Saturday, September 30, 2006

GOP Knew about Foley

In case you didn't know about this sad story already:

Foley, a one-time rising Republican star, resigned Friday after it was revealed he exchanged sexually explicit e-mails with a teenage boy, a former congressional page.


And despite claims to the contrary, the GOP leadership knew about the emails months before they became public:

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was notified early this year of inappropriate e-mails from former representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.) to a 16-year-old page, a top GOP House member said yesterday -- contradicting the speaker's assertions that he learned of concerns about Foley only last week.

Hastert did not dispute the claims of Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.), and his office confirmed that some of Hastert's top aides knew last year that Foley had been ordered to cease contact with the boy and to treat all pages respectfully.


Sigh. Do they just think nobody's going to find out? Oh, but this quote is amusing:

A House GOP leadership aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, said that Reynolds realizes he has taken a shot at his leader but that it is understandable."This is what happens when one member tries to throw another member under a bus," the aide said.

Indeed.

3 comments:

adam said...

They should all be forced to resign in shame.

Anonymous said...

The alarm @ the White House has been going off forever and hitting the snooze button is NOT the answer to a serious wake-up-call! When are we, the lemmings, going to stop jumping off the cliff with the so-called leaders of the pack? Chris

Nat-Wu said...

Well, at least no one has said Foley actually ended up molesting any of the kids. Although I think that he should have been kicked out at the time, it's somewhat understandable why the Repubs didn't want to do that. At my place of work, some years ago we had a situation where the person should have been fired, but was merely demoted. In our case management preferred to get promises that the offender wouldn't do it again rather than fire them immediately. Perhaps it's similar with the Foley situation.

That being said, what is not acceptable is that they haven't yet gotten their stories straight. Someone is lying about their part, and we don't really know if the parents were satisfied with this outcome or not. Evidently the boy himself was none too pleased with Foley, and I'm sure if it was up to him this would have happened already.

I know it's an embarrassing situation, but what they should have done is come forward together and said exactly what happened. That would be more forgivable than lying.