Republican Congressman Sends Sex Messages to Underage Boys

yes, and long as he's a white republican and comes from an affluent family...

If it's anything other than that, that's just gross.

 

welcome to partisan politics today. you can forgive anything as long as it's committed by a guy on "your side."

it's disgusting. i've been harping on this for a while now. this is just a great exhibit of it.

 

with clinton it was, "so what...everyone cheats...everyone lies...every president has done it." there was absolutely a defense of clinton. hell, i still read it here, today.

again...i'm not suggesting that what clinton did was as bad as what is happening here...but it's still equivocation for political purposes. if a republican had done the same thing, the dems would have been all over him.

the idea that anyone could believe that one party is more moral or right or good than the other....that just baffles me.

 

Are you perhaps confusing the "Clinton is great" crowd with the "Clinton reclassified extramarital BJs as not cheating" crowd?



BTW I took no part in the Clinton/Monica debates here. My take is that it was unbecoming of his office but not "high crimes and misdemeanors".

WRT Bush, he casually strolled acrossed the "high crimes and misdemeanors" line several times (NSA warrantless wiretaps, international war crimeS, etc.) but impeachment would not serve the country's best interest, short or long term. Bush's missteps will be taken care of at the ballot box, eventually.

 

its the same mentality that allows one to believe that bush is a conservative when he has spent more money than all previous 42 presidents combined (in 4 years, mind you) and has increased the size of the federal government beyond what anyone could have imagined.

its the same mentality that thinks bush is a good christian despite the fact that he thinks torture, even of children is justifiable.

i would take issue with you comparing democrats reaction to clinton vs. foley. i think any reasonable person would say that clinton disgraced the office of the president. in the "real world" people get fired for what he did. he should have been disbarred for lying under oath and he got what he deserved when congress took him thru the ringer. however, most of the country felt that he should not have been impeached and in fact, his approval rating was in the upper 60's. i never voted for clinton and i dont care for him as a president or a person, but i dont think that there is any comparison b/t clinton/lewinsky and foley/16 year old boys. adulturers should be shamed, pedophiles should be locked away.

 

i agree entirely with your assessment, above. that the republicans will write off anything bush does with an excuse.

but i don't see any difference from the other side of the aisle. sorry...i just don't.

 

Why does the FBI want to get ahold of Rep. Foley's little black book?

It has pages in it!!!

 

<p><img alt="and1004blog.jpg" src="http://blogs.chron.com/nickanderson/archives/and1004blog.jpg" width="500" height="378" /></p>

 

Where did I say one thing about justifying his behavior?

I've pointed up the difference between criminal and unseemly that's all....

I don't believe that Foley is even reported to have had sex with any of these pages; he just seems to have flirted pathetically. That is likewise wrong but not as wrong as actually having sex.

 

he wasn't only flirting.. he gave invitations for sex and alcohol.. if one of those pages obliged he would probably have had sex with them already..

isn't that the very reason why sending messages with sexual advances/invitations to minors is illegal?

 

That's part of the irony of this case. Even if he had had sex with some of these kids, that wouldn't necessarily have been illegal because they were the age of consent (16 for the most part) but he is legally getting hung up by a law he helped to draft and made into law which makes it "more" illegal to communicate these matters than to actually consumate them. That is wacked.

 

You have obviously not seen the full transcript, it goes way beyond flirting, it is pretty sordid stuff; hell i consider myself fairly immune to such things but it is pretty nasty to read.

 

what is whacked? the law which makes his communications criminal?

 

Getting hung up? Whacked?

I hate when burglars get hung up on a law that keeps them from murdering. That is whacked.

What are you saying? You don't think people who do something wrong should be held responsible? Why is it whacked?

 

you mean that cyber sex crime act that Foley sponsered?

 

yes.. I don't know what is whacked for giddy.. the fact that there is a law that nails foley or the fact that there is another law which he gets away with..

 

Max, here's a column by Joseph Califano Jr., president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, Lyndon Johnson's assistant for domestic affairs and secretary of health, education and welfare in the Carter administration. It points out the difference between the two scandals.


When the House Could Clean Itself

By Joseph A. Califano Jr.
Wednesday, October 4, 2006

The most troubling aspect of the Mark Foley scandal is not his conduct, disgusting as it was, but what the response of the leadership reveals about the rancid state of partisanship and the consequent decline of the House of Representatives. Speaker Dennis Hastert presides over a legislative body so infested with mistrust that it doesn't even have a functioning ethics committee. Since the House is incapable of washing its own dirty laundry and policing itself, the speaker has to turn over that responsibility to the attorney general and the executive branch of government.

Compare the current situation with the way Speaker Tip O'Neill and the House handled the last scandal involving sexual misconduct with pages, in the summer of 1982.

On "The CBS Evening News With Dan Rather" that June, two former pages, their teenage faces silhouetted to hide their identity, claimed they were victims of sexual abuse by members of Congress. One described homosexual advances by members; the other shocked the nation when he said he had engaged in homosexual relations with three members and procured prostitutes for others. The CBS broadcast sparked a wildfire of reports and rumors about sexual abuse of pages and drug use by members and pages.

Within a week the House had authorized its ethics committee to conduct a full investigation of allegations of "sexual misconduct, illicit drug distribution and use, and offers of preferential treatment in exchange for sexual favors or drugs by Members, officers or employees of the House." House Speaker O'Neill and Minority Leader Robert Michel asked me to be special counsel to the ethics committee, co-chaired by Ohio Democrat Lou Stokes and South Carolina Republican Floyd Spence. I was allowed to select my own staff and given a commitment that I could follow the evidence wherever it led, because, as O'Neill and Michel said, "The integrity of the House is at stake."

Assistant Deputy Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani was the point man for the Justice Department and its grand jury investigation of the charges. We agreed to exchange all relevant information and that there would be no leaks. Allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use were raw meat for a voracious, scandal-hungry Washington press corps, and Giuliani and I came across rumors and fragments of information about many members of Congress. We shared them all with each other, and there were no leaks from him or me.

The big surprise came when the two pages whom CBS had put on its evening news show recanted. They testified under oath that they had lied and that CBS reporter John Ferrugia had put words in their mouths. But uncovering the lies of the pages and the reckless reporting of CBS didn't end our investigation. We had received a host of allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use and sale by other pages and House members. We interviewed, under oath, some 2,000 past and present pages, adults who had supervised and taught them, congressional staffers, and House members. We issued scores of subpoenas.

We found no evidence of widespread sexual misconduct. We did find that Rep. Daniel Crane (R-Ill.) had had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old female page and that Rep. Gerry Studds (D-Mass.) had sexual relations with a 17-year-old male page and had made advances to other teenage male pages.

When I reported our findings to O'Neill and Michel, the dishonor that these members had brought on the House infuriated the two leaders. "Get it out," they said, "and let the committee recommend disciplinary action," which its four Democratic and four Republican members did, unanimously, in July 1983. Crane and Studds were censured by the House. Crane resigned his seat. Studds chose to stay on and was retained in office by his constituents for 13 more years.

But the ethics committee had done its job well, we believed. Our investigation found other misdeeds: House members -- two Democrats and a Republican -- had used drugs. And between 1978 and 1982 a number of House and Senate employees were involved in illicit use and distribution of drugs. All were named (Barry Goldwater Jr., who retired from the House; Fred Richmond, who admitted buying and using drugs and later pleaded guilty to tax evasion; and John Burton, who entered rehab and became a recovering addict with a productive career in the California state legislature). The employees were fired and prosecuted. The House adopted all the changes we recommended to provide far more attentive supervision of pages.

The course the House took in that scandal, and its reaction to the current one, show the difference between a leadership that saw a threat to the integrity of the House of Representatives and one that sees a threat to its continuing control of the institution. It's useful today to remember that there was a time when partisanship took second place to trust and the House leadership had the strength to wash its own dirty laundry.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/03/AR2006100301109.html


As you can see, the difference is huge. The scandal in the early '80's was handled in a bipartisan fashion, and investigated immediately.



Keep D&D Civil.

 

Hastert is done! Any idea how many people he's going to take down with him?

--------------------------

Reynolds Adviser Says He Asked Hastert's Office To "Intervene" In Foley Case Two Years Ago -- Says He'll Tell FBI Everything

By Greg Sargent | bio

Kirk Fordham, the longtime top adviser to Mark Foley who resigned today as chief of staff to NRCC chief Tom Reynolds, has just told the Associated Press that he told Speaker Dennis Hastert's office about Foley's conduct two years ago and asked the leadership "to intervene" in Foley's case -- a year before GOP House leaders have claimed they heard about it. If true, this revelation blows apart the official House leadership line that they were first alerted to the problem when they learned of the "overly friendly" emails. What's more, Fordham also says he'll disclose to the FBI and House ethics committee "any and all meetings and phone calls" regarding Foley's behavior that he had with senior leadership staffers. In other words, this is just getting started.

Full AP story...

A senior congressional aide said Wednesday that he alerted House Speaker
Dennis Hastert's office in 2004 about worrisome conduct by former Rep. Mark Foley with teenage pages -- the earliest known alert to the GOP leadership.

Kirk Fordham told The Associated Press that when he was told about Foley's inappropriate behavior toward pages, he had "more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene."

The conversations took place long before the e-mail scandal broke, Fordham said, and at least a year earlier than members of the House GOP leadership have acknowledged.

Fordham resigned Wednesday as chief of staff to Rep. Thomas Reynolds (R-N.Y).

Fordham spoke to the AP after ABC News quoted unidentified GOP sources as insinuating that he had intervened on behalf of Foley, his former boss, to prevent an inquiry into Foley's conduct.

"This is categorically false," Fordham said. "At no point ever did I ask anyone to block any inquiries into Foley's actions or behavior."

The longtime Capitol Hill aide said he would fully disclose to the FBI and the House ethics committee "any and all meetings and phone calls" regarding Foley's behavior that he had with senior staffers in the House leadership.

"The fact is even prior to the existence of the Foley e-mail exchanges I had more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene when I was informed of Mr. Foley's inappropriate behavior," Fordham said.

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/electio...e_told_hasterts_office_of_foley_two_years_ago

 

from josh --

Well, some stories develop pretty quickly, don't they?

So let's take stock of where we are. For the last four or five days Speaker Hastert and the entire House GOP leadership have been staking their positions on this story: They were notified of some inappropriate but ambiguous emails in late 2005. They addressed the matter with Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL). They had no idea that the underlying truth was as scandalous as what was revealed last Friday. Whether Hastert himself knew about that individual incident or his staff is sort of sub-codicil of the basic line.

Now, one of key figures in the scandal, Kirk Fordham, who was Foley's longtime Chief of Staff and until today Rep. Tom Reynolds' chief of staff, has been fired. And he's come out and said, no, the whole leadership story is a lie. Fordham says he repeatedly told Hastert's then-Chief of Staff Scott Palmer as far back as 2003 that there was a problem with Foley and the pages. And nothing was ever done.

So, two years before the date everyone's been focusing on back in 2005. We're not at parsing little details.

They staked everything on a story. And the story was apparently pure fiction.

Unless Hastert and Co. can thoroughly discredit Fordham in the next few hours (and oh are they going to try) I'd figure Hastert is gone by this time tomorrow if not sooner. And just as a capital ship generates a giant whirlpool as it founders and disappears into the sea, I'm sure he'll be taking several with him.

-- Josh Marshall