Separated at birth?
Creepy. Via Kos.
Chat about whatever.
by Tim F| 25 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
by Tim F| 33 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity, War on Terror aka GSAVE®
Following up on John’s post below, lying to the 9/11 Commission is also bad in a way that both easy for Joe Voter to grasp and very hard to spin away. For Condoleeza Rice’s sake I hope that the didn’t do it. But it sure looks like she did.
Find that and more WoT-related tomfoolery in this Sunday piece by Bob Woodward (who is by definition Promoting a Book and therefore suspect). The upshot of Woodward’s reporting seems to be that regarding the Bush admin, crazy liberal bloggers were basically right about everything.
Why did Woodward’s inside sources pull a 180 and reveal the Bush admin for the imcompetent navel-obsessed clowns that they are? Somewhere along the line somebody must have said to himself, they can suck at their jobs this much, but any worse than that and I’m pulling the plug. As nice as it is that the hypothetical line finally got crossed, when you look at the last Woodward book the first thing that comes to mind is the soft bigotry of low expectations. People who found Bush’s management at that point acceptable really don’t expect very much from government.
***Update***
If Woodward is correct wouldn’t George Tenet, who allegedly conducted the briefing, have mentioned it to the 9/11 Commission? This seems like a massively exculpatory detail for Tenet and hardly the sort of thing that he would hide voluntarily. If he did bring it up then the Commission should already know about the discrepancy in their stories, but apparently they had no inkling that the meeting ever happened. I think that Tenet’s side of this story deserves attention as well.
***Update 2***
This post is in: Politics, Republican Stupidity
Wiser folks have said this already, but it is worth reiterating, but the reason this is so damaging to the Republican party is that it resonates with people, pure and simple.
There are a lot of facts to this case we don’t know, and the Republicans and the spinmeisters are going to do their level best to muddy the waters with ambiguity and uncertainties. We really don’t know who “WHINTERNOW” is and why the website that leaked the emails exists or whether it was a hit job or a dirty trick.
But it doesn’t matter.
We really don’t know what exactly the House leadership knew and when they knew it, and I am sure that will all be sanitized and put in the best possible light over the next few weeks.
But it doesn’t matter.
We really don’t know if there was anything the House leadership could have done to stop him based on the vague emails- my guess is there was, but that will be spun away over the next few weeks.
But it doesn’t matter.
We really don’t know if Foley actually had sex with any underage teens.
But it doesn’t matter.
But what we do know, and what the American public now knows, is that the party that has spent the past few years demagoguing safety and security and law and order is now known as the party that has screwed up the Iraq war, that has codified torture, that has been filled to the rim with criminals and crooks fleecing the treasury (and who knows what else), and is now known as the party that at its most basic can’t be trusted, because they are the party that has middle age perverts trying to bugger your kids. And even better, the Republican House Leadership didn’t give enough of a shit to do anything about it because it might get messy or it might get in the way of their desires for power and actively hid the information from the oppostion party and the puBlic (or, as we might say, PEOPLE WHO MIGHT HAVE DONE THE RIGHT THING).
And that matters. People understand that. You can’t get around it, like you can the other issues. Iraq is complicated, and there can be some leeway for mistakes. National security is important, and you can talk away some of the distastrous decisions made by the GOP as simple disagreements. People are jaded and cynical, and when you point to Abramoff and Cunningham and other crooks, people are inclined to throw up their hands and say “All politicans are crooks.”
But when it comes to messing with people’s kids, it is a whole different ball game. It is hard for voters to get past the idea that their kid might be upstairs on his computer getting perved on by middle-aged Republicans while the leadership of the party (the party of values, mind you), informed of this man’s predilections, was just too busy to be bothered. Ask your neighbor what they think of the party that harbors a man who, in his spare time, spends hours IMing teenagers to measure their penis.
People understand that, and it should scare the shit out of the GOP.
*** Update ***
And people are going to laugh at these repeated attempts to claim ABC news is the real criminal. Maybe if Foley had been hitting on a fetus, these folks would get it.
*** Update #2 ***
Maybe rather than trying to blame ABC news for not coming forward sooner (with information they didn’t have, btw), Red State should wonder why as late as Friday the GOP was trying to STIFLE information:
On Friday afternoon, a strategist for Rep. Mark Foley tried to cut a deal with ABC’s Brian Ross.
The correspondent, who had dozens of instant messages that Foley sent to teenage House pages, had asked to interview the Florida Republican. Foley’s former chief of staff said the congressman was quitting and that Ross could have that information exclusively if he agreed not to publish the raw, sexually explicit messages.
“I said we’re not making any deals,” Ross recalls. He says the Internet made the story possible, because on Thursday he posted a story on his ABC Web page, the Blotter, after obtaining one milder e-mail that Foley had sent a 16-year-old page, asking for a picture. Within two hours, former pages had e-mailed Ross and provided the salacious messages. The only question then, says Ross, was “whether this could be authenticated.”
The house of cards is falling…
by Tim F| 43 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Republican Stupidity, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
Talk about a bad weekend to take off huffing glue blogging. When I first heard about this Foley story, right before I dropped off the radar, it seemed like a minor kerfuffle. As far as I could tell he didn’t even touch anybody. Now Abramoff, there’s a juicy scandal. Forget about one guy’s bad netiquette (to put it mildly), Abramoff had already brought down a fistful of GOP luminaries and exposed a massive criminal enterprise that corrupted the basic core of our governmental system. Just look at the latest reoprt – the White House plainly lied through its teeth when it tried to minimize the extent of its contacts with Abramoff’s operation.
Except, as Kevin Drum points out, the Abramoff story is basically white-collar crime and white-collar crime is boring. People generally assume that politicians are crooks anyway, at least as far as money is concerned. So a little more crookedness in appropriations and policymaking will generally interest federal investigators more than it will your average news consumer. There seems to be a general shrugging of shoulders when a politician gets caught doing what everybody assumes that they’re doing anyway. Even when, like in the case of William Jefferson, they do it with a bit of tabloid flair.
Looking back over forty eight hours of reporting I am not sure that I have ever been this wrong. Clearly the lesson is that whatever politicians do with our money people really, really don’t like politicians messing with our kids. Whack me three times with the obvious bat. Foley undoubtedly did the right thing by rapidly checking out of Congress and into rehab. But in this scandalquake, politically speaking, the survivors may soon begin to envy the dead.
Did the House leadership know about Foley’s problems one year ago? Five years ago? Either way Hastert and Boehner come out looking incompetent, at least, for doing nothing. From a criminal perspective their refusal to act may expose then to conspiracy charges and from a political perspective their decision to let the Foley campaign go ahead with this massive shoe waiting to drop seems inexcusable. Kos has a credible account of what may have motivated Hastert’s thinking:
Foley represented a moderately conservative district, FL-16. In 2000, Bush beat Gore 53-47. In 2004, Bush beat Kerry 54-46. It was a district which Foley had represented since 1994, with his worst showing his first election with a 58% victory. In 2002 he won with 79%, in 2004 with 68%. This was a safe Republican district. Foley also raised a lot of money, and as the recent $100K gift from Foley to the NRCC attests, the party needed his fundraising skills.
Then 2006 rolls around. The GOP is facing a tough reelection with history, Bush, and their own incompetence weighing down their chances. The DCCC has had a banner fundraising and candidate recruitment year. And suddenly, Foley faces the GOP’s worst nightmare in Tim Mahoney — a Democratic challenger who 1) was a former Republican, and 2) is worth $8 gazillion and can self-fund his race. Mahoney announced his candidacy October 12, 2005, right around the time the House leadership was trying to figure out what to do about Foley’s predatory practices.
Without Foley on the ticket, not only would the GOP suddenly face a competitive contest in a relatively safe district, but it would cost them $2-3 million to defend — money that they no longer have available.
A risky gamble, but gambling is what Republicans do. See war, Iraq.
Also via dKos, a simple explanation from ABC’s news blog about why this story has spiraled out of control:
Here’s how one senior Democratic aide summed up the Foley situation this morning for The Note: “The R’s desperately want this to be about whether or not they knew of the sexually explicit e-mails/I.M.’s.
“Most parents we talked to over the weekend (including my own conservative R mom) feel the issue is that the R’s were given and ignored a huge warning with the first set of e-mails.”
“Had there been an investigation at that time, the sexually explicit emails may have been uncovered. But, Members lost that opportunity when the R’s chose to protect Foley instead of those kids.”
Finally, read this political analysis from Josh Marshall. If he’s right, well, super, but once in a while I would like to see the Democrats win on their own merits and not because the Republicans took a ten-meter triple lutz* into an empty swimming pool.
(*) Yes that is a figure skating term. I didn’t actually take off from huffing glue.
***Update***
For those few still wondering whether WH Press Secretary Tony Snow is your archetypal wingnut hack, please click through to a slightly shrill Joe Gandelman.
This post is in: Domestic Politics, General Stupidity
Red State has figured out who to blame in regards to the Mark Foley scandal:
To be sure, the blame for the mishandling of this matter rests with the House Republican Leadership. But I’m struck by a letter released this weekend by Nancy Pelosi. In it, she wrote:
The fact that Mr. Foley was engaging in this behavior with underage children, that the Republican Leadership knew about it for six months to a year and has characterized the inappropriate behavior as “overly friendly” and “acting as a mentor” and that apparently no action was taken to protect these underage children is abhorrent.
Shouldn’t we also call on the media to tell us what exactly they knew and when they knew it. And shouldn’t we also ask the leakers of the information, who were undoubtedly Democrats, what they knew and when they knew it and why they waited almost a full year to leak the information instead of taking immediate action to stop Mr. Foley.
So the blame lies with the House Republican Leadership, but just for shits and giggles, let’s blame the media and the Democrats anyway. This will prbably be the actual strategy, by the way. Try to smear shit all over both houses, just so they can say that both parties are equally bad.
by John Cole| 44 Comments
This post is in: Humorous
I am reasonably sure the childrens book “Why Mommy is a Democrat” will be horrible in ways I can’t even imagine, but is the weekend that Tom Mark Foley was just exposed as a predator and pervert and the GOP House leadership looks to have gone a long way to cover it up really the best time for Red State to poke fun at liberal values?