Conspiracy theories
Yesterday I mentioned that, while tinfoil hat wearing bloggers might be able to discover a Democratic conspracy in the Foley affair, it would take a star quality loon to properly blame the victim. Matt Drudge was that loon. Not to be outdone by a mere gossip columnist, Rush Limbaugh leapt to his microphone to announce that it wasn't just that the victim was the real criminal here, but that the victim must have been put up to it by a conspiracy of Democrats.

I'm just thinking out loud here. What if somebody got to the page and said, you know, we want you to set Foley up. We need to do a little titillating thing here. Keep it and save it and so forth. How would you get a kid to do that? Yeah, who knows? You threaten him or pay him. There's any number of ways given the kind of people that we're dealing with and talking about here. ... I'm just telling you that the -- the -- the orgy and the orgasm that has been taking place in the media since Friday and with the Democrats is -- it's all coordinated, and it's all -- it's all oriented toward the election.

The next inevitable narrative will to blame liberal cultural elites and start some gay bashing. I'll save that for my next post.

The inevitable arrives
You all knew it was just a matter of time before someone got around to blaming the pages for Foley and the cover-up, didn't you? Plenty of rightwing bloggers have donned their tinfoil hats to figure out how this is all the fault liberals, Democrats, or the mainstream media, but it took a star quality loony like Matt Drudge to actually get down and claim the pages tricked Foley into writing those messages.

And if anything, these kids are less innocent — these 16 and 17 year-old beasts…and I've seen what they're doing on YouTube and I've seen what they're doing all over the internet — oh yeah — you just have to tune into any part of their pop culture. You're not going to tell me these are innocent babies. Have you read the transcripts that ABC posted going into the weekend of these instant messages, back and forth? The kids are egging the Congressman on! The kids are trying to get this out of him. We haven't got the whole story on this.

I think Drudge deserves extra points for his pitch perfect cranky neighbor delivery. "Hey, you kids, get your ball off my lawn!"

One failed strategy
If the Republicans thought they could skate past the Foley scandal by minimizing its importance, they have badly miscalculated.

That they might have actually considered such a bad idea is evidenced by Speaker of the House Hastert referring to the e-mails as "over-friendly" and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow calling them "simply naughty e-mails." As important as his dismissive euphemism, was the context of Snow's comment, which was an attempt to explain the inaction of the House leadership by suggesting they had more important things to do than stop a sexual predator in their midst.

Snow has already been called on his attempt to minimize the issue and retreated from that strategy:

After a reporter challenged the characterization, Snow admitted, "You’re right. That may sound a little bit too glib – I think I’ve used the words... horrifying, appalling, disturbing. Fill in the blanks," he added. "It’s absolutely inappropriate."

With only five weeks to go till the midterm election, this issue seems to have completely disrupted the Republican strategy. While they will no doubt try to regain some lost ground by getting as aggressive and dirty as possible in the few remaining days they have, we should also expect them to begin preparing their face-saving explanation of why it wasn't their fault they lost. Foley could provide an excellent fig leaf for all their other failures, as in: "We didn't lose because the American people don't want our war, don't want our economy, don't want us to dismantle the safety net, don't want us to sell the country to our corporate croniesand don't trust us or our president as far as they can throw us; no we lost because of Foley."

Update :It looks like Rep. Tom Reynolds didn't get the memo; last night he was still trying to minimize the significance of Foley's communications by calling them “overly friendly chit-chat.”

Circular investigations
Most news outlets this morning are reporting that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert called on the FBI to "investigate not only Foley but also who knew about the messages without reporting them to authorities." This makes it sound like Hastert is asking for an investigation of the congressional Republicans who have been covering up Foley's actions for at least one year and possibly as long as five years. That would be the responsible thing to do, but that's not exactly what his request asks.

Therefore, I also request that the Department undertake an investigation into who had specific knowledge of the content of any sexually explicit communications between Mr. Foley and any former or current House pages and what actions such individuals took, if any, to provide them to law enforcement. I request that the scope of your investigation include any and all individuals who may have been aware of this matter-be they Members of Congress, employees of the House of Representatives, or anyone outside the Congress.

It appears to me, and to others, the phrase "anyone outside the Congress" is an attempt to direct the investigation towards the reporters and activists who broke the story. Attacking the messengers, whether leakers or investigators, is a standard play for parties in power but an especial favorite for the modern Republican Party.

The FBI already had announced an investigation before Hastert made his request and Hastert will not be determining the scope of that investigation. But how much are we to trust the FBI?

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the organization that broke the Foley story claims they turned Foley's e-mails over to the FBI the same day they received them last July. The FBI chose not to investigate at that time. Attorney General Gonzales has made a major priority out of pursuing internet pedophiles, so the question naturally arises: did he or someone else protect a Republican congressman from investigation? CREW is requesting an investigation into the FBI's inactivity.

So we have Hastert asking the FBI to investigate CREW and CREW asking for an investigation of the FBI. Meanwhile, Hastert is meeting with the very same Republican supervisors of the pages' program who covered up for Foley "to review ways to protect pages." Resigning in shame leaps to mind as one possible step in the right direction.

Aftershocks
The Mark Foley affair doesn't end with his hasty resignation. There will be aftershocks for a while to come. The Republican leadership wants to make this go away as quickly as possible, but, with less than six weeks till the election, it's unlikely that it will vanish fast enough for their tastes. Two questions stand out at the moment, has there been a cover-up and what does this mean for the election?

The short answer to the first question is "yes, there has been a cover-up." At least five Republicans in positions of responsibility knew about Foley's inappropriate* e-mail contacts with teenage pages and kept quiet about it. More revealing is the fact that some of them saw this more as a problem for their reelection campaign than as a problem of ethics.

House Majority Leader John Boehner told The Washington Post last night that he's known about this since last spring. Rep. John Shimkus, the head of the Page Board, knew about the problem since last fall, but thought it was enough to take Foley's word that the e-mails were innocent and he wouldn't do it again. Shimkus closed the matter, off the record, without notifying the only Democratic member of the board, Dale Kildee. Rep. Rodney Alexander, who sponsored one of the pages has known about Foley's inappropriate messages for "10 or 11 months." Alexander might have a partial excuse for his silence because, he claims, the parents of the page asked him to keep it quiet (assuming he didn't pressure them in that direction). On the other hand, he reported it to Tom Reynolds, chairman of the House Republican reelection committee, but not to the Ethics Committee. Reynolds says he notified Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert in February, three months after first hearing about it. As Mustang Bobby observed, they must be getting their legal advice from the Vatican.

Let's be very clear what the issue is here: the Republican Party only became interested in investigating a possible sexual predator in their midst when it become a public embarrassment for them. As long as the only issue was the good of the victims, they couldn't have cared less. This is potentially a criminal issue. If Foley is charged with a crime, then anyone who was in on the cover-up should be charged with withholding evidence.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi demanded an investigation into the Foley matter last night, but Boehner was able to stifle further public discussion by referring the matter to the Ethics Committee. Normally, this would seem like the right thing to do, but for several years the Ethics Committee has been a black hole of inaction. The committee is currently headed by Doc Hastings who, I'm sad to say, represents my mother's district in central Washington. Hastings is part of the class of 1994, the group of Republicans elected in the Gingrich revolution. For twelve years he has been a dependable Party soldier and the perfect picture of a do nothing rubber-stamp in hands of the Party leadership. Hastings was appointed to head the Ethics Committee two years ago to replace Joel Hefley, who had proven undependable to the party when he allowed Tom DeLay to be investigated and criticized.

Hastings will no doubt try to delay action on this till after the election and the Republican Party will take the position that they can't discuss the issue while an investigation is going on. Not only has there been a cover up for the last year, the Party's electoral hopes depend on their ability to keep the cover-up going for another six weeks.

This brings us to the second question: what does this mean for the election? It's clear that this potential scandal has figured into the Republican electoral strategy since they found out about it. At the beginning of the year, Foley was interested in campaigning for Bill Nelson's Senate seat. The Party pressured Foley not to run. At the time many observers believed that the Party was afraid that Foley's well known, but not publicly admitted, homosexuality would be a liability in conservative northern Florida. Foley's dropping out of the race opened the way for Katherine Harris to get the Party's nomination. Now it appears that the Party feared far more than homophobia in north Florida; they knew this skeleton was in Foley's closet (no pun intended) and had to know he couldn't stand the kind of extra scrutiny he would face in a Senate race. Even a Harris candidacy was better than that. Now they have both.

Under Florida law, it's too late to remove Foley's name from the ballot. However, the Republican party has seven days from the time of his resignation in which to name a new candidate. That candidate will get any votes cast for Foley in November. There will, no doubt, be considerable voter confusion over this. With the Republican Party facing the very real prospect of losing the House, they can't afford to surrender even one seat. They will get the highest profile candidate they can and pour a lot of money into the race.

Locally, the big question is, can even the most beloved candidate rise above the confusion and public revulsion associated with Foley in the short time they have. Nationally, the question is, who participated in the cover-up and how many of them will be dragged down by the scandal.

Five Republican congressmen knew about this, discussed it, and kept it quiet. I'm not sure if that technically rises to the level of criminal conspiracy, but it needs to be investigated by someone other than a tame committee run by Republican congressmen. We need to know if the national Republican Party or the Florida Republican Party knew about this and participated in the cover-up. This story should not be allowed to die, nor should it be scapegoated off on to the shoulders of Mark Foley alone. The entire Republican House leadership needs to explain itself. The voters deserve some answers before the election so they can decide if these are the types of people they want to represent them.

This is no longer just about Mark Foley and his victims.

Update: In the comments, Bryan corrects me on the Florida background.

* So far, only the first e-mail exchange published by ABC News is being discussed by the members Congress. Though creepy, inappropriate is probably the correct word for that particular exchange. The other exchanges, that have since been published, are explicit discussions of masturbation and, therefore, possible felonies. The Republican leadership hasn't admitted any prior knowledge of those exchanges. I'm not sure if any reporters have pushed them on this.

Mom and Dad are fighting
There might be nothing to this, but does anyone have any inside gossip about why AmericaBlog has been dropped from Atrios' blogroll?

One down
Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) just resigned from Congress, effective immediately, after some inappropriate e-mails he wrote to a former male page were published. Foley's seat was considered a safe one for the Republican Party.

Normally I enjoy a good sex scandal mixing things up during the election season, but Foley makes my skin crawl. Foley is not just a gay Republican or a middle-aged guy hitting on someone less than a third his age; Foley is the co-chair of the US House Missing and Exploited Children Caucus. This is someone engaging the very actiity he is supposed to be in charge of fighting. Since "hypocritical" has been watered down through overuse it no longer has the power to describe how contemptable this is. This is betrayal of the worst sort.

The down side of this easy pick up of a seat in the House for our side is that the religious right is going to jump all over this as evidence for their "all homosexuals are pedophiles" narrative. It will give them ammunition to hurt a lot of innocent people. The responsibility for that pain will also rest on Foley's shoulders.

It's not quite too late
I have always hoped that America would outlive me, but I have always carried a nagging dread that it would not. Over the last five years we have taken a number of steps away from being America. Yesterday was the worst of all.

The United States of America is neither a true territorial state nor a nation-state. It is not a state primarily defined by a unique territory nor is it defined by a unique ethnic group of Americans. America is a set of institutions and values and Americans are those people holding citizenship under those institutions and believing in those values. When we abandon those institutions and values we cease to be America. A certain body of territory might still exist on the map with the name "United States of America" and the same group of people might still inhabit it, but it will no longer be America and they will no longer be Americans.

Nothing lasts forever. That's a simple law of nature. Sooner or later everything ends. Some things die; the end is neat and clean. Others whither away and the end is harder to pin down. Sometimes it's a bang, sometimes it's a whimper, but the end always comes. Someday everyone we know will die. Someday everything we have built will be broken and cast aside. Someday America will be gone.

Most people have a hard time believing that. They prefer to believe that every swing one direction will be followed by a swing the other direction. They prefer to believe that everyone will get their turn and that the mistakes of one group will always be fixed by the next group. They prefer to believe that there will always be a tomorrow. Those are pleasant, reassuring beliefs, but none of those things are guaranteed. Some changes are irreversible.

One by one the Bush administration has crossed lines that America never would have crossed: unprovoked war, state authorized torture, unlimited detention without charge or trial, wholesale wiretapping, secret judicial proceedings, unrestrained executive power, repudiating the Geneva Conventions, and, now, selectively withholding the writ of habeas corpus. It's not that we haven't blurred these lines before, but in the past we have always recoiled in horror when it became clear what we were doing. For the last five years the administration has systematically repudiated one American value after another. Congress, through cowardice or approval, has enabled the administration in every one of those steps.

These retreats from our Americanness will not be repaired by a simple change of administration in two years. A new administration might officially reverse every one of these repudiations, but the precedent has been set that American values are no more permanent than the next election. What country will trust us knowing that the Republicans might return? It took sixty years to build the international order that the Bush administration irreparably damaged in a few months from 2001-2003. It took over two hundred years to build the structure of rights that the Bush administration has irreparably damaged over the last five years.

Though we can't reverse the damage, we can stop further damage. It is vitally important that we take away at least one house of his rubberstamp congress (preferably the Senate). The new congress might be gutless, but even that is an improvement over being completely in his pocket. We cannot turn back the clock and regain the structures that he has so grievously harmed, but, given enough time and good will, we might build new structures almost as good. America is not dead yet, but it cannot survive many more of this kind of blow.

Now is not the time to give up the fight.

PS - As someone who has lived through the collapse of a peaceful and prosperous country, Coturnix's views on this should be read by everyone.

Throwing away the constitution
I'm too angry and disgusted to write anything original about this. Here's a few good words from the New York Times:

Here’s what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush administration uses Republicans’ fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser.

And who were the Democrats who betrayed their principles?

Tom Carper (Del.)
Tim Johnson (S.D.)
Mary Landrieu (La.)
Frank Lautenberg (N.J.)
Bob Menendez (N.J)
Bill Nelson (Fla.)
Ben Nelson (Neb.)
Mark Pryor (Ark.)
Jay Rockefeller (W. Va.)
Ken Salazar (Co.)
Debbie Stabenow (Mich.)

...and, of course...

Joe Lieberman (Ct.)

Lincoln Chafee (RI) was the lone Republican to vote in favor of preserving the constitution.

Let's finish with a phrase usually credited to Ben Franklin but probably first made by Richard Jackson. Regardless of who said it first, the phrase should be hung above the entrance to every legislative body in this country.

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Not a joke
The New York Post seems to think sending terrorist threats is a big joke.

MSNBC loudmouth Keith Olbermann flipped out when he opened his home mail yesterday. The acerbic host of "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" was terrified when he opened a suspicious-looking letter with a California postmark and a batch of white powder poured out. A note inside warned Olbermann, who's a frequent critic of President Bush's policies, that it was payback for some of his on-air shtick.

[...]

He asked to be taken to St. Luke's Hospital, where doctors looked him over and sent him home. Whether they gave him a lollipop on the way out isn't known.

The Post writer, Paula Froelich, apparently lacks the senses of perspective and long-term memory necessary to recall that the Post was one of the places hit with real anthrax back in 2001 and that three of her colleagues were hospitalized in that attack. Along with those mental abilities, Ms. Froelich also lacks knowledge that sending bio-threats through the mail is a federal crime. When Clayton Waagner sent fake anthrax threats to Planned Parenthood clinics in late 2001 (after the attack on the Post), he was sent to federal prison for 19 years.

Froelich might make the excuse that she was just following the example of that fine Christian role model for female conservative pundits, Ann Coulter who jokingly (I assume) took credit for a hoax anthrax threat sent to the New York Times last July.

This is a good example of eliminationist rhetoric disguised as humor, a trend increasingly common on the right in recent years. David Neiwert is the local blogosphere expert on this trend and why it is worth our concern. I want to point out a second aspect of this particular example. The fact that Froelich was so monumentally insensitive to her own colleagues experience makes me suspect that her piece wasn't really the result of any kind of meaningful thought process, it was pure reaction on her part.

Although most people would like to think that their opinions are the result of some kind of core values or philosophy and an intelligent deliberative process, the sad fact is that that's not really how we work. In many spheres of life, including, especially, politics, we don't think things through before forming opinions. Instead, early in life, we identify with a group and then adopt the opinions of our group. When faced with a new issue, we check to see what "our team" believes and then rationalize our way around to supporting that position. This often leads people to support positions directly opposed to their deeper value system (or that expose their real value systems). These contradictions give the other side endless opportunities to cry "hypocrisy!"

I'm trying to give Froelich the benefit of the doubt by assuming that she didn't stop to think about the larger implications of anthrax attacks on journalists. I'm assuming that this was an unthinking reflex on her part. She saw an opportunity to gain points for her team by mocking a player on the other side. If she had thought about it, she would never have made light of such a thing.

Of course, I might be wrong and she might really be the biggest jerk in the tri-state region.