The conspiracy thinkers are out in full attack mode. This article, cited by Mark Levin at NRO as an "excellent" analysis, seems to be missing a number of relevant facts, such as failing to note that the page class of 2001-2002 was warned to be wary of Foley. And Brian Ross of ABC has come out and said that as far as he knows, the people who broke the story are Republicans. (Oh, and in case you were wondering, GayPatriot is swallowing the conspiracy theories whole.)
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this story, because I don't have a lot of time right now (on deadline). Check out Glenn Greenwald (thoughtful), Josh Marshall (dispassionate), AmericaBlog (shrill) for the most complete coverage.
The real issue is the coverup of Foley's activities. Even the hard-right is screaming for Republican blood on this. I can't say that I'm sorry -- it's all of a piece with every other bit of nastiness the right has come up with in recent years -- torture, unlimited presidential power, anti-gay constitutional amendments, the war on individual liberty -- and it's just been coverup after coverup after coverup.
I also want to make a couple of points: the "child predator" mantra that is showing up is not accurate. These pages are minors, but they are legally of age for consensual sex in DC and in most states. We don't have the legal mechanisms to deal with people of this age effectively -- it's all piecemeal, state-by-state, activity by activity: in Illinois, for example, people can have consensual sex at age 17; can vote at 18, can drive at 16, can drink beer and wine at 18 (or could, for a while -- I lose track), but cannot drink hard liquor until 21, can marry before age 21 only with parents' consent, and are not legally "adults" in the full meaning of the word until 21. So, in this case, for purposes of consensual sex, the pages were adults in Washington. Calling it "child molestation" only serves to obscure the issue, which is the attitude of the Republican leadership to the whole thing, on which there seem to be as many different accounts as there are Republicans giving statements. It's hard to reconcile this:
White House spokesman Tony Snow contributed to the political firestorm yesterday when he told CNN the scandal involved "simply naughty e-mails." Democrats assailed the comment, and Snow later called the messages "disturbing," "appalling" and "reprehensible."
with the moral warriors of the Republican party. Note that the e-mails become "reprehensible" after the negative reaction to their being "naughty."
Foley's behavior is still stupid, irresponsible, and more than merely questionable. I've been on the receiving end of behavior like that, and it's creepy. It's nothing you can't handle -- it never even got to the point of having to say "no"in my case -- but it's still creepy.
Foley claims that he never had physical contact with any of these pages, and I can believe that. I don't understand his attraction to very young men, not on a gut level. I can see it -- gay culture, like the culture as a whole, has a youth fixation -- but I don't understand it. Young men are nice to look at, but I can't see putting up with one through a dinner date. (And I seem to have been, at various points in my life, overwhelmingly attractive to much younger men, although I never dated anyone more than eighteen years younger. At this point in the game, I sort of stick at any difference more than ten years or so.) So, questions of relative power aside, do you condemn anyone who has a relationship with a markedly younger person? Cary Grant? Strom Thurmond?
Inevitably, the Democrats-are-just-as-bad apologists are dragging the Gerry Studds story out of mothballs, and the two are no way alike. Studds had a relationship -- physical and, from all we know, emotional -- with a 17-year-old page. The page was of legal age, and the relationship was consensual. There was apparently enough to it that the page appeared with him ten years later. And the House Democrats, instead of trying to cover it up and blame everyone else, censured Studds. From this vantage, I'm not sure they were right in any other than a political sense. And of course, the Democrats don't claim to be the moral guardians of the country.
Of course the Dobson Gang is all over this, with their own brand of deflecting blame. It's because Foley's gay, you see. If he were straight, it never would have happened. Yeah. Right. They are so laughably predictable at this point that it's hardly worth noting.
And more evidence that Andrew Sullivan just doesn't get it:
John Dickerson makes a good point:
For GOP leaders to pay a heavy political price requires either more evidence that they really knew what Foley was doing or for Democrats to form an alliance, at some level, with people who find homosexuality outrageous no matter what the age.
No. There is no need for Democrats to jump on the anti-gay bandwagon on this issue, and Sullivan should know better. It's a stunning lack of perception on his part to call this a "good point." The Christianists are already trying to pin the whole thing on "gay." That's not the way for the Democrats to go. (Of course, it's probably just that Sullivan would prefer the Democrats to continue to play Republican-Lite.)
That's a really stupid comment.
Humor note:
Brian McGrory of the Boston Globe happened to remember this comment by the Man-on-Dog Boy:
``When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm."
This was when the priestly pedophile scandal was at its height in Boston. Heh. Indeed.
(Actually, the parallels between the Republican leadership and the Catholic hierarchy are becoming to close for comfort.)
This one is even funnier. Matt Drudge, via FDL:
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.
Drudge goes on to claim that, based on the IMs, the pages were "egging the congressman on." Sorry -- that's one interpretation, but I think it's a stretch. Think about it: you're 16 or 17 years old and interested in politics, and a congressman is sending you sexy IMs. What's your reaction going to be, keeping in mind that you're mostly hormones and energy anyway. I'm detecting a fair amount of discomfort in some of the responses, and a fair amount of young-man-being-naughty, but leading him on? Please. They didn't initiate contact.
This is indicative to me of what was going on on the pages' end:
"He was consistently kind," said Bryce Chitwood, president of the 2002 page class. "He was just a very friendly man and was always willing to befriend a page. It was something we appreciated. You find yourself very low on the totem pole of the congressional power scale. For a congressman to act like he was interested in a person and cared about us was something pretty special and pretty important. . . ."
Anna Fry, a former House page who said she had never heard about Foley's advances, said some of her classmates may have been tempted to correspond with the congressman after they left because they were eager to land jobs on Capitol Hill.
"After we graduated, everyone wanted to come back. Everyone was looking for an opportunity to stay in Washington," Fry said. "I can see how a 16-year-old would be vulnerable to that."
There it is -- you want to noticed, you want to be appreciated, you're sixteen years old and if the Congressman is a little creepy, well, so are a lot of them, in different ways. Kids don't have that kind of judgment, to be able to figure out immediately whether something is proper. What's so hard to understand? (In my own case, I never thought about whether it was proper. I just knew I didn't want to get involved with the man, and for me it was a question of involvement. It always has been.)
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