More on Foley

Personally, I'm a little surprised that so much can come out of one member of Congress sending some "naughty" emails and IM's to former House pages. If, like me, you're having trouble staying on top of everything, this post at Real Clear Politics is a pretty good summary of all the current stories out there on this issue. To me the most damning of the House Republicans is this story in the LA Times, which makes it quite clear that Foley's proclivities for teenage boys was well known at least among some in the House:

Years before sexually explicit electronic messages sent by Rep. Mark Foley to teenage House pages became public last week, some on Capitol Hill say, the Florida Republican was known to have a special interest in younger men. In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, several current and former congressional employees and others said they recalled Foley approaching young male pages, aides and interns at parties and other venues.

Beyond the fact that House Speaker Hastern flat-out lied about being told about the emails Foley sent, one has to question the reasoning for why he and other House leaders chose to do nothing about Foley back in 2005. It's not even believable that House staffers and pages knew this, and yet somehow the House leadership were completely in the dark.

House Republicans are making a desperate effort to staunch the bleeding from this story, but the fact of the matter is that it's out of their hands; the revelations are coming too fast and frequent right now. Their only hope is to immediately sack anyone who was involved in the decision not to act on Foley, request an ethics investigation, request a DOJ investigation into the entire matter (not just the IMs they say they didn't know about) and prostrate themselves before the public in the hopes of limiting the damage this does the polls in November.