried on his perversions in secret with only the terrified children knowing of his activities - then the question rightly arises why a Democrat connected organization allowed someone they knew as a pervert to continue to stalk children in the House of Representatives, failing to release the information until maximum political damage could be done to the opposition.

NRO’s Jonah Goldberg is usually a level headed sort of fellow, not given to wild flights of illogic or unreasonable argumentation. But Mr. Goldberg’s piece justifying some kinds of torture in yesterday’s online edition left me cold.

Sounding very much like a man trying to convince himself of something he believes to be wrong but thinks that if he talks about it long enough and with plenty of conviction he can turn the moral tables on the issue and justify it to his own satisfaction, Goldberg makes some rather startling arguments in favor of torture.

It should be noted that Goldberg is one of the only writers - conservative or liberal - who has made an effort to actually come to grips with this issue on a practical basis rather than a purely moral plane. This is a dubious distinction however because once started down that road, one inevitably makes a hash of both the moral arguments and the practical realities of the issue.

Almost by default, if one tries to define torture, the slope tilts precipitously and the surface is greased - albeit with good intentions. This is because the justification/rationalization for torture can never be based on firm and unbending principle but rather on a foundation of moral quicksand that constantly shifts position according to time and circumstance. Goldberg sees this and recognizes the pitfalls but fails to draw the one necessary conclusion; torture, however you define it, is wrong and trying to construct a framework that allows for it is something akin to herding cats. You can never quite close the corral because it’s a virtual certainty you’ve missed something somewhere.

Where Goldberg nails it is in his characterization of the hysterical denunciations by the American left and international human rights organizations of our detainee policies:

When confronted with the assertion that the Soviet Union and the United States were moral equivalents, William F. Buckley responded that if one man pushes an old lady into an oncoming bus and another man pushes an old lady out of the way of a bus, we should not denounce them both as men who push old ladies around.

In other words, context matters.

Not according to some. Led by Time magazine’s Andrew Sullivan, opponents of the CIA’s harsh treatment of high-value terrorists have grown comfortable comparing Bush’s America to, among other evils, Stalin’s Russia.

The tactic hasn’t worked, partly because many decent Americans understand that abuse intended to foil a murder plot is not the same as torturing political dissidents, religious minorities, and other prisoners of conscience. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was not asked to renounce his faith or sign a false confession when he was reportedly waterboarded. His suffering wasn’t intended as a form of punishment. The sole aim was to stop an ongoing murder conspiracy, which is what al Qaeda is. If accounts from such unbiased sources as ABC News’ Brian Ross are to be believed, his suffering saved American lives.

Comparing CIA facilities to Stalin’s gulag may sound righteous, but it is a species of the same moral relativism that denounces all pushers of old ladies equally.

On this, all serious people should be able to agree. However, it should be pointed out that we don’t know exactly what “enhanced techniques” were used on KSM to elicit the information that led to foiling several plots against Americans. While waterboarding may be a necessary violation of the Geneva Convention under the rubric of the “ticking bomb” scenario, what else would be justified? Electrodes on genitalia? Pulling out fingernails? If, as one must assume, torture “works” in these instances, why stop at waterboarding?

In fact, Goldberg makes no distinction between waterboarding and nail pulling in his time sensitive scenario:

But there is no equivalent word for murder when it comes to torture. It’s always evil. Yet that’s not our universal reaction. In movies and on TV, good men force evil men to give up information via methods no nicer than what the CIA is allegedly employing. If torture is a categorical evil, shouldn’t we boo Jack Bauer on Fox’s 24? There’s a reason we keep hearing about the ticking time bomb scenario in the torture debate: Is abuse justified in getting a prisoner to reveal the location of a bomb that would kill many when detonated? We understand that in such a situation, Americans would expect to be protected. That’s why human-rights activists have tried to declare this scenario a red herring.

Sullivan complains that calling torture “aggressive interrogation techniques” doesn’t make torture any better. Fair enough. But calling aggressive interrogation techniques “torture” when they’re not doesn’t make such techniques any worse.

Still, there is a danger that over time we may not be able to tell the difference.

While recognizing that the slope is getting slippery and that repeated violations of the Geneva strictures could inure us to the consequences, Goldberg’s arguments go off the rails when he raises the specter of the fictionalized torture portrayed by TV heroes. It is not a question of booing them for causing physical discomfort to a suspect who can lead them to the ticking bomb. It’s a question of what constitutes a “ticking bomb” in the first place.

Do we practice these “enhanced techniques” on terrorists to discover whether there is an imminent threat? Or do we only do it when we’re sure that there’s a plot nearing fruition?

Jack Bauer knows that a terrorist strike is imminent which justifies his brutal treatment of prisoners in most people’s minds. But in the real world, that kind of certainty is almost definitely lacking. And even though the capture of a “high value” terrorist operative would almost by definition be an intelligence bonanza regarding future attacks, the idea that any of them would be imminent and a direct threat to American citizens would almost certainly be unknown. Therefore, torture would be carried out in these cases not to necessarily uncover any plots but rather to see if there are any plots worth responding to in the first place.

How slippery is that slope now?

Goldberg’s reasoning becomes most muddled when he can’t seem to make up his mind about the “taboo” of torture versus its utility in stopping the ticking bomb:

Taboos are the glue of civilization because they define what is beyond the pale in ways mere reason cannot. A nation that frets about violating the rights of murder-plotters when the bomb is ticking is unlikely to violate the rights of decent citizens when the bomb is defused.

I suspect this is what motivates so many human-rights activists to exaggerate the abuses and minimize their effectiveness. Slippery-slope arguments aren’t as powerful as moral bullying. Still, their fears aren’t unfounded. Once taboos have been broken, a chaotic search ensues for where to draw the new line, and that line, burdened with precedent and manufactured by politics, rarely holds as firmly as the last. But that is where history has brought us.

In the recent debate over torture, everybody decided to kick the can down the road on what torture is and isn’t. This argument will be forced on us again, no matter how much we try to avoid it. We’ll be sorry we didn’t take the debate more seriously when we had the chance.

First of all, the argument that a nation that frets about torturing terrorists won’t torture criminals or dissenters has no basis in fact whatsoever and indeed, common sense would dictate the opposite. Once the taboo is broken for one reason, it becomes easier to do so for another - something that Goldberg recognizes but for some reason fails to draw the necessary conclusion. We can agonize about the issue but the fact remains, it is the government that sets the policy. And with this Administration (and probably future ones as well) who rightly see America at war, it is hard to imagine the challenges we’ll face tomorrow and what measures they might see as necessary to protect the homeland.

This is why strictures against torture must remain in place - even strictures against waterboarding and other techniques that only cause a prisoner psychic discomfort or physical inconvenience. Without the “taboo” of violating the Geneva Convention, there is no hard surface beneath our feet where we can anchor ourselves against the ravages of our own rationalizations and self justifications. Ends and means can blur together into unresolvable amorphous shapes making it hard to differentiate between what is necessary and what is merely convenient or easy. In this respect, Goldberg’s arguments fail the tests of specificity and consistency.

I applaud Mr. Goldberg’s effort to tackle the issue. And although he reaches what I believe to be are incorrect conclusions, the issue is by no means resolved and there is plenty of room for further debate and reflection.