A Blog For All - Comments - Keep it civil
Someone sitting on information until a politically opportune moment? What? You mean like certain newspapers sitting on the Plame story and the illegal wiretapping story until AFTER the elections? You mean the 9/11 reports or the investigation on stovepiping of Iraq intelligence that was delayed until AFTER Bush was reelected?
Or maybe you mean like Hassert turning a blind eye and hoping this wouldn't get noticed until AFTER Foley won his seat...if ever.
MattM:
Perhaps it would behoove you to realize that I've called for Hastert to resign, and that I also recognize the political situation goes both ways.
The whole matter of the intel issue is still questionable - as the 9/11 commission was far from a complete report to begin with and was highly politicized.
As for the whole Plamegate mess - you should get a refresher. There was no crime, unless you're going to indict Armitage for releasing the name of someone who wasn't even covered by the federal law on outing agents. Scooter Libby can be faulted only for his own faulty memory, and that wasn't related to the original crime, but to his recollections of what he said in the course of the investigations.
All told, there was no crime there in the Plamegate mess, as much as you'd like to think. No Fitzmas for you, and no indictments for outing an agent because no agent was outed. Plamegate was a media creation from the get-go and fueled by journalists with their own agendas who were getting fed leaks from sources adverse to the Administration.
So the "liberal media" protected a gop child molester...gosh thats remarkably conservative of them!!!!
Lawhawk, I wasn't bitching at you so much as I was at AJ and Macranger's false outrage at the timing.
The Dems are just playing by the same skewed rules the Republicans wrote.
I read somewhere today that the FBI says it failed to handle this case properly when it learned of the problem in July...it did nothing...when the family turned over the emails to them.
If ABC knew that the authorities had been alerted, and failed to respond, they were under no obligation whatsoever.
You cannot spin this, this was wrong on the House GOP's leadership's part, and trying to say it's a plot by ABC looks sleazy.
If someone did this to my son (or daughter), and going public with it (after being ignored) it was easily found out that other pages had similar experiences or worse, I, as a parent, would go after the bastards with everything I had.
Lawhawk, you should know better than to cite AJ Strata, who has yet, to my knowledge, to be right about anything ever. Seriously, go back a year and read his posts with 20/20 hindsight and try not to laugh out loud.
ABC did not, as you and Strata imply, sit on this since 2003. ABC News heard about it a couple of months ago, after it had been reported to the FBI. The real damage was done by the much more salacious IM's that came to light after ABC broke the story.
What we are learning now is that the Republican cover-up goes back many, many years. The problems with Foley were brought to the attention of House leadership and hidden from the Democratic members of the appropriate committees. It has come to light that it was standard to warn new pages about Foley being "a little friendly."
Some Foley apologists, like Strata, are demanding to know why the Democrats didn't do anything or why ABC waited a couple of months to report the story. So is this an admission that the Republicans are so inept and untrustworthy to the point that the media and opposition parties are now liable for not aggressively working to ferret out and correct their screwups?
Why don't we just put all the Republicans in jail where they'll be watched 24/7? After all, that's where we put people who can't be trusted to act properly on their own accord.
hastert wants the DoJ and FBI to investigate? WTF have they been doing since CREW gave them the emails in july? who told them not to investigate?
to put it another way. is gonzales a predator-enabler? will i get disappeared for asking?
At least you have asked for Hastert's head. I would say the entire Foley Five ned to go - they all knew or blew it in one way or another. They all cared about their jobs over the page's safety. Not any more complicated than that.
You really see no distinction between sexual activity between an adult and a minor and sexual activity between two adults? Perhaps it depends on what sexual activity "is", eh?
As to the conspiracy theories of "leftist" news organizations waiting from 2003 until the 2006 elections to spring this issue on poor Mr. Foley, I seem to recall that in 2004 (an intervening year), there happened to be not only congressional elections, but, perhaps more importantly, s presidential election.
Moreover, the Republican Party generally and House Republicans and the Executive Branch in particular, made a significant issue of the status of homosexuals in our society at that time. The conventional wisdom, for what it is worth, was that the issue was hoisted into the national debate to "energize the conservative, Republican base." This activity begs the question of why a supposedly "left" MSM would deliberately wait out a presidential election to use this directly related, scandalous material in a mid-term election. Assuming, of course, that the so-called "MSM" was in fact politically biased at the time (or is now, for that matter).
Sorry, but the "theory" fails the so-called "red face" test. Given the facts, it makes no sense under any analysis. It is merely a form of grasping at straws from embarrassment, and obviously so.
benjoya:
Thanks for posting and sharing your views. It is my policy not to delete comments unless they are clearly not PG-13 or are spamlinking.
Thus far, it appears that the FBI investigations did not uncover anything that would otherwise be construed as steps in furtherance of the criminal act. MSNBC had more, and I cover it in my most recent postings. The key grafs:
Graphic talk alone is rarely enough, said Joseph Dooley, a former agent who helped set up New England’s first FBI unit targeting Internet predators. Many adults engage in explicit chats with undercover agents but never show up for the scheduled meetings, he said.So, the FBI thought it was unusual enough, but not sufficient to bring charges.
“We never charged anyone unless they actually traveled to have sex,” Dooley said.
Investigators could consider federal obscenity laws, experts said, but the law prohibiting disseminating obscene material to children applies only to those under 16.
Benjamin Vernia, a former federal prosecutor specializing in such cases, compared Foley’s online conversations with pages to “grooming,” a law enforcement term for the way sexual predators bring along their underage victims. Grooming is a red flag for authorities, Vernia said, but it’s rarely enough to bring charges.
That doesn't implicate a failure on the part of the FBI, but that the law contains grey areas that folks like Foley can and do exploit. They take advantage of kids, but stop short of the physical molestation that would bring the criminal sanctions.
lawhawk,
thanks for your civility, but even if nothing illegal was turned up, isn't it disingenuous to say all anyone knew about were "over-friendly" emails when the FBI was informed in july? more to my point:
it appears that the FBI investigations did not uncover anything that would otherwise be construed as steps in furtherance of the criminal act.
are you saying FBI investigations have already taken place? that's news to me. is hastert calling for additional investigations or just expressing support for an ongoing investigation? is it plausible that the FBI has been investigating a congressman without the knowledge of the leadership? and if ABC could come up with these IMs, how come the FBI couldn't? does that sound like a thorough investigation?
So Foley flirts with pedophelia in such an advanced way for so many years and then does NOT go all the way with someone underage? Aren't republicans supposed to be realistic? How can you be realistic and a liar at the same time?
Where's the jail time? Isn't it time he got the screws put to him so to speak? He dishes it out but can he take it? A street sweeper needs his job too but would not escape jail just for losing his job.
I hope the fickle and/or right wing press gives this as much follow through as they gave Bill Clinton who was an actual warm-blooded human. At least Monica Lewinski could drive a car.
What a sickening double standard. I've never hated and feared the right wing more. Yet I have a feeling that we're not through it yet or at all. Blissed out zealotry already brought a Dark Ages to the old world and wiped out about every other culture that ever trusted Christian missionaries over the centuries. The psycological weapons they used to destroy Rome are still firing like some mad machine that know one knows how to turn off.
I hope the 'good' Christians fight with the same vemon that was launched Clinton or better than that, that they really do just free their minds.
Europeans, Australians and Latin Americans don't feel the need to suffer this way. They find ways to connect with God without warring upon their flesh and festering irrational frenzies. It is this war upon the flesh that's got people strapping on bombs, playing with snakes and feeling that they are unable to speak about a creepy boss moving in on them.
Rome fell. You Christians were right and justified unless you consider all the damage it did. Rome was very mean yes, rotten. You divided the empire. You starved the Western Legion. You won. Rome fell. Whatever more revenge you want from homosexuals drop dead. If the Dark Ages were not punishment enough for you then you just want too much. We are done with your out of line truly deeply evil sins of pride and will not continue to suffer from a grudge you ought to have let go of long ago.
Youre good right? Please don't dare use this as a further excuse to attack us. It may not have prevented the problem but in an open society this would have taken a few months not a few years to figure out and contend with. We could have a happy reasonable nation if there weren't so many ignorant delusionals to babysit the insecurities of. There is a Christian pamphlete on the streets of NY called Awake. So why don't you?
Ahem... the thought of moral outrage from the party of Bill (skirt chaser) Clinton, Ted (hic)...(Chappaqidic) Kennedy, Barney Frank...etc. etc. is not only rediculous, but a sickenning attempt by the socialist Dems to win an election with zero credibility and no ideas. God help this country if they take back the House, Senat and/or the Presidency.
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