am shaking my head today. Maybe I’m loyal to a fault. But come on, who hasn’t been in position where you couldn’t win like Denny Hastert is today?
I’m shocked at the number of conservative Republicans who are so eager to dump their friends when they get into trouble. It’s rather troubling, actually. . . How do these people stay married to the same spouses for years and years? Haven’t they ever seen a undeserving friend through a storm in his or her life? Isn’t anyone ever deserving of weathering difficulties?
You can’t prove guilt unless you have the evidence in hand. Hastert — who has a million things on his mind at any one time — was presented a while back with some of the email message evidence, but not all. With what he had in hand, he made a call to reprimand and “speak to” Foley through the head of the page board, downstate Illinois’ own Congressman John Shimkus.
NW Burbs and Greg Blankenship write two especially good response to this so read the comments. Cats. Dogs. Living Together.
There’s another angle that makes the above bizarre to me. It’s not about loyalty to a politician, it should be about loyalty to teenagers who already grow up in an oversexed culture. How are social conservatives (and many are) not incredibly offended by this? A High School Coach of 14 years knows what the hell is going on when he reads even the initial set of less offensive e-mails and Denny covered it up. I can say that even in dealing with adult students, but students where there is an age and power difference even if less so, I have never brought up how hot another student is or asked for pictures. Being friendly isn’t being icky. And being icky is a sign of a problem.
We give Congress a special responsibility with this program–a historic program. It’s not to just go gee whiz willickers, he sent some naughty e-mails so we’ll talk to him. It’s the fucking asshole is making suggestive remarks to kids–get him the hell out of the situation now and then check and see if it goes any further and make sure the kids are protected. If it doesn’t go further, all contact with kids is cut off through the job and if it does go further–go after him with the law.
No one gets hurt if Foley had just been a little creepy and kept away from pages while an investigation went on. There’s no downside. There is a tremendous upside to investigating and keeping Foley away from kids that is pretty obvious today
What I wrote wasn’t especially good. It’s common sense. I’m a dad — this makes me furious and it makes the partisans trying to defend it are pathetic.
If Republicans failed to protect 16-year-old pages from a 52 year old Congressman who got his jollies off them, how on earth can we trust that they would protect us from anything else?
I’ll repeat what I wrote at IR: All the country now knows that in the face of a great many red flags the GOP leadership ignored warning after warning.
What other red flags are they missing? And what will the consequences of those missed warnings be?