KAUS ON FOLEY:
The only clearly guilty party, as far as I can see–aside from Foley–is the New York Times, which hyped the anti-Hastert angle by conflating the earlier, suggestive emails and the later damning ones.
I’m not sure I’m ready to cut Hastert that much slack, though the NYT certainly doesn’t get much either. And Ann Althouse thinks that blaming the closet is letting Foley off too easy: “But many heterosexuals also pursue young subordinates. They are fully open about their sexual orientation, but somehow they do bad things too.”
Meanwhile, Tom Maguire smells a rat — er, besides the obvious one, I mean: “Apparently the Mark Foley story first broke on this new blog, StopSexPredators.blogspot.com, which started in July and brought down the Congressional leadership with its sixth, seventh and eighth posts. Color me skeptical. . . . The story was evidently not quite good enough for the D Kos, but ABC found enough to run with it.”
UPDATE: Apparently, staffers were warning pages about Foley in 2001. And I should note that I’m no relation to Tom Reynolds, in case anyone wonders. Meanwhile, RedState is questioning the timing.
MORE: “If I were one of those sickos. . .”
MORE STILL: Bill Quick has read the IM traffic.
And Eric Scheie comments: “It’s inappropriate behavior by a high-ranking congressman, and no more. . . . So why is the left acting like it’s Watergate?”
EVEN MORE: Reader C.J. Burch offers a prediction:
Once the FBI starts investigating, and they will, all sorts of lurid things are going to come out about the use and abuse of pages on both sides of the aisle. And with Representative Jefferson getting indicted soon… great fun ahead for comedians. I’m beginning to suspect that the Republicans and the Democrats both secretly hate the two party system and are working hard to destroy it. The alternative explanation, that they are both this incompetent, corrupt and sleazy is just too depressing to contemplate.
As I noted below, the response to the Jefferson search makes me wonder what else they’re hiding.